Weekly AI Roundup: Feds eye OpenAI and Microsoft partnership, Google’s new AI marketing tools

Politico, citing unnamed sources familiar with the discussions, said both government agencies (whose jurisdictional boundaries are sometimes blurry) are discussing whether the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft gives them an unfair advantage. It was reported that he was competing for the opportunity to lead the investigation. The rapidly expanding AI market.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 following the launch of OpenAI’s commercial arm. The AI ​​company was originally founded as a nonprofit, but its management team quickly sought out funding and talent to build the large-scale language models and consumer products it would soon become famous for. We realized we needed to attract talent. Last January, Microsoft reportedly invested another $10 billion in OpenAI. The company now has the rights to integrate OpenAI’s technology into existing and future products, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, which was just released to businesses of all sizes last week. Microsoft reportedly owns a 49% stake in OpenAI’s commercial arm.

Antitrust regulators in the U.S. and U.K. have been dealing with OpenAI since at least December following a near-collapse within OpenAI that began with the board’s firing of CEO Sam Altman and culminated with his reinstatement five days later. It is reported that the company was eyeing a partnership with Microsoft. in the same position. After matters began to settle down, Microsoft was given a non-voting seat on his newly reconstituted OpenAI board.

According to a report by Politico, ongoing discussions between the Department of Justice and the FTC are specifically related to the OpenAI and Microsoft partnership, and will resolve the issue of which agency will have the authority to oversee developments in the broader AI industry. He says he is not focusing on that.

This isn’t Microsoft’s first legal dispute with the FTC. After facing a lengthy antitrust lawsuit led by the FTC, Microsoft was finally cleared last summer to move forward with its acquisition of video game holding company Activision-Blizzard.

Google launches new AI-powered generation tools for marketers

Google on Tuesday introduced a new feature powered by Gemini, the company’s multimodal large language model released last month, designed to help marketers develop online advertising campaigns using simple text prompts. .

Google Ads’ new “conversation experience workflows are designed to help you build better search campaigns through chat-based experiences,” the company said in a blog post. “Pair your expertise with Google AI.”

Marketers can simply enter a website URL and Gemini-powered functionality will generate “relevant advertising content, including creatives and keywords,” according to the blog post. The company uses its proprietary watermarking technology SynthID to identify his AI-generated images created with Google Ads.

A beta version of Google Ads’ new conversational experience is currently available to English-language advertisers in the US and UK, and will be rolled out to English-language advertisers globally in the coming weeks, according to a Google blog post. .

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. As of this writing, the company’s stock price is just shy of its all-time high of $405.

The surge in popularity and adoption of AI over the past year has been a huge boon for Microsoft. Under the leadership of CEO Satyanadera, the company has quickly established itself as a pioneer in his booming AI era. As explained above, the company has become a major financial backer of his OpenAI and has already started integrating AI into its suite of office products such as Word and Excel.

Analysts expect Microsoft to post record revenue when the tech giant reports its final quarterly results of 2023 next week. Elsewhere in the tech industry, the streaming giant’s stock rose 7% earlier this week after Netflix’s fourth-quarter profit beat expectations.

Deepfake dilemma escalates

AI is rapidly becoming a scapegoat for politicians seeking to eliminate incriminating evidence, the Washington Post said in a report published January 22.

The sharing of deepfake images on social media has increased in recent months due to the rise of AI-powered image generation platforms such as Midjourney and Dall-E. Last year, an AI-generated image of Pope Francis and former President Donald Trump that many believed at the time was a real photo went viral.

According to the paper, some unscrupulous politicians, including former President Trump, are now using the uncertainty spread by the rise of deepfakes to demonstrate that embarrassing or abhorrent images, videos, and audio are actually generated by AI. It seems that he is claiming that it was done by him. .

The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that deepfakes are evolving and proliferating faster than the mechanisms designed to identify them. A few companies, such as Meta and TikTok, have implemented labeling policies for AI-generated content, but as one source cited in the Post report notes, the current state of social media algorithms dynamics tend to promote emotionally charged content. Means to capture user attention – Technology companies have little incentive to solve the problem by making it easy for users to distinguish between real content and AI-generated content.

The deepfake issue continued to grow this week after some voters in New Hampshire received a phone call last weekend that appeared to be from President Biden but was almost certainly an AI-generated recreation of President Biden’s voice. He was also in the spotlight after receiving a phone call urging him not to vote in the primary election. The call reportedly prompted an investigation by state authorities.

“The moment for political deepfakes has arrived,” Robert Wiseman, president of the consumer advocacy nonprofit Private Citizen, said in a statement responding to the New Hampshire deepfakes call. “Policymakers must hurry to put safeguards in place or face election disruption. The New Hampshire deepfakes highlight the many ways deepfakes can cause chaos and perpetuate fraud.” It reminds me of.”

And on Thursday morning, media reports began pouring in that sexually explicit deepfake images of Taylor Swift were circulating on X and other social media platforms. A handful of states, including Texas and New York, have already banned non-consensual deepfake porn, similar to the one that affected Swift.

Bulleting of Atomic Scientists identifies AI as the major existential threat facing humanity

The famous Doomsday Clock, developed in the aftermath of World War II and symbolically representing humanity’s nearing end, is closer to exhaustion than ever before.

The organization announced Tuesday that the clock will now be 90 seconds to midnight for the second year in a row. For context, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the clock read seven minutes to midnight. This crisis is widely considered to be the closest the world has ever come to a complete nuclear exchange between the world’s two superpowers.

Along with the ongoing threat of nuclear war and impending ecological catastrophe, one of the main factors contributing to this grim prognosis is generative AI. The report specifically highlighted the technology’s ability to generate and spread misinformation and its rapid deployment by the military as a threat to human survival.

But it also offered a cautiously optimistic nod to ongoing international efforts to impose guardrails on AI development and deployment, including President Joe Biden’s recent executive order. “But these are just small steps,” the group wrote in a blog post.[and] Despite the challenges involved in managing artificial intelligence, more needs to be done to enact effective rules and norms. ”

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