In addition, the thorny issue of deepfakes is becoming more and more thorny by the day.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are discussing a possible antitrust investigation into the multibillion-dollar partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, but discussions are bogged down by uncertainty over the agency who has the power to initiate the investigation. investigation, according to a Jan. 19 report from Politico.
Citing anonymous sources familiar with the discussions, Politico reports that the two agencies — whose jurisdictional line between them can sometimes be blurry — are vying over whether to lead the federal investigation into whether the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership produces an unfair advantage for both companies. in the growing AI market.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, following the launch of OpenAI’s for-profit arm; The AI company was originally founded as a nonprofit, but its leaders quickly realized that it would need to raise capital and attract top talent in order to build the big language models and the consumer products for which she would soon become famous. In January last year, Microsoft reportedly invested An additional $10 billion in OpenAI. It now has the right to integrate OpenAI technology into its existing and future products, as it has already done with the Microsoft 365 Copilot, which was launched last week. distributed to businesses of all sizes. Microsoft reportedly owns a 49% stake in the for-profit arm of OpenAI.
Antitrust regulators in the US and UK have reportedly had their eyes on the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership at least since December, following a near-implosion within OpenAI that began with the firing of CEO Sam Altman by the board and culminated five days later with his return. at the same position. After the dust settled, Microsoft was granted a non-voting seat on the newly reorganized OpenAI board.
The ongoing talks between the DOJ and the FTC focus specifically on the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership and are not intended to resolve the question of which agency might have the authority to oversee developments in the broader AI industry, according to the Politico report.
This would not be the first legal dispute between Microsoft and the FTC: after being subject to a lengthy antitrust proceeding led by the agency, Microsoft was finally authorized last summer to move forward with the acquisition of video game holding company Activision-Blizzard.
Google Launches New AI-Driven Generative Tool for Marketers
On Tuesday, Google introduced a new feature powered by Gemini – the company’s large multimodal language model, released last month – designed to help marketers develop online ad campaigns through the use of simple text prompts .
The new “Google Ads conversational experience workflow is designed to help you create better search campaigns through a chat-based experience,” the company wrote in a blog post. “It combines your expertise with Google’s AI.”
According to the blog post, marketers only need to enter their website URL, and the Gemini-powered feature will generate “relevant advertising content, including creative and keywords.” The company uses its proprietary SynthID watermarking technology to identify all AI-generated images created in Google Ads.
A beta version of the new conversational experience in Google Ads is now available to English-speaking advertisers in the US and UK and will roll out to English-speaking advertisers worldwide in the coming weeks, according to the Google blog.
Microsoft Reaches Historic Valuation of $3 Trillion
On Wednesday, Microsoft became the second company in history (after Apple) to reach a valuation of $3 trillion; At the time of writing, the company’s stock price stands at just under $405, its highest ever.
The growing popularity and proliferation of AI over the past year has been a huge boon for Microsoft. Under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, the company has quickly positioned itself as a pioneering force in the emerging era of AI; as noted above, it has become the largest backer of OpenAI and has already begun integrating AI into its fleet of office products, such as Word and Excel.
Analysts expect Microsoft to post record revenue when the tech giant reports earnings for the final quarter of 2023 next week. Elsewhere in the tech space, Netflix’s fourth-quarter results exceeded expectationscausing the streaming giant’s share price to jump 7% earlier this week.
The deepfake dilemma worsens
AI is quickly becoming the scapegoat of politicians seeking to get rid of incriminating evidence, writes the Washington Post in a report published January 22.
The sharing of deep fake Images on social media have increased in recent months, sparked by the rise of AI-based image generation platforms like Midjourney and Dall-E. AI-generated images of Pope Francis and former President Donald Trump, which many thought at the time were real photographs, made headlines last year.
Now, according to the Post, some unscrupulous politicians – including former President Trump – appear to be taking advantage of the widespread uncertainty caused by the rise of deepfakes to claim that embarrassing or damning images, videos and audio were in fact generated by AI. .
The problem is compounded by the fact that deepfakes are growing and proliferating faster than the mechanisms designed to identify them. A small handful of companies, like Meta and TikTok, have introduced labeling policies for AI-generated content, but as a source cited in the Post report points out, the current dynamics of social media algorithms – which tend to promote content triggering Emotions as a way to hold users’ attention – technology companies don’t have much incentive to try to smooth the waters by making it easier for users to distinguish between authentic and AI-generated content.
The problem of deepfakes was also highlighted last weekend when some voters in New Hampshire received a phone call, apparently from President Biden, but almost certainly in an AI-generated recreation of his voice, encouraging them to don’t vote in this week’s primary election. This call reportedly led to an investigation by state authorities.
“Deepfake’s political moment has arrived,” Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy nonprofit Private Citizen, said in a statement responding to New Hampshire’s deepfake calls. “Policymakers must hurry to put protections in place, or we will face electoral chaos. The New Hampshire deepfake is a reminder of the many ways deepfakes can sow confusion and perpetuate fraud.
Then, on Thursday morning, media reports of fake sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift being shared rampantly on X and other social media platforms began to flood in. A handful of states, including Texas and New York, have already banned non-consensual deepfake pornography. like the one that affected Swift.
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Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Names AI a Major Existential Threat Facing Humanity
The famous Doomsday Clock, a symbolic representation of humanity’s proximity to the apocalypse, developed in the aftermath of World War II, is closer than ever to being exhausted.
On Tuesday, the organization announced that the clock would be at 90 seconds to midnight for the second year in a row. For context, the clock was seven minutes to midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is widely considered the closest the world has ever come to a full nuclear exchange between two global superpowers.
Generative AI is one of the main factors contributing to this grim prognosis, alongside the ongoing threat of nuclear war and impending ecological catastrophe. The Bulletin specifically highlighted the technology’s ability to generate and disseminate misinformation and its rapid adoption by the military as a threat to the survival of humanity.
However, he also gave a cautiously optimistic nod to international efforts that are currently underway to impose guardrails around the development and deployment of AI, including President Joe Biden’s recent executive order. “But these are only small steps,” the organization wrote in a blog post, “(and) much remains to be done to establish effective rules and standards, despite the daunting challenges of governance of artificial intelligence.”
Publicis Groupe unveils $326 million AI project
Publicis Groupe – one of the world’s largest marketing companies – announced earlier this week a plan to invest $326 million in an internal AI-powered system geared toward employee effectiveness and organizational integration. “CoreAI”, as the system is called, will be accessible via a single user interface (UI) across all Publicis Groupe subsidiaries, including Saatchi & Saatchi and Le Pub.
A beta version of CoreAI is expected to roll out to most Publicis Groupe employees over the next year.
Thanks to CoreAI, “every individual in the group will have access to everything we know at Publicis across all expertise and geographies,” said the company’s CEO, Arthur Sadoun, during a livestreamed video from ‘an hour for shareholders and customers. “In short, we are bringing the power of one to the power of one. »
Read the full report from The Drum’s senior reporter Sam Bradley. here.
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