Welcome to AI Tool Report!

Friday’s top story: Google DeepMind workers have signed a letter calling for Google to uphold its AI principles by not selling its AI products and services to military clients.

🌤️ This Morning on AI Tool Report

1. 🚨 Google AI workers sound alarm

2. 🎥 How to create video guides in one hour, with no skill

3. 💰 Perplexity’s ad revolution begins

4. 💼 How to become an AI Consultant

5. 🛒 How to automate e-commerce order processing

6. 🐟 AI-powered seafood by Google X?

Read Time: 5 minutes

STOCK MARKETS

⤵️ Stocks pulled back during Thursday’s trading session, losing all the gains made at the beginning of the week. Investors are being cautious before FED Chairman Jerome Powell speaks this afternoon at 10am EST. Learn more.

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ETHICS

🚨 Google AI workers sound alarm

Our Report: On May 16th, over 200 Google DeepMind (Google’s R&D lab) employees signed and circulated a letter asking Google to end its contracts with military organizations, expressing concerns that AI was being used to aid warfare, which is a violation of Google’s own AI principles which—when it acquired DeepMind in 2014—stated that their AI technology would not be used for military or surveillance purposes.

🔑 Key Points:

• While the letter doesn’t name any specific military or conflict, it does reference a contract (known as Project Nimbus) that Google has with Israel to supply Cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli military.

• It alleges that the Israeli military uses its AI for surveillance and target bombing, and is required (by government law) to secure Cloud services from Google, which impacts them “as leaders in ethical and responsible AI.”

• It urges the leadership team to uphold its AI principles and investigate these allegations, block military access to its technology, and prevent future access, but so far, they’ve had “no meaningful response.”

🤔 Why you should care: While just 5% of Google’s workforce have signed this letter, it highlights growing tensions and a culture clash between Google (who happily sells cloud services and AI technology to military clients) and Google's AI division, DeepMind, (which pledged to not work on technology that could be used for military purposes).

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Together with Guidde

Let's face it: Written guides are a waste of time, right?

FAQs, training materials, onboarding docs, how-to guides, and feature notes take weeks to write. They always need updating, are often off-brand, and take whole teams of people to create. 

But no one reads them.

What if you could create, edit, publish, and update brand-consistent, engaging video guides in less than one hour?

Welcome to Guidde, your all-in-one AI platform for effortless video guide creation for any organization, big or small.

Our easy-to-use features mean you can:

• Quickly whip up videos

• Edit in real-time

• Share with anyone, anywhere

Join IKEA, DocuSign, Nasdaq, and Databricks, and try Guidde now

1. Meco is a distraction-free space for reading and discovering newsletters, separate from the inbox

2. Watermelon is for building custom customer service chatbots

3. Langtrace evaluates and improves Large Language Models

4. Breezemail uses AI to automatically categorize emails

5. Playcast converts text content into audio

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ADVERTISING

💰 Perplexity’s ad revolution begins

Our Report: By the end of this year, AI search engine start-up, Perplexity (backed by Jeff Bezos), is planning to monetize its AI search engine through ads, to capitalize on its increasing popularity, which has contributed to its recent $1B valuation, double what it was three months ago.

🔑 Key Points:

• According to a circulating pitch deck, the Perplexity app has been downloaded over 2M times and answers over 230M queries each month, and advertisers can either sponsor “related questions” or secure display ads.

• This new ad scheme follows the launch of its publisher program last month, which will see Perplexity give publishers—like TIME and Fortune—a percentage of the ad revenue earned, if they appear in a search query.

• But Perplexity recently came under fire for how it surfaced content, with Forbes and Wired accusing them of plagiarism, something which they have now rectified, and are hoping will not damage future ad revenue.

🤔 Why you should care: Perplexity’s AI ad model and publisher program could signal a broader change in digital ad strategies, as investors have previously shown concern over how AI-assisted search might affect Google’s ad revenue because it’s changing how people get information online.

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Together with Innovating with AI

💼 Want to become an AI Consultant?

Our friends at Innovating with AI just welcomed 170 new students into The AI Consultancy Project, their new program that trains you to build a business as an AI consultant.

Here are some highlights...

• The tools and frameworks to find clients and deliver top-notch services

• A 6-month plan to build a 6-figure AI consulting business

• Early access to the next enrollment cycle for AI Tool Report readers

Get early access to The AI Consultancy Project

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This week’s automation: How to automate e-commerce order processing

This week’s automaton will simplify your e-commerce order processing operations by automating the key steps: From payment confirmation to inventory updates, set this automation up to enhance order accuracy, speed up fulfillment, and keep your customers happy.

Want to know how to set this up in detail? Read this.

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FOOD

🐟 AI-powered seafood by Google X?

• Google X (or simply X)—Alphabet’s AI innovation lab that spawns moonshot-based ideas (think ambitious, pie-in-the-sky, somewhat unattainable ideas)—has launched Tidal, which will “feed humanity sustainably.”

• Tidal will initially focus on salmon aquaculture—as it’s the fastest-growing food production system in the world—and will use sensors, robotics, data science, and AI to give farmers a fuller picture of their harvests.

• The systems will give precise yield estimates, so farmers can plan ahead, and highlight potential issues, like sea lice, before they cause any damage, and have already been deployed in Chile, Brazil, and Norway.

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Until next time, Martin & Liam.

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