IBL News

Category: Top News

  • OpenAI Warns It Might Leave the European Union If the Upcoming AI Act Doesn’t Change

    OpenAI Warns It Might Leave the European Union If the Upcoming AI Act Doesn’t Change

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said yesterday at an event in London that ChatGPT could leave Europe if it fails to comply with the upcoming AI regulations by the European Union (EU).

    “The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-regulating; there’s so much they could do, like changing the definition of general-purpose AI systems,” said Altman [in the picture].

    “The details really matter. We will try to comply, but if we can’t, we will cease operating.”

    As part of the draft of the EU’s regulation, companies deploying generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, will have to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems, opening the way for artists to claim compensation for the use of their material.

    Additionally, the new requirement would make companies that develop the models, including OpenAI and Google, partly responsible for how their AI systems are used, even if they have no control over the particular applications the technology has been embedded in (or APIs).

    Moreover, this Act would impact open-source models and non-profit use of the latest AI by U.S. organizations.

    Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has also toured European capitals this week, seeking to influence policymakers as they develop guardrails to regulate AI. He met officials in Brussels on Wednesday, including Thierry Breton, the EU’s digital chief overseeing the AI Act.

    Breton told the Financial Times that they discussed introducing an “AI pact” — an informal set of guidelines for AI companies to adhere to before formal rules are put into effect.

    American tech companies have urged Brussels to proceed with caution in regulating AI, arguing that Europe should find a balance between opportunities and risks.

    The EU parliamentarians reached common ground on the draft of the AI Act earlier this month. It will now be debated between the representatives of the Parliament, the Council, and the Commission to thrash out the final details of the bill, which is due to come into force by 2025.

    Experts say that without any European companies leading the charge in AI, EU politicians have little incentive to support the industry’s growth.

  • Microsoft Adds New Tools, Copilots, and Plugins Into Its Products [Video]

    Microsoft Adds New Tools, Copilots, and Plugins Into Its Products [Video]

    IBL News | New York

    During its annual event for developers, and following an extension of its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella [in the picture above], announced this week new AI developments on its products, including an AI-powered Bing in Windows 11 and Skype, and Copilots in Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform.

    The software giant also unveiled that it’s adopting the same plugin standard that OpenAI introduced for ChatGPT — such as OpenTable, Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Atlassian, Adobe, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters, and Zillow — enabling interoperability across ChatGPT and Microsoft’s 365, Teams, and other copilot offerings.

    In addition, ChatGPT Plus will have Bing — which includes citations — as the default search.

    During the Microsoft Build conference, the company also introduced Azure Machine Learning prompt flow — for developers to construct prompts — and Microsoft Fabric for analytics.

    Microsoft Fabric includes data engineering, data integration, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, applied observability, and business intelligence, all connected to a single data repository called OneLake.

    It comes with a Copilot, allowing users to create dataflows and data pipelines, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results.

    • Microsoft Build keynotes and view videos and photos

  • Meta’s Open-Sourced AI Model that Introduced Text-to-Speech In 1,100+ Languages

    Meta’s Open-Sourced AI Model that Introduced Text-to-Speech In 1,100+ Languages

    IBL News | New York

    Meta released this week as open-source software an AI model called Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) that can recognize over 4,000 spoken languages and produces text-to-speech in over 1,100 languages.

    Today, existing speech recognition models only cover approximately 100 languages — a fraction of the 7,000+ known languages spoken on the planet.

    Machines with the ability to recognize and produce speech can make information accessible to many more people, including those who rely entirely on voice to access information.

    Speech recognition and text-to-speech models typically require training on thousands of hours of audio with accompanying transcription labels.

    “Through this work, we hope to make a small contribution to preserve the incredible language diversity of the world,” said Meta.

    Meta combined wav2vec 2.0, its self-supervised learning, and a new dataset that provides labeled data for over 1,100 languages and unlabeled data for nearly 4,000 languages.

    To collect audio data for thousands of languages, Meta turned to religious texts, such as the Bible, that have been translated into many different languages and whose translations have been widely studied for text-based language translation research.

    These translations have publicly available audio recordings of people reading these texts in different languages. As part of this project, Meta created a dataset of readings of the New Testament in over 1,100 languages, which provided, on average, 32 hours of data per language.

    By considering unlabeled recordings of various other Christian religious readings, Meta increased the number of languages available to over 4,000.

    “We also envision a future where a single model can solve several speech tasks for all languages. While we trained separate models for speech recognition, speech synthesis, and language identification, we believe that in the future, a single model will be able to accomplish all these tasks and more, leading to better overall performance,” Meta said.

  • OpenAI Leaders Propose an International Regulatory Body for the Governance of AI

    OpenAI Leaders Propose an International Regulatory Body for the Governance of AI

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI Founder Sam Altman [in the picture], President Greg Brockman, and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever proposed an international regulatory body for the governance of superintelligence—future AI systems.

    “It would be unintuitively risky and difficult to stop the creation of superintelligence,” they said in a blog post on their website.

    This agency — “something like an IAEA for superintelligence efforts” — would inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security, and track compute and energy usage.

    “Within the next ten years, AI systems will exceed expert skill level in most domains, and carry out as much productive activity as one of today’s largest corporations,” they explained.

    “Major governments around the world could set up a project that many current efforts become part of, or we could collectively agree that the rate of growth in AI capability at the frontier is limited to a certain rate per year.”

  • Meta Hit by the EU with a Record $1.3 Billion Fine Over Data Privacy

    Meta Hit by the EU with a Record $1.3 Billion Fine Over Data Privacy

    IBL News | New York

    Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, was hit yesterday with a fine of $1.3 billion (€1.2 billion) by the European Union’s privacy regulator — in this case, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) — over the transfer of personal data of Facebook users to servers in the United States.

    In 2021, Amazon was fined 746 million euros for violating EU privacy laws.

    The European Data Protection Board announced the fine in a statement Monday, saying it followed an inquiry into Facebook by the Irish Data Protection Commission, the chief regulator overseeing Meta’s operations in Europe.

    This Commission said that the processing and storage of personal data in the United States contravened Europe’s signature data privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

    The fine is the largest ever levied under GDPR.

    “Facebook has millions of users in Europe, so the volume of personal data transferred is massive. The unprecedented fine is a strong signal to organizations that serious infringements have far-reaching consequences,” said Andrea Jelinek, chair of the European Data Protection Board.

    Meta has also been ordered to cease the processing of personal data of European users in the United States within six months.

    Meta said it would appeal the ruling, including the fine. There would be no immediate disruption to Facebook in Europe, it added.

    The company said the root of the issue stemmed from a “conflict of law” between US rules on access to data and the privacy rights of Europeans.

    “This decision is flawed, unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent for the countless other companies transferring data between the EU and US,” said Meta.

    The move highlights ongoing uncertainty about how global businesses may legally transfer EU users’ data to servers overseas.

    Dublin is home to the European headquarters of Apple, Meta [Its Ireland’s headquarters in the picture above], Twitter, and Google, which have created thousands of jobs in the country and boosted its economic growth. Ireland’s low corporate tax rate of 12.5% has been a major factor in luring these firms.

  • Amazon.com Plans to Add Generative AI – Powered Search to Its Store

    Amazon.com Plans to Add Generative AI – Powered Search to Its Store

    IBL News | New York

    Amazon.com will bring ChatGPT-style search to its online store, as reported by Bloomberg.

    The ambitions of the e-commerce giant have surfaced in recent job postings. One listing stated that Amazon is “reimagining search with an interactive conversational experience,” aiming to assist users in finding answers to questions, comparing products, and receiving personalized suggestions.

    The company stated, “This will be a once-in-a-generation transformation for Search.” It will be a “new AI-first initiative to re-architect and reinvent the way we do search through the use of extremely large-scale next-generation deep learning techniques.”

    According to some surveys, over half of US shoppers start their product searches on Amazon.com, which is a higher share than Google.

    During an earnings call last month, Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer, Andy Jassy, mentioned that generative AI technology “presents a remarkable opportunity to transform virtually every customer experience.”

  • AI Search with Cited Sources Perplexity Raises $25.6 Millions

    AI Search with Cited Sources Perplexity Raises $25.6 Millions

    IBL News | New York

    AI search startup, San Francisco–based Perplexity.ai, which was launched in December 2022 and reached two million monthly active users in four months, announced it raised $25.6 million in series A.

    The funding round was led by Peter Sonsini of New Enterprise Associates (Board member, Databricks) with participation from seed round investors Elad Gil (Founder, Color Health), Nat Friedman (Former CEO of GitHub), Jeff Dean (SVP, Google AI) and Bob Muglia (Former President of Microsoft), as well as new investors Susan Wojcicki (Former CEO of Youtube), Paul Buchheit (Creator of Gmail), Soleio (Designer of Messenger, Dropbox), and Databricks Ventures.

    Analysts saw remarkable the presence of six current and former AI researchers at Google.

    On its search results, the Perplexity platform offers up a new model by providing citations to every answer and allowing attribution for sources of information for verification. Recently, it released an iPhone iOS app with instant answers, cited sources, voice search, follow-up questions, and thread history.

    Since its launch, Perplexity has been releasing new features to users every week.

    The funding in Perplexity is one of the latest deals in the booming AI industry. Character.AI, also founded by former Googlers, recently raised $150 million. Adept, another AI startup, announced it had raised $350 million from investors including Spark Capital and General Catalyst.

     

  • Experimental AI Autonomous Agents Showcase their Capabilities

    Experimental AI Autonomous Agents Showcase their Capabilities

    IBL News | New York

    AI agents like Auto-GPT, AgentGPT, BabyAGI, and GodMore are the latest trend in the Large Language Models (LLMs) area, using OpenAI’s ChatGPT architecture to automate tasks.

    While ChatGPT requires a prompt for every new step, AI agents can take an overarching goal such as “grow my educational software business” and perform various tasks such as developing a sales strategy, identifying target clients, writing a video or podcast script, or building a website.

    However, these AI agents are still in development and may not always produce accurate or reliable results.

    • Auto-GPT
      Created by game developer Toran Bruce Richards, Auto-GPT is currently an open-source on GitHub, that requires to install a development environment like Docker, or VS Code with a Dev Container extension. Also, a paid API key from OpenAI is needed.
    • BabyAGI.
      It’s also available in a repository on GitHub. To use it, OpenAI or Pinecone API key and Docker software is required.
    • AgentGPT and GodMore.
      They are user-friendly applications for non developers.


    • Mashable: Auto-GPT, BabyAGI, and AgentGPT: How to use AI agents
    •     Ars Technica: Hype grows over “autonomous” AI agents that loop GPT-4 outputs
    .

  • OpenAI Releases the ChatGPT App for iPhone with Voice Support

    OpenAI Releases the ChatGPT App for iPhone with Voice Support

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI released the ChatGPT app for iOS smartphones in the U.S. today.

    Available on the Apple store, this free-to-use app supports voice input as it integrates Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source speech-recognition system.

    Paid ChatGPT Plus subscribers have access to GPT-4’s capabilities, early access to features, and faster response times, according to the company.

    OpenAI said that it will roll out in additional countries in the coming weeks. Also, the app for Android will came “soon”.

    ChatGPT provides the following, as stated by the company:

    • Instant answers: Get precise information without sifting through ads or multiple results.
    • Tailored advice: Seek guidance on cooking, travel plans, or crafting thoughtful messages.
    • Creative inspiration: Generate gift ideas, outline presentations, or write the perfect poem.
    • Professional input: Boost productivity with idea feedback, note summarization, and technical topic assistance.
    • Learning opportunities: Explore new languages, modern history, and more at your own pace.”

     

  • European Union’s AI Act Plans to Target American Open-Source Developers and API Access

    European Union’s AI Act Plans to Target American Open-Source Developers and API Access

    IBL News | New York

    The European Union amended AI Act on May 11th, 2023. If passed and enacted, it would ban U.S. companies such as OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and IBM from providing API access to generative AI models. This amended act would also sanction American open-source developers and software distributors, such as GitHub if unlicensed generative models became available in Europe.

    This means that any model that is made available in the European Union without first passing extensive and expensive licensing would be subject to massive fines of €20 million or 4% of worldwide revenue.

    Essentially, the European Union is threatening to sanction an important part of the American tech ecosystem by ordering large tech companies to put small businesses out of business.

    The AI Act has extraterritorial jurisdiction. If enacted, enforcement would be out of the hands of EU member states. A European government could be compelled by third parties to seek conflict with American developers and businesses.

    Open-source developers, including open-source LLMs, would have to register their “high-risk” AI project or foundational model with the government and expensive risk testing would be required. Registration will also require disclosure of data sources used, computing resources (including time spent training), performance benchmarks, and red teaming.

    APIs — meaning, third parties implementing an AI model without running it on their own hardware — would be essentially banned. That would include implementation examples like AutoGPT and LangChain.

    However, European small businesses are exempt from undergoing a stringent permitting review project before launch.

    Third parties would have the ability to file lawsuits to force a national AI regulator to impose fines.

    American experts said that “this is a deeply corrupt piece of legislation; the most likely effect of such a policy is to create a society where the elite have access to R&D models, and nobody else – including small entrepreneurs.”