Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Multilingual. Google is launching its Gemini Live AI voice assistant in Hindi, eventually expanding to eight other languages spoken in India. It’s part of a broader push to offer more AI-enabled, native language services in a market where it has up to 800 million users.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Lost in translation. Local rules around employee stock options could hurt European tech companies’ ability to attract talent, and spur workers to opt for US firms. That’s the warning from Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who is eyeing an IPO and says a brain drain is the biggest risk to the Swedish buy-now-pay-later firm.

One the best reminders that the US healthcare system isn’t so much broken as it is nonexistent is when you file a claim for basically any medical issue, only to find out that the fine print of your insurance company’s policies can be loosely interpreted as not covering the exorbitantly expensive thing that you now have to pay for out of your own pocket.

I don’t think AI can solve this. But maybe AI can make things a little bit more annoying for insurance companies. Claimable is a new company that uses AI to appeal denied insurance claims for you. They charge $39.95 per appeal, which they send to the proper place and use the right language. Presumably insurance companies are using AI, too, so it could be a matter of triggering the right algorithms on the other side.

In a pilot program, Claimable claims it has recovered $3 million for patients at an 80% appeal success rate, which it says is 1.6 times better than average. And it resolves most cases in less than 10 days.

Now let’s see if the insurance industry lobby tries to get claimable banned or fined by the Federal Trade Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Talking through AI and the future of music with will.i.am

THE SCENE

Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am is sanguine about the future of music and AI, comparing it to a grocery store where there is an organic section (human-created tunes) and other products (technology-driven songs).

“And organic doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not GMO. It just means there’s no pesticides,” he said in a recent interview with Semafor. And then will.i.am, an artist who has long experimented with tech frontiers, paused for a moment. “Wait, I don’t even know if that’s true.”

He picked up his phone and called a friend for help. “Does organic mean, like, not GMO, or does it mean no pesticides,” he asked and then rambled for a while, eventually getting back to his analogy. “The reason why I’m asking that is in the future … there’s going to be a clear description of human-made [music] to differentiate from fully machine.”

“Chaaa, I git yuuuu! Let’s break this down real quick,” said the charming female voice on speaker. It was not a person, but one of will.i.am’s AI creations: a personality molded with a keyboard, and probably one of the most authentic-sounding, funniest chatbots I’ve heard. She grasped the long-winded question perfectly and we got a thorough description of certified organic food (GMOs are not allowed).

“Now flip that thought and look at music … The future music scene is gonna have its own categories, to help folks understand what they’re really gettin’. It’ll be a whole new vibe,” she said. 

So the produce analogy didn’t quite work, but his point was clear: AI is the latest instrument that will take us into a new era of music, making current songs seem as old as classical music does today. And one of will.i.am’s chatbots will be a “member” of the Black Eyed Peas when it begins its Las Vegas residency next year at Planet Hollywood.

But he isn’t using the technology to make music — at least not yet. But he is investing in companies like Udio, one of the leading AI music creation apps, along with some of the biggest startups, including Runway, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

Udio and competitor Suno were sued in June by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement, one of many lawsuits against generative AI companies that argue the use of proprietary material to train AI models is illegal.

“Didn’t they sue Spotify a long time ago?” will.i.am asked his AI companion.

“Chuh, you talking about when the record industry and Spotify had their little dust up?” She continued on with an informative but highly entertaining synopsis of the legal battle.

“My point is, even Spotify got sued. If you don’t get sued, that means you ain’t doing shit,” he says.

The number of AI-related job openings at the US Treasury Department, according to a study by computing firm Getac, which scraped LinkedIn and Glassdoor data. That put it in 4th place for the number of AI job postings in the US, just behind Microsoft, Meta, and Deloitte. Christin Wang, marketing director at Getac, said the jobs centered on national security and economic management, including protecting sensitive financial data at the department.

On this week’s episode of Mixed Signals, Ben and Nayeema tackle the age-old debate of man vs. machine and ask the bold question: Can AI cure writer’s block? Glaringly absent from this week’s Veep debates, AI and its use cases (or lack thereof) are at the center of everything, from the dockworkers’ strike to Hollywood’s grand plans. To figure out how long they, along with creatives and the media elite, have job security, they talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Ayad Akhtar, whose latest play, McNEAL, wrestles with AI and ethics.

Catch up with the latest episode of Mixed Signals.

Software companies that make DJing platforms are increasingly adding AI capabilities, giving DJs the option to automate tasks they normally do themselves like choosing songs or mixing and transitioning tracks. It’s bringing the debate over AI’s place in art to dance floors in Berlin, where DJs and club goers are either wary or welcoming of the new technology.

“It wouldn’t work,” DJ Christian Becker, a 33-year-veteran and co-owner of Bohnengold in the buzzy Kreuzberg district in Berlin, told Semafor while taking a break from his set on a recent Saturday night. “Because you’re connecting with the people … you have to watch the people, how they dance.”

World scratch DJ champion Angelo Tun said there will always be pushback from “purists and the guys who want to hold onto the past.” Tun, who also heads branding at Munich-based DJ software company Algoriddim, said “it started with vinyl. They were against digital tools. Innovation is happening in every industry now.”

Marc Andreessen, the Netscape founder turned venture capitalist turned political lightning rod, addressed what he sees as Washington’s cognitive dissonance over technology earlier this week. Speaking at the Ray Summit with Anyscale cofounder Robert Nishihara, Andreessen said:

Technology has become a very politically loaded topic over the last decade for a bunch of reasons. So our firm is much more engaged in politics than we used to be and I’ve been spending a lot more time in DC than I used to. I sort of have these two very different conversations in DC. … The Tuesday conversation is ‘it’s us versus China and then Iran, Russia and so forth. This revolution is here and the US needs to be the dominant technology, global superpower.’

And then on Thursday, I go back and they forgot about the China topic and … they’re like ‘technology is weird and scary and it’s freaking us out and AI is really scary and we think we ought to stop this whole thing.’

• China’s domestic struggles won’t change its trajectory in Washington.
• Gulf sovereign wealth fund in talks to invest in big US lender.
• Vance wants to be a ‘pro-family’ Republican. His party isn’t there yet.