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5 Ways That AI Is Actually Useful Right Now

Artificial intelligence seems to be either set to transform the world beyond all recognition or collapse in on itself. It's hard to get a clear perspective on just how useful or otherwise this rapidly expanding tech is, though it's fair to say that a lot of the ideas being floated at the moment sound pretty uninspiring.

Part of the issue in assessing AI is the sheer breadth of ways it's used. Most recently, we have been thinking of generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney. Still, AI algorithms are also getting you from A to B in Google Maps, choosing the posts you see on Instagram, and working behind the scenes across all kinds of different apps and sites.

If you're struggling to find any genuine use cases for AI, give these ones a try—you might find they can boost your productivity and creativity, at least until the AI bubble pops under the weight of copyright claims, exorbitant processing costs, and a lack of novel training data.

Summarizing text

Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are very good at taking large blocks of text, picking out the most important points, and condensing them down to more digestible summaries. This can work with PDF documents, emails, webpages, notes, and anything else (and it's a feature being built into more apps and tools).

In these cases, the AI is working with a fixed batch of words, so inaccuracies and hallucinations should be less of a problem. However, they can still happen—double-check anything that's important by asking follow-up questions or even requesting that the answers you get include actual quotations from the text they're summarizing.

Chatbots will happily summarize documents for you. (Gizmodo) Rewriting text

As a digital publication, we of course believe that human-written text is far superior to AI-written text—even if it takes a little longer to churn out—but that doesn't mean AI can't be helpful for writing. It can be really useful for phrasing something differently, coming up with alternative words, or tweaking the tone of an existing passage of text.

If you want to think about it another way, AI can work as a supercharged thesaurus and dictionary for writers, augmenting rather than replacing the human brain. Again, hallucinations are less of a problem than they'd otherwise be because the AI isn't inventing anything from scratch (and you're acting as an editor at the same time).

Transcribing audio

We've written before about transcription services that use artificial intelligence to turn spoken audio into digital text quickly. This is another example of how AI can genuinely save you time and effort. You can get long audio clips from lectures, meetings, interviews, and more, all turned into text in the space of just a few minutes.

This feature is also available in apps like the Google Recorder on Pixel phones and is coming to the Voice Memos app in iOS 18. It powers numerous live caption services and can even translate between languages automatically. While it's not perfect in terms of accuracy, the best ones are pretty close and getting better all the time.

Getting ideas

One of the best ways to negate the problem of AI hallucinations is to use the tech in situations when hallucinations are actually helpful. So think up new ideas for something, whether it's a product project, a startup, a mobile app, the next twist in your novel, something to keep the kids entertained at home, or whatever it needs to be.

Admittedly, the generated ideas aren't going to be truly original—merely the smushed-together averages of all the creative ideas the AI has ever been trained on. However, they can still help spark something in your mind or take you in a direction you wouldn't otherwise have thought of, so they're adding to your creativity rather than replacing it.

Use AI to aid inspiration. (Gizmodo) Analyzing data

AI algorithms can undoubtedly process masses of data at lightning speed, finding patterns and associations that mere humans might miss. This kind of technology is being used in everything from optimizing traffic flow to interpreting brain scans—in all kinds of situations where huge volumes of data need to be processed.

This isn't so much an AI use case that you can engage with yourself, but you might well benefit from it in the years ahead—whether that's through a more accurate medical diagnosis or a more efficient subway timetable. Algorithms aren't just for keeping you locked to social media; they can also do good in the world.

Under 30 Alums' AI Startup Aims To Help Hedge Funds Speed Up Stock Research

Linq's cofounders, from left to right, Subeen Pang, Hojun Choi, Chanyeol Choi and Jin Kim.

Courtesy of Linq

A former Goldman Sachs investment banker, a quant researcher and two MIT Ph.D.S got together in May to apply the most advanced AI technology to the cutthroat and fantastically lucrative world of hedge funds.

Their startup, called Linq, helps hedge funds speed up their research into thousands of listed companies worldwide. Firms with a combined assets under management of more than $100 billion are already using Linq's AI software, according to the startup, with over 400 investors on the waitlist.

Linq is led by CEO Chanyeol Choi, who holds a Ph.D. In electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021. The other MIT Ph.D. Is Subeen Pang. Hojun Choi, who made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list last year, is the former Goldman banker and Jin Kim is the quant researcher.

"We have top-tier talent from both finance and AI, working on a narrowly defined problem," says Chanyeol in a video interview together with Hojun (no relation). "Our in-house analysts from Goldman Sachs work seamlessly with AI engineers from MIT and Harvard to identify and automate workflows and processes around specific tasks."

Linq, based in South Korea and the U.S., graduated from the Techstars accelerator in 2023. In June, it raised a $6.6 million seed funding round led by Atinum, whose portfolio includes online travel company Klook and crypto exchange operator Dunamu, and InterVest, a backer of "Baby Shark" creator Pinkfong and women's fashion unicorn Ably. The round was joined by Yellowdog, a venture capital firm launched by Daum Communications founder Lee Jae-woong, and the VC arms of billionaire Kim Beom-su's internet conglomerate Kakao and billionaire Kwon Hyuk-bin's game giant Smilegate.

"There are myriad ways of making money in the stock market, which means each and every hedge fund requires a customized AI solution befitting the specific investment strategy of the portfolio manager."

Hojun Choi, cofounder and COO of Linq.

Linq's AI software automates time-consuming equity research tasks, such as scanning for company announcements and news, building financial models and summarizing earnings reports and call transcripts. The startup works closely with each hedge fund to provide a "hyper specialized solution," says Hojun.

Other companies that offer AI tools for equity research include SoftBank Vision Fund 2-backed AlphaSense, Bloomberg and S&P Global. Chanyeol says Linq differentiates itself by providing a wider coverage of data. "Existing market intelligence platforms are U.S.-centric, meaning any region outside of the U.S. Is sparsely covered in terms of public filings, transcripts and local news," he notes. "We leverage the power of AI to gather local intelligence at a global scale, which is especially important given how interconnected the global value chain is today."

Another is its focus on personalization, adds Hojun. "Our competitors are traditional data providers that serve a wide array of customers," he says. "On the contrary, from day one, Linq focused on building bespoke AI for hedge funds. There are myriad ways of making money in the stock market, which means each and every hedge fund requires a customized AI solution befitting the specific investment strategy of the portfolio manager."

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America's Cyber Security Agency Picks Its First Head Of AI

Washington D.C. Has been scrambling for years to find artificial intelligence experts to navigate a world where LLMs and AI models may supercharge every aspect of our lives. This week the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the anti-hacking arm of the Department of Homeland Security, announced it had named its first chief.

CISA appointed Lisa Einstein as its first AI head on Thursday in an announcement it shared with Axios. Einstein comes from the think tank world and was already advising CISA on how to handle AI threats and helped them test AI cybersecurity tools for the White House.

She also worked on a four hour long tabletop game that brought together 50 different representatives from government and businesses like Microsoft and Nvidia. The goal of the game was to work through AI security incidents as a team.

"We will only reap the benefits of AI and avoid harms from its failure or abuse if we work together to prioritize safety, security, and trustworthiness. I am honored to serve with the dedicated and talented CISA team to tackle this important challenge," Einstein said in a public statement about her appointment.

AI and the threats it poses are on everyone's mind in DC. President Biden got serious about the threat after watching Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. But every government building that works seriously with computers has been fretting over the threat of AI and machine learning long before Biden sat down to watch Tom Cruise.

Jen Easterly, the director of CISA, has publicly compared AI to nuclear weapons. The big difference is that the people who made nuclear weapons showed some limited restraint. "When you think about it, the most powerful technology of the last century was arguably nuclear weapons. The most powerful technology of this century is artificial intelligence," she said during a talk at the National Press Foundation in April 2023.

"Nuclear weapons were built by governments that had the incentive to keep them safe. The incentives of those building AI is all about maximization of profit and business competition."

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