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- Meta’s AI ads take aim
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A fast-moving Tuesday sees Meta racing to automate ad creative with AI, Microsoft beefing up Swiss data centers, and Yoshua Bengio setting moral guard-rails for the field. Asia isn’t sitting still: Malaysia just partnered with Abu Dhabi’s Presight to wire its digital economy, while the world’s biggest music labels ponder friend-or-foe licensing deals with generative tools. To round things out, the US FDA quietly rolled out a ChatGPT-style reviewer called Elsa to shave months off drug approvals. Scroll on for deeper dives, fresh tools you can try, nine-figure funding rounds, and a lighter story about plumbers getting their own AI dispatcher.
Sliced just for you:
🎯 Meta’s AI ads take aim
🏔 Microsoft’s $400M Swiss cloud push
🔍 Bengio’s ‘Honest AI’ watchdog
🌏 Malaysia-UAE Presight pact
🎸 Record labels warm to AI licensing
🏥 FDA’s Elsa speeds drug reviews
Meta has told big advertisers it will let them upload brand assets and have an AI system automatically generate entire cross-platform campaigns by late-2025, moving beyond today’s single-image variations. A sandbox launching this quarter will iterate headline tone, visuals and calls-to-action in minutes, scoring variants against real-time engagement data before pushing winners live. Creative agencies welcome quicker testing but worry the model’s appetite for historic performance data could cannibalise their own IP. Privacy groups add that training on billions of personal photos heightens biometric-tracking risks. Meta says brand-safe filters and watermarking are baked in and insists campaigns remain opt-in. Analysts note the plan mirrors Google’s Performance Max and may stoke another arms race for generative ad inventory.
Redmond will modernise and expand four data-centres near Geneva and Zurich, citing a 60% jump in Swiss demand for enterprise AI over the past year. The outlay upgrades cooling, GPU capacity and on-site renewables, keeps all sensitive data in-country and layers in “sovereign AI” services aimed at banks, hospitals and government. Microsoft will also open a skilling hub expected to certify 300 000 local workers in AI-heavy fields by 2028, and extend co-innovation grants to Swiss SMEs. The economy ministry framed the move as proof that the nation’s neutrality and privacy laws are competitive advantages. Critics say growing US tech footprints could expose Bern to geopolitical pressure on export-controlled chips.
Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio has launched a non-profit whose single mission is to design models that detect and flag deception by other AIs. The institute will assemble red-team data sets of “plausible lies,” publish open-source evaluation suites and lobby regulators to mandate external honesty audits. Bengio argues that preventing manipulative behaviour is a pre-condition for safe autonomous agents, likening the effort to antivirus software for cognition. Early funding comes from philanthropic donors; the lab plans to release its first benchmark by year-end and is courting partners in government procurement. Critics note similar detector projects have struggled as generative models rapidly evolve.
Kuala Lumpur’s digital ministry signed an MOU with Abu Dhabi data-analytics firm Presight to build a national AI backbone spanning smart cities, logistics and healthcare. Phase one outfits Johor’s Iskandar corridor with predictive traffic controls and a real-time port optimisation dashboard, while a joint venture will train 5 000 Malaysian engineers on Presight’s algorithms. Officials tout the deal as complementary to government cloud initiatives and a step toward ASEAN-wide data-exchange standards. Observers say it also deepens Gulf investment in Southeast Asian tech beyond traditional energy projects.
After months of lawsuits over unlicensed training, the “big three” music groups are now exploring blanket deals that would let generative-audio startups legally ingest back catalogues in exchange for royalties and attribution triggers. Insiders say pilot programmes could arrive by Q4, offering developers tiered access—mono stems for practice models, full multitracks for premium chat-compose apps—and embed digital fingerprints to track downstream usage. Artists are split: some fear brand dilution, others see new revenue streams. Analysts compare the shift to publishers’ pivot from litigation to licensing during the early Spotify era, predicting a surge of AI-generated “official remixes.”
The US Food and Drug Administration quietly deployed a secure generative assistant dubbed Elsa that can ingest thousands of pages of trial data, draft summary sections and flag anomalies in adverse-event tables. In pilot oncology applications, Elsa cut protocol review times by 22 %, freeing scientists for deep-dive questions rather than form-checking. The agency stresses that human reviewers remain the final arbiter and that the model runs on air-gapped infrastructure, preventing leakage to external AI providers. Full rollout across all FDA centres is slated for June 30, with periodic bias audits and a standing ethics board.
🛠️ AI tools updates
Finance-as-a-service specialist Consero rolled out a rebuilt interface for its SIMPL back-office platform, adding Slack-like search, self-service bill pay and interactive KPI dashboards. The summer roadmap layers in generative features: natural-language variance analysis, predictive cash-burn alerts and one-click board-deck drafts powered by an in-house LLM fine-tuned on 3 billion anonymised ledger entries. CFO beta users say the chat interface reduces monthly close prep from days to hours. Consero stresses SOC-2 compliance and excludes customer data from model retraining unless firms opt in. Rivals such as Ramp and Brex are pursuing similar AI finance co-pilots.
💵 Venture Capital updates
Fresh off receiving FDA “breakthrough” tags for speech and vision prostheses, Neuralink banked $650 M led by Morgan Stanley, valuing the brain-interface firm near $9 B. Funds will underwrite ongoing human trials across three countries and scale up chip production at a new Austin fab. Five paralysed volunteers are already using the implant to text and steer wheelchairs by thought. Investors view the round as a bet on neuro-AI convergence and potential Medicare reimbursement.
🫡 Meme of the day
⭐️ Generative AI image of the day
Before you go, check out AI dispatcher for plumbers.
