Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• 🇺🇸 New task force on AI and national security

• 🤖 Top 10 gen AI use cases

• 🎁 OpenAI's GPT-4o update

• 💼 Meta creates ‘Business AI’ group

Let’s get right into it!

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GOVERNMENT

New task force on AI and national security

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched a new task force, TRAINS, within its Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute to assess the security risks of AI models, with participation from various federal agencies.

TRAINS includes experts from the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies, focusing on areas such as national security, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure. The task force aims to ensure safe, secure, and trustworthy AI innovation, which is seen as vital for both public safety and national security.

RESEARCH

Top 10 gen AI use cases

Menlo Ventures has released its 2024 report on enterprise gen AI adoption and the top 10 use cases driving growth include:

1. Code Copilots (51% adoption) assist developers with coding tasks.

2. Support Chatbots (31% adoption) provide AI-driven customer and internal support.

3. Enterprise Search (28%) unlocks data from silos.

4. Data Extraction/Transformation (27%) optimizes data processing.

5. Meeting Summarization (24%) automates note-taking.

6. Document/Image Analysis enhances content understanding.

7. Personalized Content Creation streamlines branded content production.

8. AI Agents automate multi-step tasks across industries.

9. Healthcare and Legal AI improve data management and process automation.

10. Financial AI reshapes accounting, compliance, and data extraction.

These use cases are enhancing productivity, cutting costs, and driving ROI across sectors.

STARTUPS

OpenAI's GPT-4o update

OpenAI has launched a major update for its GPT-4o language model, focusing on enhancing its creative writing abilities and improving efficiency in handling uploaded files. The new version promises more engaging, relevant, and natural content generation, with deeper insights and comprehensive responses when processing documents. GPT-4o, which stands for "omni," is a significant upgrade from GPT-4 Turbo and offers improved natural language understanding.

Unlike ChatGPT Plus users, GPT-4o is available for free with a usage limit five times higher. The model now excels at automating content creation and solving complex problems, producing more human-like and fluid writing. Additionally, its upgraded file-handling capabilities allow users to upload PDFs and text files, enabling better comprehension, extraction of key information, and more accurate summaries, making it especially useful for professionals dealing with large data sets or legal and research documents.

BIG TECH

Meta creates ‘Business AI’ group

Meta has appointed Clara Shih, former CEO of Salesforce AI, to lead its new "Business AI" group, which will focus on commercializing Meta’s Llama large language models. Llama models, with over 600 million downloads, have been made available under an "open-source" license, but Meta imposes strict usage policies.

These include restrictions on government use, particularly in national security roles, and requirements for enterprises with more than 700 million monthly active users to request an additional license from Meta. This shift marks a move towards monetizing Llama models, with Meta maintaining control over their application and use, even as the models gain popularity across industries.