🤖 Robo-lawyer: AI lawyer suits up for court

Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, founder of AI For Anyone, and I’ll be sharing with you the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

In today's edition:

• Robo-lawyer: AI lawyer suits up for court

• OpenAI and Microsoft get (even more) serious

• McKinsey buys Iguazio, an Israeli AI startup

🎉 To celebrate our rebrand, we're giving away 10 Google AIY Kits! Each kit gives you all the tools you need to build an AI-powered camera or an AI-powered speaker.

You can find more details on how to enter at the end of this email. Winners announced on Jan 31st on my Twitter.

Robo-lawyer: AI lawyer suits up for court

Yup, you read that right. For the first time in history, an AI-powered "robot" lawyer will represent a defendant fighting a traffic ticket in court next month.

The AI lawyer, created by DoNotPay, will listen to court arguments and formulate responses for the defendant in real time by whispering into the defendant's ear.

Since its inception in 2015, DoNotPay has raised $27.7 million from venture capital firms. Although this is the first time their AI is representing a defendant in the courtroom, the company has already helped its customers win over 2 million customer service disputes and court cases using AI-generated form letters and chatbots. 

The AI lawyer is only legal in some courtrooms, and many lawyers have opposed the idea. But for those who can't afford legal representation, the democratization of legal representation is welcome news.

It was only a matter of time, wasn't it?

Read more: CBS News (link)

OpenAI and Microsoft get (even more) serious

Another day, another update on the OpenAI & Microsoft partnership.

Yesterday, Microsoft and OpenAI officially announced an extension to their long-term partnership with a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment.

The agreement includes:

• Investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems,

• deploying OpenAI's models across Microsoft's consumer and enterprise products, and

• making Microsoft the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI's workloads.

This saga has become tech's favorite rom-com. But you know who's not laughing? Google. 😬

Read more: Microsoft Corporate Blog (link)

McKinsey buys Iguazio, an Israeli AI startup

Management consulting firm, McKinsey, has acquired Israeli real-time data analytics startup Iguazio for an undisclosed sum, marking the global consultancy firm's first acquisition in Israel.

Iguazio’s machine-learning platform helps enterprises deploy, manage and embed AI applications into their business operations. QuantumBlack, McKinsey's AI arm, will use it to create more productive, faster, and more reliable AI solutions for its clients.

Israel is the fifth global R&D hub for QuantumBlack, and they're looking to build and expand partnerships in the country.

Read more: Times of Israel (link)

🗞️ Byte size: Summaries of my favorite AI article

Disclaimer: AI is (partially) used to summarize these articles.

As Australian colleges crack down on ChatGPT, disabled students defend AI [Japan Times] - While universities have taken steps such as increasing in-person supervision and invigilation tech to reduce the risk of cheating, educators and students have argued that AI technology should be embraced and used to make learning materials more accessible for both disabled and non-disabled students. Some educators and disabled students believe that, if used effectively, AI technology has the potential to revolutionize how education is accessed.

Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent [Conversations with Tyler Podcast] - In this podcast interview from 2019, Sam Altman discusses finding talented folks, what it takes to be a successful founder, his views on AI and other tech, and more. My favorite quote: "Well, I will caveat this by saying if you believe what I believe about the timeline to AGI and the effect it will have on the world, it is hard to spend a lot of mental cycles thinking about anything else. So I have not thought deeply about what it would take to solve, really, any other problem in the last few years." Talk about focus.

Jordan Peterson discusses ChatGPT [YouTube] - This video of Jordan Peterson — Canadian psychologist, author, and one of the most controversial public figures on the planet — discussing ChatGPT is making the rounds on Twitter. Peterson seems to be equally amazed and terrified by the technology. In this video, he predicts the impact it'll have on education and society at large.

🔥 Trending tools & resources

• Magician (link) - magical AI-powered design tool for Figma. The public beta was just released yesterday.

• Playground AI-first image editing (link) - Playground is a platform for making graphics using AI and text. Yesterday, they released a feature that allows users to instruct an AI to synthesize edits.

• InstructPix2Pix + EbSynth demo (link) - Cool demo that uses these two technologies to replacing clothes in video using AI.

• Current state of AI text-to-video [video] (link) - Great overview of the current state of text-to-video tools. Exciting space!

• Personal interactive avatar teachers [video] (link) - Demo using Hyper + ChatGPT + AI Animation to create interactive avatar teachers.

Have cool tools to share? Tweet me at @haroonchoudery if you'd like me to include it in a future issue of Not A Bot.

🐦 Tweet of the day

The Turing Test is so 1900's. Nowadays, it's all about the Curinge Test. 🤣

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading, and see you next time. ✌️

- Haroon - (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

🥳 Google AIY Kit Giveaway

Win one of 10 Google AIY Kits! All you have to do is refer 5 people to Not A Bot using the below link. I'll be announcing the winners on @haroonchoudery on January 31st.

(Tip: share your link on socials to get more referrals)