AI @ Noon | July 15

The Hong Kong government is making its own version of ChatGPT, after OpenAI restricted access to the popular chatbot.

India antitrust probe finds Apple abused position in apps market: An investigation by India's antitrust body has found that Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging "in abusive conduct and practices," a confidential report seen by Reuters showed.

‘I am happy to see how my baby is bouncing’: The AI transforming pregnancy scans in Africa: While ultrasound services are normal practice in many countries, software being tested in Uganda will allow a scan without the need for specialists, providing an incentive for pregnant women to visit health services early on. Guardian

Starmer plans to introduce AI bill in King’s Speech: Plan for tech regulation will be one of 35 bills to be set out by new Labour government. FT

Robots and other smart machinery will comprise up to one-third of the US military in the next 10 to 15 years, retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at an Axios event.

+ The Senate Armed Services Committee's version of the annual defense policy bill features an array of provisions focused on AI and emerging tech.

What are AI agents? The next big thing is AI tools that can do more complex tasks. Here’s how they will work. Melissa Heikkilä

What if the AI boosters are wrong? A skeptical paper by Daron Acemoglu, a labor economist at MIT, has triggered a heated debate over whether artificial intelligence will supercharge productivity. NYT

Fortune: 70,000 students are already using AI textbooks

OpenAI working on new reasoning technology under code name ‘Strawberry’ Reuters

OpenAI promised to make its AI safe. Employees say it ‘failed’ its first test. The previously unreported incident showcases the limits of President Biden’s strategy for thwarting AI harms. WP

OpenAI illegally barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers say: In a letter exclusively obtained by The Washington Post, whistleblowers asked the SEC to probe company’s allegedly restrictive non-disclosure agreements. WP

AT&T says data from 109 million US customer accounts illegally downloaded: Reuters reports AT&T said on Friday the company suffered a massive hacking incident as data from about 109 million customer accounts containing records of calls and texts from 2022 was illegally downloaded in April.

Bloomberg: AT&T data hack prompts FCC probe, raises broad security concerns

+ Records downloaded from Snowflake cloud platform, AT&T says

+ Data includes records of customer calls, texts over 6 months

Google near deal to buy startup Wiz for $23 billion: WSJ reports the deal for the cybersecurity company would be the tech giant’s largest acquisition ever.

AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change: NPR reports as AI gets more sophisticated, it needs more energy. In the US, a majority of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels like coal and gas which are primary drivers of climate change.

AI's insatiable appetite for energy: NYT reports the soaring electricity demands of data centers and AI are straining the grid in some areas, pushing up emissions and slowing the energy transition.

AI’s bizarro world: Fortune reports we’re marching towards AGI while carbon emissions soar.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

AI @ Noon | July 12

The Kremlin is rewriting Wikipedia: A new version of history is taking shape. Economist

Republicans seek probe of Microsoft’s $1.5bn investment in UAE’s G42: Letter says deal warrants ‘special scrutiny’ on any ties between AI group and China. FT

US businesses may soon find that deregulation comes with risks: Recent Supreme Court decisions have hamstrung regulators but they will also make things much more complex. Brooke Masters

Why the Pentagon needs Silicon Valley’s AI: Conflicts in Ukraine and Syria signaled to defense officials a new kind of war—one that would require Big Tech’s expertise. FC

OpenAI develops system to track progress toward human-level AI: The company believes its technology is approaching the second level of five on the path to artificial general intelligence. Bloomberg

The future is all bot vs. bot Axios

The intense battle to stop AI bots from taking over the internet: Artificial intelligence systems need to be trained on text – which has led their creators to gather up words from right across the web. Independent

Will AI become your assistant or your boss? An ethicist explains: An AI ethicist argues that while AI could increase efficiency, it could create a new surveillance-based work environment. FC

AI bubble set to inflate further: It will take time for the technology to be put to productive use by customers. Richard Waters

WSJ: Get ready for more AI mania this earnings season

Bloomberg: Sequoia, Nvidia back startup fireworks AI at $552 million valuation

Silicon Valley wins few government contracts: WSJ reports the total amount of awards received by country’s top national security startups less than half of what venture capitalists have invested.

Apple Pay will open up to rival payment services in Europe. 

Rise of the restaurant robots: Chipotle, Sweetgreen, and others bet on automation: Chains experiment with machine helpers like Flippy, Chippy, and Autocado as they face increasing labor costs. WSJ

Google parent Alphabet has shelved efforts to acquire HubSpot.

Tesla is postponing its planned robotaxi unveiling to October.

Big Tech’s climate goals at risk from massive AI energy demands: Bloomberg reports Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are grappling with growing energy demands from artificial intelligence. 

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

AI @ Noon | July 11

US says Russia used AI-powered bots in disinformation scheme: Bloomberg reports an editor at a Russian state media outlet developed software to create a bot farm as part of a project that was funded by a member of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday by the Department of Justice.

US and allies take down Russian ‘bot farm’ powered by AI: WP reports the effort drove nearly a thousand covert accounts on X.

How 'Islamic State' uses AI to spread extremist propaganda: DW reports groups like the "Islamic State" and al-Qaeda are urging followers to use the latest digital tools to spread their extremist message, avoid censorship, and recruit.

Inside the next era of warfare: How tech is reshaping the battlefield Axios

Tech winners from Trump’s 2024 platform: Crypto, AI, and Elon Musk: For a party whose leaders, including former president Donald Trump, have often railed against Big Tech, the Republicans’ new platform has relatively little to say about tech regulation. And what it does say signals a laissez-faire if not outright cozy approach to emerging sectors that have drawn scrutiny from the Biden administration. WP

The Federal Trade Commission just waded into an obscure-seeming arena of AI policy that could nevertheless define the future of research and competition in the field. In a blog post on Wednesday, the agency’s Office of Technology wrote that open-weights AI models can “drive innovation, reduce costs, increase consumer choice, and generally benefit the public.” Read the post here.

FTC bars anonymous messaging app from serving users under age 18: NYT reports the move against the app NGL by the Federal Trade Commission was the first time the agency barred an online service from hosting minors.

CNN to lay off 100 staffers as it preps major revamp of digital efforts: THR reports CNN CEO Mark Thompson told staff Wednesday that its first digital subscription product will launch this year, and that it is exploring a "strategic push into AI."

What is AI? Everyone thinks they know but no one can agree. And that’s a problem. Will Douglas Heaven

Apple TV+ just dropped a show about deadly AI—weeks after debuting Apple Intelligence: FC reports that ‘Sunny,’ starring Rashida Jones, takes an eerie-but-funny look at a near future where people grapple with the dark side of the kind of AI that Apple just introduced.

Defeated by AI, a legend in the board game Go warns: Get ready for what’s next: Lee Saedol was one of the world’s top Go players, and his shocking loss to an AI opponent was a harbinger of a new, unsettling era. “It may not be a happy ending,” he says. NYT

+ “I faced the issues of AI early, but it will happen for others. It may not be a happy ending.” -- Lee Saedol, the legendary Go player who lost to Google DeepMind’s AI program in 2016, warns an audience in Seoul about the risks the technology may pose

Knowledge workers don’t seem to think AI will replace them—but they expect it to save them 4 hours a week in the next year Steve Hasker

Microsoft and Apple drop OpenAI seats amid antitrust scrutiny: FT reports ChatGPT maker plans strategy to engage crucial partners as regulatory scrutiny of sector increases.

Microsoft, Apple will not join OpenAI’s board as regulatory scrutiny grows: Regulators are asking whether tech giants hold too much sway over smaller artificial intelligence companies. WP

xAI is building its own data center from scratch: Semafor reports as part of that push, it has purchased 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, making it what Musk called “the most powerful training cluster in the world by a large margin.”

Advanced Micro Devices said on Wednesday it will acquire Finnish artificial intelligence startup Silo AI for about $665 million.
 
Reuters: Samsung bolsters AI in foldable phones, health monitoring in smartwatch, ring

Reuters: Intuit to cut about 1,800 jobs as it looks to increase AI investments

AI investors are starting to wonder: Is this just a bubble? John Herrman

In constant battle with insurers, doctors reach for a cudgel: AI: NYT reports as health plans increasingly rely on technology to deny treatment, physicians are fighting back with chatbots that synthesize research and make the case.

Bloomberg: Elon Musk says second Neuralink brain implant about a week away

Amazon says it reached a climate goal seven years early: NYT reports the company said it effectively got all of the electricity it used last year from sources that did not produce greenhouse gas emissions. Some experts have faulted the company’s calculations.

Surging AI energy needs could bring Three Mile Island back online: The Pennsylvania plant, site of a partial meltdown in 1979, is part of a burst of fresh activity at mothballed plants as tech companies, manufacturers and energy regulators scramble to find enough zero emissions electricity. WP

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

AI @ Noon | July 10

US allies issue rare warning on Chinese hacking group: An advisory by Australia, along with the US and six other countries, details a group known as APT40. WSJ

+ House Speaker Mike Johnson is targeting the end of 2024 for Congress to pass a “significant” package of legislation aimed at curbing China.

Chinese developers scramble as OpenAI blocks access in China: Guardian reports the US firm’s move, amid Beijing-Washington tensions, sparks rush to lure users to homegrown models.

Africa gets $1 billion boost as UN agency backs startup hubs: Bloomberg reports the United Nations Development Programme, African governments and the private sector plan to raise $1 billion and open a string of technology hubs across the continent to boost start-up innovation.

+ The first of 10 hubs that will form part of the world’s largest initiative supporting Africa’s technology startups will open at UNDP’s innovation center in Lagos, Nigeria.

New AI polling is out: The AI Policy Institute has published new survey data on public attitudes toward safeguarding American AI technologies from foreign competitors. Key findings:

+ 71% of Americans express significant or moderate concern about the Chinese acquisition of advanced AI models created by US firms.

+ Bipartisan agreement emerged on AI development pace, with 75% of both Democrats and Republicans preferring a measured approach on AI use and deployment over accelerating to gain an edge on China.

+ 63% of respondents support legislative action to restrict AI technology exports.

How the Department of Homeland Security’s WMD office sees the AI threat GZero Daily

Fortune: AI is effectively ‘useless’—and it’s created a ‘fake it till you make it’ bubble that could end in disaster, veteran market watcher warns

Etsy, the artisanal e-commerce giant, will require that every item for sale incorporate a "human touch." 

27.1 billion: From April to June, investors poured $27.1 billion into US-based artificial intelligence startups, according to PitchBook. 

Inside the secrets of generative AI: The French-American startup Hugging Face recently made the most powerful corpus of texts for developing language models available on its open-source platform. Le Monde

China's AI startups race for customers as titans like Alibaba cut prices: Intensifying battle to generate revenue sows concern over industry sustainability. Nikkei

Deepfake fraudsters impersonate FTSE chief executives: AI-generated voice notes are used to trick people into transferring money. The Times

+ @alialsalim: Data centres now account for ~3% of annual global carbon emissions from human activity, on par with the aviation and shipping industries.

48: Google’s greenhouse gas emissions are up a whopping 48% since 2019, thanks in no small part to its investments in AI.

Microsoft and Occidental sign carbon credit deal to help offset AI energy surge: FT reports the agreement comes as tech groups seek to meet climate promises while expanding power-hungry artificial intelligence.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

AI @ Noon | July 9

AI-powered super soldiers are more than just a pipe dream: The US military has abandoned its half-century dream of a suit of powered armor in favor of a “hyper-enabled operator,” a tactical AI assistant for special operations forces. Wired

Semafor: OpenAI to join Washington lobbying group BSA | The Software Alliance

+ BSA has been a leading industry voice as global regulators, including those in the Biden administration, grapple with how to regulate artificial intelligence. The group has pushed for what it describes as the responsible development of AI and advocates for federal rules in light of the hundreds of proposals that have cropped up in state legislatures.

Cloudflare, the infrastructure and security firm used by 1 in 5 websites, introduced a new service last week that protects clients' content from poaching by data-harvesting bots.

+ AI makers are using increasingly aggressive scraping tactics, seizing any web data that's "publicly available."

AI is keeping the VC ecosystem afloat: It has accounted for more than 40% of new private US "unicorns" so far this year, and over 60% of the increase in total venture-backed valuation, per PitchBook.

Corning raised its second-quarter core sales forecast on Monday, driven by robust adoption of its new optical connectivity products for generative AI.

The words that give away generative AI text: From “delves” to “showcasing,” certain words boomed in usage after LLMs became mainstream. Wired

The age of drone warfare is disrupting the defense industry: Rapidly evolving technology designed by smaller players is challenging the dominance of sluggish industry giants. FT

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

AI @ Noon | July 8

CNBC: China leads the patents race for generative AI, with Tencent and Baidu topping the list

+ Geographically, China leads with 38,210 inventions from 2014 to 2023, far outpacing the U.S. (6,276), Republic of Korea (4,155), Japan (3,409) and India (1,350).

+ Tencent, Ping An Insurance and Baidu are among the top ten inventors, the UN report showed.

+ “The sharp rise in patenting activity reflects the recent technological advances and the potential within GenAI,” the report said.

AI begins ushering in an age of killer robots NYT

Amazon to build $1.3bn Australian defence cloud: FT reports the deal aims to improve data sharing with allies including UK and US.

The AI industry starts to focus on a potential Trump presidency Semafor

Hollywood tycoon Ari Emanuel blasts OpenAI’s Sam Altman after Elon Musk scared him about the future: ‘You’re the dog’ to an AI master Fortune

A hacker stole OpenAI secrets, raising fears that China could, too: NYT reports security breach at the maker of ChatGPT last year revealed internal discussions among researchers and other employees, but not the code behind OpenAI’s systems.

We need to control AI agents now: Automated bots are about to be everywhere, with potentially devastating consequences. Jonathan Zittrain

AI has all the answers. Even the wrong ones: ChatGPT has the appearance of a brilliant logician and that’s a problem. Tim Harford

For AI giants, smaller is sometimes better: Companies are turning their attention to less powerful models, hoping lower costs and solid performance will win more customers. WSJ

Reuters: Crypto hacking thefts double to $1.4 bln in first half of 2024, researchers say

Every time you post to Instagram, you’re turning on a light bulb forever: Even simple actions online can take a toll on the environment. Arthur Holland Michel

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

AI @ Noon | June 27

Chinese AI firms woo OpenAI users as US company plans API restrictions: Reuters reports Chinese artificial intelligence companies are moving swiftly to attract users of OpenAI’s technology, following reports that the US firm plans to restrict access to its API in China and other countries. ChatGPT maker OpenAI is planning to block access to technology used to build AI products for entities in China and some other countries, Chinese state-owned newspaper Securities Times reported on Tuesday.

AI will fuel antitrust fires, Big Tech’s German nemesis warns: Artificial intelligence will intensify competition abuses by Big Tech, according to Andreas Mundt, the top German antitrust official who’s spearheaded efforts to rein in Silicon Valley. AI systems will become a closed shop, and users won’t be able to escape to look for alternatives, Mundt warned at the annual press conference of his agency, the Federal Cartel Office. Bloomberg

Israel next month will launch a tender to establish the country's first supercomputer to ensure the country remains a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the chief executive of the state-backed Israel Innovation Authority said on Wednesday.

Biden-Trump debate: Where they stand on AI, TikTok, and chips: Both agree on need to outcompete China in tech, but differ on means. Nikkei

Hollywood workers union reaches pay, AI-use deal with top studios: Reuters reports a union representing Hollywood film and television crew said on Tuesday it has reached a tentative three-year deal with major studios that includes agreed-on pay hikes and guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

Generative AI reaches fork in the road: "AI platforms should not mistake the music community's embrace of AI as a willingness to accept continuing mass infringement," writes RIAA chairman Mitch Glazier. Billboard

The AI boom has an unlikely early winner: Wonky consultants: Rattled by tech’s latest trend, businesses have turned to advisers at Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, and KPMG for guidance on adopting generative artificial intelligence. NYT

YouTube in talks with record labels over AI music deal: FT reports licensing negotiations come as industry wrestles with legal and creative impact of artificial intelligence.

Generative AI can’t cite its sources: How will OpenAI keep its promise to media companies? Matteo Wong

Research: Using AI at work makes us lonelier and less healthy David De Cremer + Joel Koopman

Amazon’s market capitalization reached $2trn for the first time.

An AI recreation of NBC sports broadcaster Al Michaels’ voice will be part of Peacock’s Olympics coverage, the network announced in a statement. The feature will be used to present “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock," which will provide fans with a customized playlist featuring highlights from the previous day.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

AI @ Noon | June 26

Central banks urged to keep pace with ‘game changer’ AI: Technology will have profound impact on global financial system, says Bank for International Settlements. FT

Central banks must prepare for profound impact of AI, BIS says: Reuters reports in its first major report into the rapidly advancing world of AI, the central banking umbrella group said policymakers need to harness its immense power to monitor data in real time in order to "sharpen" their inflation-predicting abilities.

Fortune: Federal Reserve governor says AI is ‘not going to replace’ central bankers—at least not yet

The Department of Homeland Security has made its first 10 hires for its new AI Corps: Axios reports the new 50-person AI Corps, modeled after the US Digital Service, will study ways to tap AI across DHS's portfolio, including countering fentanyl trafficking, combating online child sexual exploitation and enhancing cybersecurity.

'Humans are essential for training AI': Behind artificial intelligence, there's a whole process of collecting, verifying, and annotating data carried out by humans. French sociologists Maxime Cornet and Clément Le Ludec explain that this is largely outsourced, notably to Madagascar. Le Monde

AI isn’t dumb, but it might be dumber than you think: It’s time to get real about what AI can and can’t do. Shira Ovide

Bloomberg: OpenAI delays launch of voice assistant to address safety issues

+ Company says it needs extra month to “reach our bar to launch”

+ Voice feature was a key focus at launch event in mid-May

Amazon is working on a rival to ChatGPT to launch this September.

Bloomberg: OpenAI taking steps to block China’s access to its AI tools

+ OpenAI reportedly sent warnings to developers across China

+ Chinese firms like Zhipu announced incentives for switching

21 billion: Accenture’s generative AI business is booming. The consulting firm’s practice, which helps companies use AI technology to become more efficient, now has $21 billion worth of contracts, up from $17 billion this time last year. 

New weapons will eclipse atomic bombs. Their builders ask themselves this question. Autonomous weapons will be built. The only questions are who will build them and for what purpose. Alexander C. Karp + Nicholas W. Zamiska

Microsoft faces a hefty antitrust fine after the European Commission on Tuesday accused it of illegally linking its chat and video app Teams with its Office product.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc