AI Weekly Digest - April 29 2024

AI Weekly Digest - April 29 2024

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Regulator CMA probing Microsoft and Amazon over AI investment

(All pictures: Alamy)

The Competition and Markets Authority has asked for views on?Microsoft’s recruitment of Inflection AI?staff and its minority investment in French start-up Mistral, as well as Amazon’s $4bn investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic.

Amazon criticises 'unprecedented intervention'?

The CMA statement lays the groundwork for a possible formal investigation. Executive director of mergers Joel Bamford said: "Open, fair and effective competition in foundation model markets is critical to making sure the full benefits of this transformation are realised by people and businesses in the UK." Microsoft said "we remain confident that common business practices such as the hiring of talent or making a fractional investment in an AI start-up promote competition and are not the same as a merger", following the CMA's announcement. It added: "We will provide the UK Competition and Markets Authority with the information it needs to complete its inquiries expeditiously." Amazon, meanwhile, said the regulator's intervention was "unprecedented", noting its Anthropic deal "doesn't give Amazon a board director or observer role and continues to have Anthropic running its models on multiple cloud providers".

Amazon's Jassy: 'AI will transform every customer experience'

Amazon?CEO Andy Jassy said he believes AI "is going to transform every customer experience that we know ".

CEO sees 'three big macro areas of the generative AI stack'?

Amazon's Andy?Jassy went on: "I think a lot of the discussion has been around applications, starting really with ChatGPT?which really caught people's attention, but we think there are three big macro areas of the generative AI stack, each of which are gigantic and each of which we're investing deeply in. At the lowest layer are people that are building their own large language models, and the two things that really matter there are the computer, to train the model and to run the predictions and the inferences, and what matters in that is the chip."

Zuckerberg: Meta AI to be 'most intelligent assistant freely used across world'

Mark Zuckerberg (Picture: Alamy)

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the goal is for Meta AI to be “the most intelligent AI assistant that people can freely use across the world", as he announced it will be integrated into Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger. He added: “I don’t think that today many people really think about Meta AI when they think about the main AI assistants that people use. But I think that this is the moment where we’re really going to start introducing it to a lot of people, and I expect it to be quite a major product .”

Adobe introducing full AI image generation to Photoshop

Adobe?announced it will introduce full AI image generation to Photoshop this year, via image-generation system Firefly Image 3 . This model is trained on data the US group has the rights to, avoiding potential copyright infringement claims against users. It previously released image-generation tools within Photoshop which can fill in or expand parts of existing images. Ely Greenfield, Adobe's chief technology officer for digital media, said the new software would allow designers to sketch a scene on a napkin, snap a photo on their smartphone and ask Photoshop to generate fully featured images in a variety of styles.

Meta investors balk at group's AI spending forecasts?

Shares in Meta fell 16%?despite it posting better-than-expected Q1 figures, as investors balked at the group's AI spending forecasts. The Facebook owner posted revenue up 27% year-on-year at $36.46bn, with net profit more than doubled at $12.37bn. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: "It's been a good start to the year . The new version of Meta AI with Llama 3 is another step towards building the world's leading AI. We're seeing healthy growth across our apps, and we continue making steady progress building the metaverse as well." Zuckerberg appeared braced for the decline as the group redoubled its commitment to AI and the metaverse. He said: “I think it’s worth calling that out, that we’ve historically seen a lot of volatility in our stock during this phase of our product playbook where we’re investing in scaling a new product but aren’t yet monetising it... Historically, investing to build these new scaled experiences in our apps has been a very good long-term investment for us and for investors who stuck with us and the initial signs are quite positive here too. But building a leading AI will also be a larger undertaking than the other experiences we’ve added to our apps and this is likely going to take several years."

Google in 'new cost reality' due to rise of AI

Google search boss Prabhakar Raghavan said "I think we can agree that things are not like they were 15-20 years ago, things have changed", as he told staff the group is "in a new cost reality" due to the rise of AI. He added: “People come to us because we are trusted. They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with, but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI.”

Columnist asks: Is AI giving a meaningful lift to business?

FT columnist Richard Waters asked how long "Wall Street’s artificial intelligence-fuelled rally can continue without clear evidence that generative AI is giving a meaningful lift to business?". Writing ahead of this week's Q1 earnings reports, he said: "The likely message from the tech companies is: Be patient. The uptake of generative AI and impact on sales should start to become apparent later this year or in 2025. But after the huge rise in capital spending caused by the AI race, any delays could lead to a massive hangover for the hardware industry."

Source: Microsoft finalises $1.5bn G42 investment

Sources told the FT that Microsoft finalised its $1.5bn investment in G42 last week after a push by the Biden administration for US tech giants to strike AI deals in the United Arab Emirates.

OpenAI criticises Musk’s 'revisionist history'

OpenAI?criticised Elon Musk’s “revisionist history” as it asked a US court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the co-founder. Musk claims the?ChatGPT?developer has wrongly abandoned its altruistic principles to pursue profits, but the group said in a court filing: “Now that he has launched a competing artificial intelligence company, Musk seeks to leverage the success OpenAI has achieved and to direct OpenAI’s affairs for his own commercial benefit.”

Bank of England policymaker: UK risks falling behind US on AI

Bank of England policymaker Jonathan Haskel warned the UK risks falling behind on AI as infrastructure investment falls behind the US. He said: “US hardware has been zooming ahead of UK hardware really for quite a few years. Interestingly on the software side, those investments between the US and UK were quite similar, but once we got to the pandemic UK software investment rather flattened and US software investment has absolutely shot up.”

Clegg cites talks with regulators for Meta AI UK/EE delay

Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg addressed the lack of access to Meta AI for consumers in the EU and UK, where legislation is being drafted aimed at regulating the most powerful models . He was speaking after Meta last week announced an update to its AI model - Llama 3 - which will be integrated into Meta AI. Clegg said: “We are still proceeding [across Europe] but [are doing so] slightly at the pace of the discussions we have with regulators and others."

TSMC: AI chipmakers to be early adopters of faster A16 chips

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world's biggest contract manufacturer of advanced computing chips , said a new chip manufacturing technology will enter production in the second half of 2026. Reports said the launch of A16 will set up a showdown with US rival Intel over who can make the fastest chips. TSMC executives told a conference in Santa Clara, California, that makers of AI chips will likely be the early adopters of the new technology rather than smartphone makers.

Brave integrates AI into its search engine

Privacy-focused company?Brave?has integrated AI into its search engine. Brave chief of search Josep Pujol said: “With the new Brave Search and its integration of Answer with AI, users get the best of both worlds - one place to get generative answers as well as up-to-date links, providing instant and highly relevant results."

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