A Snapshot and Summary of What’s Happening to Enable the Safe and Effective Use of AI
Welcome to the latest installment of the Wovenware Monthly AI Index, where we’ve curated the most important news stories and issues shaping the new AI-driven world. In this month’s edition, learn about the new AI products and partnerships in big tech, the slow and steady progress in regulations, and even how AI is making a fashion statement.
Happy reading!
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENTS
Meta came out with a new version of its large language model, Llama 3, which is offered free of charge, and used for its AI model. Meta also will integrate it into the search functions of its social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. According to Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox in a Wall Street Journal interview, the new version is “going to be the most intelligent and best performing model of its kind that’s freely available.”
As AI models continue to consume more and more data in a feeding frenzy, the challenge is in where to find that data, since most AI developers have already chowed through most of what is on the Internet. Synthetic data is becoming the answer, but it will need guardrails so that all data doesn’t become AI-generated data.
AI is not only a glutton for data, apparently it’s also a glutton for electricity. Crunching massive amounts of data requires lots of energy within AI data centers. One company that is getting lots of interest in helping to address this challenge is ExoWatt. Sam Altman of OpenAI, as well as venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz and others are investing $20M in ExoWatt. The start-up develops modules fitted with solar lenses that turn the sun’s energy into heat, before producing electricity by passing the stored heat through an engine.
Meta just announced that it will be using a new labelling feature that identifies material that is AI-generated and which is not. By doing this, Meta is joining others in the industry to provide greater AI transparency.
U.S. AND EU REGULATIONS
A new poll shared exclusively with POLITICO from the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute showed that Americans want governmental regulation on the use of public data to train AI, as well as rules for better management of the energy that AI consumes. Nearly three quarters of respondents said companies should be “required to compensate the creators of that public data.” Additionally, respondents favored the idea of a special tax on electricity for AI companies, “with about six in ten saying they would be in favor of the government collecting revenue to support and upgrade the electrical grid.”
The U.S. has a long way to go, however, in regulating AI. Congress still has not passed a federal law to ensure its safe use, although individual states have passed their own laws. According to the CEO of the Partnership for AI, “One of the biggest hurdles that legislators face in regulating AI is just keeping up to the state of the science and the technology as it is developed.”
On the UK front, British antitrust regulators are investigating big tech partnerships, such as ones between Microsoft and French AI firm Mistral; and Amazon and U.S. startup Anthropic; as well as Microsoft’s hiring of former employees from Inflection AI. They’re trying to determine if the partnerships qualify as mergers, as part of their focus on taking a tougher stance on U.S. big tech dominating the market.
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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Eight U.S. newspapers have sued Open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. Newspapers, such as the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Denver Post claim that they have been illegally using millions of copyrighted articles without permission or payment to train their chatbots.
Talk about AI being everywhere. A chatbot developed by OpenAI walked the red carpet at the Met Gala fashion event held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The chatbot took on the persona of Natalie Potter, a socialite from the 1930s famous for her satin wedding gown. People could ask her questions and interact to learn more about her life and times.
Not to be shown up by chatbots, AI made other appearances at the Met Ball, in the form of deep fakes. Famous people, such as Katie Perry, Rihanna and Lady Gaga, who were not able to make it to the event, had AI-generated images appear on X and other social media platforms, as though they were in attendance. In fact, Katie Perry’s own mother thought she was looking at her daughter on the red carpet.
OTHER AI THOUGHTS TO PONDER
Just when the lines between humans and machines become blurred, here’s a whole new level of fuzziness. Gartner coined the term “digital humans,” which it says are “representations of people, typically rendered as digital twins, digital avatars, humanoid robots, generative AI or conversational user interfaces.” The firm estimates that in five-to-10 years companies could have digital twins for every single one of their customers.
Warren Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO recently shared his thoughts on AI during the company’s annual meeting. He compared AI to the development of the atom bomb, since both have the potential to have “devastating consequences on society if used incorrectly.” He also said, “we let the genie out of the bottle when we created nuclear weapons, and AI is similar – it’s partway out of the bottle.”
And on that somber note, that’s it for this month. We hope you gained new insights from the Wovenware Monthly AI Index.
Please share your questions, concerns and opinions about the AI-driven era. We’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to info@wovenware.com.