Kickstart Monday #7: For the first time most German companies use AI.
57 percent of German companies with 20 or more staff now work with artificial intelligence. Two years ago it was 20 percent. The figures come from the industry body Bitkom. Also: A diagnostic aid from Dresden runs without the cloud, at OpenAI people read real ChatGPT conversations. And iOS 27 is here, the new Siri is not, at least not in the EU.
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01 · What is new
For the first time most German companies use AI
57 percent of German companies with 20 or more staff now use artificial intelligence. A year ago it was 36 percent, two years ago 20. Another 38 percent are planning or discussing it. Only 4 percent still consider the subject irrelevant, against 41 percent two years ago. Bitkom surveyed 603 companies for the figures.
AI runs most often in customer contact at 72 percent, followed by marketing and communication at 54 percent. Internal knowledge accounts for 22 percent, own products for 20. Nobody is near the limit: No user says they are making full use of what is possible, three percent say they are making strong use of it. Of all companies, 45 percent are spending more on it this year than last.
A diagnostic aid from Dresden runs without the cloud
A group around Jakob Nikolas Kather at TU Dresden and the university hospital presented a diagnostic system in Nature Medicine last week that runs entirely on site. It is built on a locally run modelA language model that computes on your own hardware instead of in the cloud. The data stays in the building, but the computing power has to come from you.. The patient data never leaves the hospital.
It was tested on appendicitis, gallbladder inflammation, pneumonia, pulmonary embolism and urinary tract infection. The best local models reached 84 to 90 percent correct diagnoses. When the system computes several times and compares the results, the figure rises to 97.5 percent over three runs and 99.6 percent over ten. Under harder conditions it fell from 90.6 to 70.2 percent.
OpenAI has people read private ChatGPT conversations
According to internal documents seen by the magazine 404 Media, OpenAI employs several hundred contractors who read real conversations with ChatGPT. They write down what the user was trying to do. Then they rate four versions of the answer on a scale from one to seven. Internally the programme is called Project Lily, the pay is more than 50 dollars an hour.
Before that, every text passes through a privacy filterAn automatic pre-filter meant to strip names and personal details from a text before anyone sees it. It does not catch everything. meant to remove names and personal details. OpenAI concedes that not everything is caught. Anyone who wants to switch this off can turn off model improvement in the settings. For team and company accounts OpenAI says it does not use the content for training in any case.
02 · What changes
Apple ships iOS 27 and blocks the new Siri for the EU
Apple has been rolling out iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 since Monday. In the EU the reworked Siri runs on the Mac, on iPhone and iPad it does not. The system-wide writing tools and the new camera functions are missing here as well.
The reason is the Digital Markets ActThe EU law for very large platforms, in force since 2023. Among other things it requires that outside providers get the same interfaces as the in-house services.. Under it iOS counts as one of the platforms that have to open the same interfaces to outside providers as to the in-house services, macOS does not. Apple is therefore holding the feature back rather than rebuilding it. Consent to training on Siri data is requested when the new Siri is set up, in the EU that means on the Mac for now.
Nvidia and Google want data centres to follow the power grid
On Wednesday Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI founded the AI Energy Management Alliance, with 18 partners from AI, semiconductors and the energy industry in total. Data centres are meant to match their consumption to the state of the grid, according to Nvidia by up to 40 percent within a minute.
The lever is load shiftingComputing jobs that do not have to finish straight away move to hours when the grid has spare capacity. That relieves the grid without building new lines.. Applied to the existing US grid, that works out at 100 gigawatts of additional capacity for data centres. It would be needed because new sites there wait up to ten years for a connection, while the grids run at about half their capacity on average. In return the alliance is asking for faster approvals.
Deadlines at a glance
- until older AI tools have to label their output in machine-readable form
- until the German Federal Court of Justice rules whether a protected photograph may be copied for an AI training dataset
- until companies above 800,000 euros in prior-year turnover have to issue invoices to other companies electronically
Recalculated on every visit.
03 · The number of the week
87 to 93 percent
That is how much lower the click-through rateThe share of times a shown link is also clicked. When it falls, the page stays visible but the visit does not happen. from Bing Chat to the New York Times was compared with ordinary Bing search. The figure comes from Microsoft itself. It had been redacted in the files of the case the paper and other publishers are bringing against OpenAI and Microsoft. On Thursday it was released.
In the same documents the Microsoft researcher Brent Hecht calls training on other people's content possibly the largest theft of human work in history. Nick Turley, who is responsible for ChatGPT at OpenAI, speaks of an existential threat to publishers.
Read on20 Minutenad-hoc-newsDr. Web
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Daniel Klantke · Kickstart Monday #7 · klantke.com/en/blog/kickstart-monday-07