Most Read: Apple’s Free AI Training Program, NYPD AI Gunfire Detector Under Fire

Here are the most-read stories on AI Business this week:

Apple Offers Free AI Training for Developer Academy Students

Apple plans to provide free AI training for all students and mentors enrolled in its Developer Academy program to encourage the next generation of developers to embrace AI.

Launched in 2013, the Apple Developer Academy offers free tuition for coding and app design for iPhone, iPad and Mac.

The company announced it would be expanding its training program, offering courses on AI fundamentals and how to build and train AI models.

Apple said it will also provide extensive lessons on using CoreML, the company’s framework for developing AI and machine learning applications capable of running on Apple devices.

The courses are set to begin this fall and the academy is available to students in the U.S., Brazil, the Republic of Korea and Indonesia.

Learn more about the courses and find out if you’re eligible to join

New York City AI-Powered Shot Detection System Accuracy Questioned

The New York City Comptroller has recommended in a report that the New York Police Department (NYPD) not renew its current $22 million contract with a company that provides an AI-powered shot detection system without fully evaluating its performance.

The audit, conducted by Comptroller Brad Lander’s office, found that ShotSpotter only confirmed shootings 13% of the time. The auditory gunfire detection and location technology from security technology company SoundThinking also reported a high degree of false positives and overestimated the reduction in police response times.

Related:Hollywood Greats Return as AI Narrators in Audiobook App

The report found that in sample months in 2022 and 2023 ShotSpotter alerts only resulted in confirmed shootings between 8% and 20% of the time.

“During the month of June 2023, for example, out of the 940 ShotSpotter alerts that NYPD responded to 771 could not be confirmed as shootings upon arrival at the scene (82%), 47 were determined to be unfounded (5%) and 122 were confirmed as shootings (13%),” it said.

Uncover how many hours the NYPD spent investigating ShotSpotter false alarms

AI-Powered Startup Raises $27M to Automate Regulatory Compliance Checks

New York-based Norm Ai has raised $27 million in a series A funding round to expand its platform that turns regulations into AI-powered compliance agents.

Founded in 2023, the startup built a platform that transforms regulations and corporate policies into computer code. The AI-powered platform uses that code to build AI agents designed to assist compliance teams in conducting checks on products and services.

Related:Audi Integrates ChatGPT in Cars for Enhanced Voice-Control System

Private equity firm Coatue led the round, having previously led Norm’s $11.1 million seed round in January.

Citi Ventures, Capital Ventures and New York Life Ventures joined this latest round, with TIAA Ventures and Jefferson River Capital, the family office of former Blackstone president Tony James, also participating.

The startup plans to use the funds to expand its platform and grow its client base. It’s also looking to hire new software engineers and sales staff.

Read more about Norm Ai’s regulatory AI agent platform

AWS Commits $50M to Support Public Sector Generative AI Innovations

AWS has announced a $50 million initiative aimed at accelerating public sector innovation, providing cloud credits and advanced AI infrastructure to entice government and public organizations to leverage its generative AI services.

The new Public Sector Generative AI Impact Initiative will run for two years and provide access to AWS services including Bedrock, its fully managed service for developing foundation models, and the machine learning development platform SageMaker.

Users can also use AWS’ specialized hardware to support intensive AI workloads, including its Trainium and Inferentia chips.

Public sector firms will be able to access AI training to help achieve their go-to-market goals and free entry to AWS Summit events worldwide.

Learn how to access the public sector cloud credits

Salesforce Launches AI Benchmark to Evaluate CRM Deployments

Salesforce has introduced a language model benchmark tailored for businesses to evaluate their AI models against customer relationship management (CRM) tasks.

Benchmarks are tools designed to evaluate the performance of a language model. They contain tools and tests that provide model owners with an assessment of their model's outputs on specific tasks, such as the MMLU benchmark for evaluating general knowledge.

Salesforce’s new test focuses on CRM, enabling model owners to evaluate their AI system's performance on sales and service use cases across four key metrics: accuracy, cost, speed, and trust and safety.

Salesforce’s AI research team developed the new benchmark test. Salesforce argued that previous model benchmarks lacked business relevance, failing to evaluate metrics enterprises would care about, such as running costs and trust considerations.

Salesforce said the new CRM test lets businesses make more strategic decisions about which AI systems to deploy for CRM use cases.

Uncover which AI models the benchmark ranks highest for CRM use cases