Week 8: What's Happening in AI

AI ‘off-switch’ for Europe, AI can’t hold copyright, and a surge in new releases and founder interviews.

Below: AI 'off-switch' in Europe, AI can’t hold copyright, and a surge in new releases, founder interviews, and more.

Policy

Americas: 

• AI cannot hold copyright, federal Judge Howell rules 

• SF officials want to stop robotaxis operating 24/7 after traffic chaos

• White House science adviser says safeguards on AI risks will be coming ‘fast’

• Sen. Cantwell’s forum to explore supporting (and regulating) AI (more here)

Europe and Middle East:

• Meta confirms AI ‘off-switch’ incoming to Facebook, Instagram in Europe 

• Israeli startups are moving jobs, money out of country amidst judicial shakeup 

• Why US tech giants are threatening to quit the UK over regulation 

Asia:

• China to limit use of generative AI in online healthcare activities 

• $1.4B robotics fund to be created by Beijing

• Beijing is coming for the metaverse

Responsible AI

Self-regulation, trust and safety, and more:

• InflectionAI’s Mustafa Suleyman on 10 years until chatbots run the world

• Anthropic’s Jack Clark: Why I am confused about AI

• What Google wants from Washington on AI 

User testing and information:

• Responsible AI user testing of Midjourney's AI-generated images

• Tool: Twilio AI Nutrition Facts: 'Create Your Own Label'

Health and education:

• Khan Academy’s Sal Khan: The AI tutor for every child and the next frontier

• Eye scans detect signs of Parkinson’s disease up to 7 years before diagnosis 

• ICYMI: AI detects systolic heart failure from wearable devices

Foundation models and methods:

• OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo fine-tuning and API updates

• DeepMind’s reinforced self-training method (more here)

• Allen Institute for AI’s Dolma: 3 trillion token open corpus for pretraining (more here) 

Multimodal releases and tests:

• HuggingFace’s IDEFICS, an open visual language model based on Flamingo

• Meta’s SeamlessM4T, a multimodal model for speech translation (more here)

• ElevenLabs releases Eleven Multilingual v2 for nearly 30 languages

• Union Square Ventures’ Andy Weissman on AI-native media

Workforce:

• What the electric car transition really means for autoworkers

• Cloudwork platforms falling short of meeting basic workers’ rights (Univ. of Oxford)

• 40% of workforce will need to reskill due to AI (IBM)

• 92% of executives agree people skills are more important than ever (LinkedIn)

Where AI is going

Mental models:

• Microsoft's Satya Nadella ís winning Big Tech's AI war. Here's how (Fast Company)

• Early days of AI (Elad Gil)

• Opinion: Too much money is going to AI doomers (Seattle Times)

Compute, chips, and hardware:

• SoftBank’s Arm said to line up 28 banks for biggest 2023 IPO 

• How Index Ventures jumped to the front of the AI GPU line 

• Researchers are helping robots teach themselves to open doors and more 

Defense, space, and cybersecurity:

• Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines 

• Chinese firm launches WonderJourney satellite with AI-powered ‘brain’

• Space is the next cybersecurity frontier (more here)

Information, civil society, and more:

• Biden admin. announces more new funding for rural broadband infrastructure 

• Advocates say the Content Authenticity Initiative would help sort fact from fiction

• Opinion: AI is the new atomic energy. Nationalize it (Politico)

• Does ChatGPT have a liberal bias? 

Partnerships and updates:

• Google DeepMind testing ‘personal life coach’ AI tool  

• Opera adds Aria (free browser AI) to Opera for iOS

• Youtube and Universal Music Group partner on artist-centric approach 

• ICYMI: OpenAI acquires AI design studio Global Illumination

Extra bits:

• Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque, upcoming interview

• AI models are powerful, but are they biologically plausible?

• Scammers used ChatGPT to unleash a crypto botnet on X

• IBM taps AI to translate COBOL code to Java

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