More than 150 executives are urging the European Union to rethink the world’s most comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence, saying Friday that upcoming regulations will make it harder for companies in Europe to compete with rivals overseas, especially when it comes to the technology behind systems like ChatGPT. ...
“Such regulation could lead to highly innovative companies moving their activities abroad " and investors withdrawing their money from AI development in Europe, the letter said. “The result would be a critical productivity gap between the two sides of the Atlantic.” ...
The corporate leaders called for a regulatory body of experts that can regularly adapt rules to new developments and respond to risks that emerge. They also pointed to the need for transatlantic standards.
It’s the latest letter to weigh in on the future of AI, which has dazzled users but raised concerns about data privacy, copyright infringement and disinformation. That has sent governments worldwide racing to rein in the technology. ...
“I am convinced they have not read the text but have rather reacted on the stimulus of a few,” Dragos Tudorache, a Romanian member of the European Parliament who is co-leading the measure, said of the executives who signed the letter.
He noted that the letter’s “only concrete suggestions” are already part of the legislation, including “an industry-led process for defining standards, governance with industry at the table and a light regulatory regime that asks for transparency.” ...
A startup called Brilliant Labs is combining augmented reality with artificial intelligence and putting both technologies into a monocle. Founders Bobak Tavangar, Raj Nakarja and Benjamin Heald recently secured over $3 million in funding for the idea. Backers include big names in the tech industry.
Oculus founder backs AR monocle
Investors include Brendan Iribe, a co-founder of VR company Oculus, which was acquired by Meta in 2014, and Adam Cheyer, co-inventor of Apple's voice assistant Siri. Iribe stepped down as CEO of Oculus two years after Meta's acquisition, and left the former Facebook company for good in 2018 after disagreements over VR strategy. ...
Small, lightweight and affordable AR lens
Launched last March, Monocle is priced at $349, making it much more affordable than AR headsets like Magic Leap 2 or the recently announced Apple Vision Pro. The lens fits in any pocket, weighs just 15 grams, and can be attached to any headset or held in front of the eye by hand. ...
Less than two months after the launch of their first chatbot Pi, artificial intelligence startup Inflection AI and CEO Mustafa Suleyman have raised $1.3 billion in new funding.
Microsoft, Nvidia and three of tech’s most influential billionaires led the investment in the Palo Alto-based startup launched in early 2022. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt all personally invested, with Nvidia the sole new investor among the group.
The new funding values Inflection at $4 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the transaction. Inflection said the company and Suleyman remained majority shareholders and declined further comment. ...
Against the world’s largest clusters overall, Inflection said it estimated that it would trail only Frontier, the supercomputer maintained by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. ...
The model used for Pi, which Inflection announced earlier in June and said had similar computing capabilities to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is one of the smaller ones it’s had in the works, Suleyman claimed, with much bigger to come. Also in the short-term pipeline: an API for selected partners to train their own conversational AIs. (Inflection doesn’t plan to make that generally available as it focuses on its own consumer products, Suleyman said.) ...
“It’s totally nuts,” he admitted. Facing a potentially historic growth opportunity, Suleyman added, Inflection’s best bet is to “blitz-scale” and raise funding voraciously to grow as fast as possible, risks be damned. ...
I just published a story that sets out some of the ways AI language models can be misused. I have some bad news: It’s stupidly easy, it requires no programming skills, and there are no known fixes. For example, for a type of attack called indirect prompt injection, all you need to do is hide a prompt in a cleverly crafted message on a website or in an email, in white text that (against a white background) is not visible to the human eye. Once you’ve done that, you can order the AI model to do what you want. ...
Allowing these language models to pull data from the internet gives hackers the ability to turn them into “a super-powerful engine for spam and phishing,” says Florian Tramèr, an assistant professor of computer science at ETH Zürich who works on computer security, privacy, and machine learning. ...
Unlike the spam and scam emails of today, where people have to be tricked into clicking on links, these new kinds of attacks will be invisible to the human eye and automated. ...
Deeper Learning
Chinese creators use Midjourney’s AI to generate retro urban “photography”
“Inside the Nimitz, which is housed in a massive, unfolding 18-wheeler, participants go through a video briefing before strapping on an Oculus Rift headset and a piece of wearable technology called a SubPac that percusses in real time to the sounds of the mission,” the Navy said in a release. “Visitors navigate the mission using a cutting-edge steering wheel and throttle system that replicate the actual sensation of piloting a high-speed, Navy Special Warfare Combatant Craft.”
At the conclusion of the mission, participants will move to a “debriefing station” where they’ll receive feedback and a performance grade.
An Agency Watchdog Rather Than a Legislative Cure.
As we have urged in the context of digital platforms, this is precisely the kind of situation that calls out for an expert administrative agency. The need for flexibility makes drafting legislation designed to consider all possible uses virtually impossible. ...
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited young adult romance bestseller list was filled with dozens of AI-generated books of nonsense on Monday and Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, Amazon appeared to have taken action against the books, but the episode shows that people are spamming AI-generated nonsense to the platform and are finding a way to monetize it. ...
“I honestly thought Amazon had a handle on the click farms. CLEARLY NOT.”
The Vatican is getting in on the AI craze. The Holy See has released a handbook on the ethics of artificial intelligence as defined by the Pope.
The guidelines are the result of a partnership between Francis and Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Together, they’ve formed a new organization called the Institute for Technology, Ethics, and Culture (ITEC). The ITEC’s first project is a handbook titled Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap, meant to guide the tech industry through the murky waters of ethics in AI, machine learning, encryption, tracking, and more.
Google has killed a project internally known as "Iris" that it established to build augmented reality glasses, according to Business Insider. The tech giant worked on the glasses' development for several years, but it reportedly shelved Iris following waves of layoffs and company reshuffles over the past few months. Another event that factored into Google's decision was the departure of Clay Bavor, the company's former chief of augmented and virtual reality, to form a startup with Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. In addition, Google reportedly kept changing its strategy for the Iris glasses, which became a source of frustration for team members working on the project. ...
While the company has stopped working on its own AR hardware, Business Insider says it still very much has big augmented reality ambitions. Instead of building its own hardware, Google has apparently chosen to focus on creating an "Android for AR" instead. ...
