PM — What’s the difference between AI and machine learning?

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We thought we were doing well during Ramadan without incessant caffeinating, but we also just realized it’s only Monday. The best antidote? Some positive business news, courtesy of our friends in the GCC showcasing plenty of appetite for stake purchases here in Egypt.

THE BIG STORY TODAY

Abu Dhabi Wealth Fund ADQ could acquire stakes in both listed and unlisted Egyptian companies as part of its investment in Egypt, Sovereign Fund of Egypt (SFE) CEO Ayman Soliman told Al Arabiya TV (watch, runtime: 9:45). The investment would come as a move of support, especially to companies that are preparing to list on the EGX, with details on the investment set to be announced within days, Soliman said. Bloomberg had reported last month that ADQ could be acquiring state-held stakes in Abu Qir Fertilizers, Mopco, and Alexandria Container & Cargo Handling as part of a USD 2 bn investment that could see it buy up stakes in five EGX-listed companies.

ALSO FROM SOLIMAN- Al Wataniya + Siemens power plants on the table for investments from Saudi’s PIF? Three Siemens-built power plants and state-owned Al Wataniya — both of which could be seeing stake sales soon — are on the table for investments from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the SFE boss said. The kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is looking to invest USD 10 bn in Egypt’s healthcare, education, agriculture and financial services sectors.

** CATCH UP QUICK on the top stories from today’s EnterpriseAM:

• B Investments is exiting Giza Systems with stake sale to Saudi Telecom subsidiary: B Investments is selling its entire 44.7% stake in engineering subsidiary Giza Systems to Saudi Telecom’s internet subsidiary. B Investments’ board accepted an undisclosed binding offer for the shares from Solutions by STC that would value Giza Systems at USD 145 mn.
• Egyptian online mental health startup O7 Therapy has raised a USD 2.1 mn seed round in what the startup says is the largest seed round for a mental health startup in the Middle East.
• Edita Food Industries has officially inaugurated its Moroccan plant, where it started operations in December at the facility, which is the company’s first greenfield investment outside of Egypt.

SO, WHEN DO WE EAT? You’ll be breaking your fast at 6:15pm CLT this evening in the capital city, and fajr prayers are at 4:12am.

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HAPPENING NOW-

Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry is joining an Arab League-led push to find a diplomatic solution to the Russia-Ukraine war. Shoukry is in Moscow and Warsaw today as part of a visit led by the Arab League liaison group, according to a ministry statement. The group, which includes Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit and the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, and UAE, will hold “necessary consultations and contacts with parties involved” to help reach a diplomatic resolution.

THE BIG STORY ABROAD is still the state of affairs in Ukraine’s Bucha, where Russia is being accused of committing war crimes. Moscow is reversing the narrative on the allegations — over which Europe is preparing a fresh package of sanctions — by ordering an investigation into what it says is Ukraine spreading “deliberately false information,” according to Reuters.

FOR TOMORROW-

It’s PMI day tomorrow: Purchasing managers’ index figures for March for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar will be released tomorrow morning at 6:15am CLT. By that specific gauge, Egypt’s private sector has been in contraction since November 2020. Headwinds intensifying last month due to the conflict in Ukraine are unlikely to have changed that.

???? CIRCLE YOUR CALENDAR-

Companies have a little over two weeks to file their first quarterly ESG compliance report: Listed firms and non-bank financial services companies need to submit their first quarterly ESG report by 20 April, the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) announced last week.

Didn’t we say previously that the deadline was 10 April? Yes, we did, per a circular (pdf) published by the FRA last month. The regulator has since amended the deadline, handing firms an extra 10 days to submit.

What you need to know: The regulator is making it mandatory for corporates to publicly disclose their performance on key environmental, social and governance metrics each year when they submit their annual financial statements, starting 2023. Reach out to Moustafa Taalab at InkankIR, our parent company, if you need some help.

Other upcoming dates you want to know about:

• Foreign reserves: March’s foreign reserves figures will be announced some time this week;
• Inflation figures for March are expected on Sunday, 10 April.

Check out our full calendar on the web for a comprehensive listing of upcoming news events, national holidays and news triggers.

☀️ TOMORROW’S WEATHER- Hot, hot, hot: Expect a daytime high of 41°C tomorrow and a nighttime low of 24°C, our favorite weather app tells us.

Elon Musk just became Twitter’s biggest shareholder after buying a 9.2% stake in the platform, a regulatory filing showed. The stake is worth around USD 2.89 bn based on Twitter’s stock price at market close on Friday. Musk’s purchase sent Twitter shares soaring around 26% in premarket trading, according to Bloomberg. The purchase comes a month after Musk polled his followers on the platform on whether Twitter adheres to the principle of freedom of speech, and floated the possibility of launching his own platform to rival Twitter.

Meta AI is losing some of its biggest researchers: The Facebook parent company seems to have lost some of its top AI talent this year, with at least four — and as many as six — “prominent members” leaving Meta AI in recent months, CNBC reports, citing people it says has knowledge of the matter. Although there doesn’t appear to be a specific reason driving the exodus, which is concentrated for the most part at the London AI lab, CNBC’s sources suggest that there’s a new wave of exits in the offing. While some are leaving for career advancements, others are pursuing better compensation in other positions or are looking for a change of pace by getting in on startups, the sources say.

Crypto exchange-traded funds are picking up steam and are bound for even further growth in Europe, where there’s already some USD 7.3 bn invested in these products, Bloomberg reports. If trends hold up, that figure could more than double by 2025, CoinShares International CEO Frank Spiteri said. DeFi Technologies is also set to pile into the growing investor interest in the crypto ETFs with the launch of three new ETFs through its subsidiary and Swiss based asset-management firm Valour Inc. The ETFs will be launched on the Euronext exchanges in Paris and Amsterdam on Wednesday.

???? ON THE TUBE TONIGHT-

(all times CLT)

Meen Qaal captures that adolescent phase where you feel like you’re (permanently) choosing your entire future: The Ramadan series features Ahmed Dash and Gamal Soliman as a son and father who butt heads over what the former will study at university. Soliman depicts a traditional Egyptian father who wants his son to pursue engineering after he gets the grades that qualify him to enter the discipline. Dash is crushed by the decision, showing early on in the TV show that he has an entrepreneurial spirit and would rather study business. Meen Qaal shows a very real depiction of that indecisive time and all the stress and pressure that comes with it. We found ourselves relating to the show while also being proud of how far we’ve come over the (many, many) years when it comes to decision making. It’s a light series and the actors play the parts with skill and humor.

⚽ The leagues have a smattering of matches today:

Crystal Palace and Arsenal are playing today at 9pm in the English Premier League.

La Liga: Espanyol will face Real Sociedad at 9pm.

Serie A: Milan is competing against Bologna at 8:45pm following a match between Verona and Genoa at 6:30pm.

???? OUT AND ABOUT-

(all times CLT)

Ramdan at Jabal Street 66 is an untraditional celebration of the Holy Month in the middle of the desert at Wadi Degla Protectorate. The event runs daily and features a camping experience, sohour by a chef, classic songs with oud, tanoura, a mesaharaty show, a private prayer place for men and women, hammocks, and star gazing.

Mosad Ozil is performing tonight at The Room New Cairo at 9pm.

Lotus Park is hosting a Ramadan yoga session before iftar tomorrow at 4:30pm.

???? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

The stories you tell yourself change the way you see the world: Choose Your Story, Change Your Life by Kindra Hall explains how the way you describe situations and events in your head — the stories you tell yourself — impacts the way you view yourself and the world around you. Since the person you’ll talk to most during life is yourself, Hall poses a new way to do it that won’t leave you stuck in a single instant but will instead propel you forward. This includes looking at what you learned from interactions and giving yourself a pat on the back every once in a while.

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Egypt Kuwait Holding’s general assembly has approved a dividend payout to shareholders of USD 0.07 per share, the company said in an EGX filing (pdf).

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MARKET ROUNDUP-

The EGX30 fell 0.3% at today’s close on turnover of EGP 907.64 mn (7% below the 90-day average). Foreign investors were net sellers. The index is down 3.5% YTD.

In the green: Medinet Nasr Housing (+6.14%), MM Group (+5.24%) and Palm Hills (+4.1%).

In the red: EFG Hermes (-2.6%), Fawry (-2.2%) and AMOC (-2.0%).

Enterprise explains: Artificial Intelligence (AI). A couple of weeks back, advisor for AI to the CIT Ministry Sally Radwan gave us the rundown on the government’s artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. AI is expected to contribute 7.7% to Egypt’s GDP by 2030 — meaning we had all better get to grips with just exactly what it is. AI could be explaining itself one day soonish — but in the meantime, here’s our (mostly) human-made explainer to help you buff up.

So what is AI? Put simply, AI is getting computers to act like humans in terms of problem-solving and decision-making. With the use of large datasets and computer programs, AI machines are made to mimic the intelligence and actions of human beings.

AI is used for a number of everyday activities. This includes speech recognition (like Siri and Alexa); customer service (think how many social media company pages use AI bots to handle their incoming customer requests); computer vision (as with image searching on Google); recommendations (like how Netflix and Spotify give you customized recs based on your prior activity); and automated stock trading (AI-driven trading platforms that can process thousands of trades a day without human intervention). On a more advanced level, AI is also used to steer driverless cars.

There are two types of AI: strong and weak. Don’t be fooled: weak AI is not necessarily the less powerful of the two, but rather refers to AI systems that are programmed only to fulfill specific tasks, like Siri or Alexa. Also called narrow AI, the tech is a set of advanced methods to analyze data and use it to extract patterns to predict and optimize certain values in a more sophisticated way than traditional data analysis tools can, Radwan told us last week. Strong AI, meanwhile, refers to the concept of AI systems that have an intelligence equal to humans — which don’t yet exist. Strong AI would boast a self-aware consciousness with the ability to solve problems, learn, and plan for the future, IBM writes.

SOUND SMART- Egypt’s national AI strategy focuses on weak or narrow AI, Radwan said. A key focus of the government’s efforts in narrow AI is final human determination (FHD), which means the human is always in control. Check out how the strategy has been applied for different sectors in our talk with Radwan here.

Same, same, but different: AI vs machine learning. Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI, where machines learn from their past interactions and input data to create new things or make different decisions. For instance, the Google document on which this article was written makes suggestions as to what the next word or phrase could be while we type. Since we’ve been using Google docs on a company-wide level for a very long time, word suggestions are now more specific. If we write the first name of one of our team members, the document suggests their second name automatically. That is machine learning.

And deep learning is a subset of machine learning — its evolution, so to speak. It allows machines to deduce a course of action based on previous examples of similar situations. Unlike machine learning, deep learning systems are built like the human brain, using interconnected neural networks that influence each other. Deep learning machines don't need human intervention to tell them what to do with the massive amounts of data that are fed into them. They learn via previous experience. One practical application for deep learning is in translation services — machines can decipher what dialect is being spoken, for example.

There are of course concerns when it comes to AI, some of which are easily debunked. Fear #1: The singularity. One of the main fears of strong AI is the machines-overtake-humanity apocalypse scenario, as seen in countless movies and series. While this is just the stuff of fantasy for now, some AI researchers say there’s a 50% chance that machines could outsmart humans in the next 45 years. If things ever reach that stage, there’s really not much we can do except sit back and hope the robots decide to be kind. But freaking out now “is like being worried about overpopulation on Mars before we even have gotten a person on Mars,” one AI expert tells NBC.

Fear #2: Privacy. AI-driven consumer products “are frequently equipped with sensors that generate and collect vast amounts of data without the knowledge or consent of those in their proximity,” Privacy International writes. That’s a problem in itself, but it gets worse: AI could be used to de-anonymize this data, tracking specific human beings across devices and in both public and private spaces. There’s also the possibility that our data could be used against us, as AI algorithms inadvertently perpetuate existing discrimination and biases in society. That is why “the development, use, research, and development of AI must be subject to the minimum requirement of respecting, promoting, and protecting international human rights standards,” Privacy International writes.

Fear #3: Employment. We’ve all heard it before: Machines are coming for our jobs. However, Radwan told us last week that AI’s contribution to the labor market is actually positive, as it tends to create more jobs than it makes obsolete. But the rise of AI will result in job displacement, which means that different kinds of jobs will be created. For that, governments need to work on upskilling the population as a whole.

Fear #4: Ethical concerns. So, let’s say an AI machine evolves and becomes sentient, with all the emotions, desires, and existential angst we associate with human consciousness. Do we treat it as we would an average machine? Or has it become something more — something that demands certain rights? This debate has been raging since well before strong AI was even in the realm of possibility, with some insisting it should get the same ethical treatment as humans once it emerges — including protection from exploitation and suffering.