Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI is leading a $60 million funding round for Opal, the same company behind the high-end Tadpole webcam, according to a report from The Information.

While Opal will reportedly continue to sell its webcams, The Information reports that it’s also working on AI-enabled devices that people can use as “creative tools.”

The feature, called Maven, lets you type prompts like, “show me fantasy audiobooks that I can complete on an 8-hour road trip.” Audible will then use AI to come up with matching audiobooks.

Audible is rolling out Maven as a beta to half of US-based users on Android and iOS. Amazon just debuted an AI-powered discovery feature on its Music app as well.

Unlike a regular ebook, these AI-enabled digital textbooks will supposedly assess students’ reading level and change the content based on the reader. South Korea expects to be the first country in the world to use these books starting in 2025.

The newspaper will file an amended complaint by August 12. If the Times wins its suit, adding those works means those two companies are on the hook for a minimum of $7.5 billion in statutory damages alone.

The release notes for both iOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 mention that Apple Intelligence isn’t currently available in China, but only the iOS 18.1 notes specify that Apple Intelligence is currently available in the EU, either, as observed by 9to5Mac.

Apple has already said that it doesn’t think it will launch Apple Intelligence in the EU this year due to regulatory concerns.

You may need to close and reopen the app to see it, but according to Android expert Mishaal Rahman, Gemini is showing up for non-Google Workspace users.

Gemini can do things like summarize emails, suggest next steps, or draft replies. Before now, you’ve needed a Google AI premium subscription or a Workspace account for access to the AI assistant.

John Schulman is leaving to work on alignment at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival. In a reply post on X, CEO Sam Altman thanked Schulman and said he “laid out a significant fraction of what became OpenAI’s initial strategy.”

In his new job, Schulman will work closely with Jan Leike, another senior leader who recently left OpenAI for Anthropic due to concerns that safety had taken a backseat to business priorities.

404 Media reports, with screenshots of Slack conversations and excerpts from emails, on a massive undertaking by Nvidia to scrape online videos for AI training that appears to go well beyond research.

According to the messages, they were attempting to download full-length videos from a variety of sources including Netflix, but were focused on YouTube videos. Emails viewed by 404 Media show project managers discussing using 20 to 30 virtual machines in Amazon Web Services to download 80 years-worth of videos per day. 

Elliott Management, famous for targeting underperforming companies such as Twitter, says Nvidia is in a bubble, in a new letter to investors.

Many of AI’s supposed uses are “never going to be cost-efficient, are never going to actually work right, will take up too much energy, or will prove to be untrustworthy”, it said.

The sell-off at least in part is about Wall Street losing confidence in AI. (I did warn you it was going to be a year of reckoning back in February!) There are a couple of other things going on, with potentially long-term effects on tech, too.

Crypto, a proxy for investors’ appetite for brainless risk, started a plunge that continued to worsen into Monday morning. The cause of all this came from three surprising pieces of economic data that came out last week, causing traders to rethink how they make, or at least don’t lose, money.

Responding to the RIAA’s copyright lawsuit, AI songmaker sites defended their models as being like kids learning rock and roll or tools enabling creativity. Country artist Tift Merritt had a different take after being shown a song AI music generator Udio spat out when prompted to mimic her style:

... the “imitation” Udio created “doesn’t make the cut for any album of mine.”

“This is a great demonstration of the extent to which this technology is not transformative at all ... It’s stealing.”

I had similar thoughts back in March.

CNBC spotted the update this week in Microsoft’s risk factors with the SEC. These are managed by lawyers to help shield companies from shareholders lawsuits and generally pretty conservative. Still, the change feels like a sign of how OpenAI and its largest investor are drifting apart.

Relatedly, I couldn’t help but notice the number of times Microsoft execs mentioned OpenAI during their earnings call this week: zero.

“The reality right now is that while we’re investing a significant amount in the AI space and [on] infrastructure, we would like to have more capacity than we already have today,” Jassy said on Thursday’s Q2 2024 earnings call. “We have a lot of demand right now, and I think it’s gonna be very, very large business for us.”

Earlier, Jassy said that AWS’ AI business has a “multi-billion dollar revenue run rate.”

“From Llama 3.1, to GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, to Phi 3 or Mistral Large 2, you can access each model via a built-in playground that lets you test different prompts and model parameters, for free, right in GitHub,” according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. Seems kind of like Microsoft’s take on Hugging Face.

I was once told that the only reason people are wowed by AI products like ChatGPT is because it mimics us, and we’re obsessed with ourselves. I think about that a lot, especially as I watched this video of ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode catching its non-existent breath as it counts quickly to 50. So strange.

Sam Altman announced that OpenAI is collaborating with the US AI Safety Institute for early access to their next foundation model (but no release date was specified.)
He also emphasized OpenAI’s commitment to dedicating 20% of computing resources to safety, a promise originally made to the now-defunct Superalignment team.

Plus, he noted that OpenAI has removed non-disparagement clauses for employees and provisions allowing the cancellation of vested equity.

This was mandated for all federal agencies back in March, so expect more of these kinds of announcements.

CISA’s general ambit means this hire is a tad bit more significant than the average Chief AI Officer — the agency deals with foreign influence operations and election cybersecurity, for instance. (In 2020, the agency’s head was yeeted by Trump for saying that the election had in fact been safe and secure.)

The US Copyright Office spent a good chunk of last year soliciting comments from the public about AI and intellectual property, and it’s out today with the first part of the resulting report. The takeaway? Digital replicas and deepfakes of people are a big problem, and the patchwork of existing IP laws won’t be enough to solve it.

Based on all of this input, we have concluded that a new law is needed. The speed, precision, and scale of AI-created digital replicas calls for prompt federal action. Without a robust nationwide remedy, their unauthorized publication and distribution threaten substantial harm not only in the entertainment and political arenas, but also for private individuals. 

Notable timing here: we just saw the No Fakes Act reintroduced in the Senate earlier today.

Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) updated their discussion draft that seeks to prevent debacles like that between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI. It’s gained the support of SAG-AFTRA and the Recording Industry Association, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which counts tech companies among its donors, previously raised concerns that the draft bill was overly broad.