With generative AI still captivating the tech world, some companies are throwing around large sums of money in an effort to demonstrate their seriousness about the technology’s future.

One of the latest of these announcements came from accounting and consulting giant PwC, which recently said it would put $1 billion toward scaling its own AI capabilities as well as helping its clients do the same over the next three years.

The company’s investment includes access to Microsoft’s OpenAI Azure cloud platform and OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The goals of the multiyear pledge are to provide more funding for AI-related projects and train the company’s workforce as a whole in the use of the tech.

“We had a lot of debate about what’s the right scale of investment, as you can imagine, but we truly believe that AI is going to be transformative to industries in the way work gets done,” Joe Atkinson, PwC’s vice chair and chief products and technology officer, told Tech Brew.

“So it’s going to hit everybody in one way or another. And we view our role as having a degree of responsibility to help our clients navigate that as well as help our people navigate that.”

PwC isn’t the only consultancy putting new resources behind AI for itself and its clients.

Keep reading here.—PK

Robotic knee replacements.

It’s 2023, and yet somehow most knee replacements are still done with bone saws. (No wonder 100k of them fail every year…sheesh.)

But before we could even begin to realize just how unbelievable that is, Monogram may have a potential solution. Not only have they developed custom 3D-printed implants that could be more successful than traditional replacements, but they’re also developing highly accurate surgical robots for the procedure.

The possible end result? A potentially more comfortable, less invasive alternative to traditional knee replacement surgeries—which just so happens to be a $19.4b market.

It’s great to see tech that could potentially help others, and even greater when Brew readers have a chance to invest in it.

You can invest before their planned Nasdaq listing—but your last chance to fund your investment is May 10.

New data from Morning Consult indicates that a majority of voters view regulating the tech sector as a job for the federal government.

According to a survey conducted in mid-March, 64% of Democrats and 54% of independents said passing legislation to regulate tech industries is a federal issue, while 52% of Republicans saw it as a state-level responsibility.

While state efforts to regulate tech—particularly efforts focused on online privacy—have bipartisan support, awareness about such actions is low.

Keep reading here.—MA

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

Early-stage startups remind me a lot of my nonprofit days. You wear a lot (a lot, a lot!) of hats, have lofty goals that don’t match your limited resources, and are surrounded by dreamers who want to change the world. This is definitely true in my day-to-day life at StoryFile, where I help our tech and product teams work well—and work well together—with our clients and colleagues.

I am also a one-woman IT team and created our security program from the ground up. In my free time, I serve as an honorary member of our ops team as well as engage in strategic conversations and planning with senior leadership and other teams across the organization.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

I am most optimistic about conversational video AI being on the verge of very natural interactions thanks to generative AI. And I am so sure of it because StoryFile is on the verge of releasing this possibility to everyday businesses and enterprises alike.

As far as least optimistic, I’d say phooey to that question and instead answer that I’m predicting that AR glasses and conversational AI-enhanced glasses are not that far off from a mainstream breakthrough. I’d guess in the next two years we’ll see the likes of Meta, Apple, and/or Google get that first mass-adoption product to market.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

I’m loving the Patent Drop Substack newsletter, as well as anything from Timnit Gebru, Allie K. Miller, and Elizabeth M. Adams.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I’m a superhero, er, I mean, a working parent. Contrary to old-timey lore, working parents are the most efficient producers on your team and can multitask like nobody’s business.

What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?
How to combine my love for YA fiction with my very nonfiction adulthood. My life needs more witches, wizards, special powers, and magic potions.

Stat: $140 million. That’s the amount the federal government pledged to “establish seven new National AI Research Institutes focused on ‘responsible AI innovation,” Tech Brew’s Maeve Allsup reported in a roundup of proposals aimed at regulating the tech industry.

Quote: “We once again find ourselves at a key decision point. Can we continue to be the home of world-leading technology without accepting race-to-the-bottom business models and monopolistic control that locks out higher-quality products or the next big idea? Yes—if we make the right policy choices.”—Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, in a New York Times op-ed outlining the case for why the government “must regulate AI”

Read: Never give artificial intelligence the nuclear codes (The Atlantic)

Buh-bye, bugs : QA Wolf gets web apps to 80% automated, end-to-end test coverage in just 4 months—with unlimited, parallel test runs and a Zero Flake Guarantee. Book your 90-day pilot.*

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Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Q&A with former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer
• Bidding farewell to the Chevy Bolt
• Generative AI takes center stage in Microsoft, Google, and Meta’s Q1 reports