AI Weekly Digest – August 26 2024

All the key points you need to know about recent events in the artificial intelligence sector. LinkedIn newsletter readers can also sign up to an enhanced email edition of the AI Weekly Digest - published every Friday. You can subscribe for free.

OpenAI announces licensing deal with Vogue publisher

OpenAI has announced a partnership with Condé Nast which will allow the AI start-up to display content from the magazine giant's brands, such as Vogue, GQ and The New Yorker, within its ChatGPT and SearchGPT products. Financial terms of the multi-year deal were not disclosed. OpenAI has similar deals with, among others, Time, the Financial Times and Axel Springer. OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said: “We’re committed to working with Condé Nast and other news publishers to ensure that as AI plays a larger role in news discovery and delivery, it maintains accuracy, integrity, and respect for quality reporting." Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said the partnership will allow the publisher "to continue to protect and invest in our journalism and creative endeavours".

Zuckerberg backs AI smart glasses to grow quickly

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he believes the AI-powered smart glasses the group manufactures in a tie-up with Ray-Ban can be “a really big product”, potentially used by hundreds of millions of consumers. Appearing at the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Zuckerberg also forecast future iterations of the device will feature always-on “super interactive AI”.

More than half of companies cite AI as risk factor

Some 56% of Fortune 500 companies cited AI as a “risk factor” in their most recent annual reports, according to research by Arize AI. The figure was just 9% in 2022. The research found some industries are more concerned about AI than others, with more than 90% of the largest media and entertainment companies in the US saying fast-growing AI systems were a business risk this year, along with 86% of software and technology groups.

ChatGPT developer opposes California safety bill

OpenAI has added its voice to those expressing opposition to a California bill aiming to ensure powerful AI is deployed safely. Chief strategy officer Jason Kwon wrote in a letter to Scott Wiener, the senator who is spearheading the bill, that it threatens “California’s unique status as the global leader in AI”, and warned it could “slow the pace of innovation, and lead California’s world-class engineers and entrepreneurs to leave the state in search of greater opportunity elsewhere”.

OpenAI allows companies to customise GPT-4o

OpenAI has rolled out new features enabling corporate customers to use their own?company data to customise its flagship GPT-4o model. Head of product Olivier Godement said: "We’ve been extremely focused on lowering the bar, the friction, the amount of work it takes to get started."

Anthropic hit with class-action copyright claim

AI company Anthropic has been hit with a class-action lawsuit in the US by three authors who claim it misused their books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its chatbot Claude.

AMD pays $4.9bn to beef up AI chips offering

AMD is to acquire server maker ZT Systems for $4.9bn as it looks to grow its portfolio of AI chips. The chipmaker intends to pay for 75% of the acquisition with cash and the remainder in stock. AMD CEO Lisa Su told Reuters that AI systems "are our number one strategic priority", and said the addition of ZT Systems engineers will allow the company to more rapidly test and roll out AI graphics processing units at the scale required by cloud computing giants such as Microsoft. Su added: "The main way (ZT Systems) is additive to the company is we sell more GPUs." The CEO said AMD plans to break off its server manufacturing business and sell it once the deal closes. ZT Systems CEO Frank Zhang will join AMD and report to data centre chief Forrest Norrod.

Hollywood union agrees voice replication deal

A deal with online talent marketplace Narrativ that allows actors to sell advertisers the rights to replicate their voices with AI has been announced by Hollywood union SAG-AFTRA, which said: “Not all members will be interested in taking advantage of the opportunities that licensing their digital voice replicas might offer, and that’s understandable. But for those who do, you now have a safe option."

ChatGPT baffles users with Welsh-language answers

Some ChatGPT users in the UK reported being perplexed last week when the?OpenAI chatbot responded in Welsh to English-language queries.

GitHub head says open source 'has won' AI battle

Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Microsoft-owned code-management platform GitHub, said "in the last year, over 100,000 AI projects have been started on GitHub open source... up by an order of magnitude from what we’ve seen before ChatGPT". He added: "As such, I’d say the quantity absolutely will be now in the open-source space as it has been in software for the last two decades. Open source has won."

Fears that Copilot could stifle GitHub innovation

Thomas Dohmke also said the success of Copilot has created a dilemma for GitHub in AI coding: "We don’t know what the next big thing in AI is, in the same way that you would’ve had a hard time predicting in 1994 that Amazon would become the big tech company, the member of The Magnificent Seven, that it is today. It took them a decade or so to actually turn their first profit. So it’s hard to predict what’s coming next. Especially in this AI race, I think our biggest weakness is that we already have a large product in market with a large installed base, where then moving fast is a challenge in itself. We have the benefit of that installed base helping us to grow market share and a tight feedback loop, but at the same time, every time we want to experiment, we have to balance between that experimentation and breaking things and keeping the current customer set happy, both actually on the technical side but also how we invest in the engineers, the product managers, the designers that we have."

Government reiterates commitment to AI funding

The government has insisted it will fund pioneering AI and supercomputing technology despite a decision to scrap aid worth ￡1.3bn for projects it inherited. A government official said: “Supercompute is still a huge priority for the government - it’s a priority for [technology secretary] Peter Kyle and it’s definitely a desire of his that we get it right. We want any government money to pack a punch. We are not abandoning supercomputing at all.”

Study shows all generative AI models hallucinate

A study by researchers at Cornell concluded all generative AI models hallucinate, albeit to varying degrees. Report author Wenting Zhao said: “The most important takeaway from our work is that we cannot yet fully trust the outputs of model generations. At present, even the best models can generate hallucination-free text only about 35% of the time... Empirical results in our paper indicate that, despite the promise of certain methods to reduce or eliminate hallucinations, the actual improvement achievable with these methods is limited."

Investor call to strengthen board-level AI understanding

A top official at Norway's $1.7tn sovereign wealth fund told Reuters that companies need to do more to deal with artificial intelligence at board level to govern how it is being used and to reduce risks. Carine Smith Ihenacho, chief governance and compliance officer at Norges Bank Investment Fund, said: "Overall, a lot of competence building needs to be done at board level. It doesn't mean we need one AI person that's an expert on AI... We need the board to understand, as a group, how AI is being used... have a policy at board level and whether or not it is being used responsibly." Nine of the 10 biggest equity holdings in the fund, which holds stakes in close to 9,000 firms globally, are tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft.

Korean duo merging to take on Nvidia

South Korean-based AI chip makers Rebellions and Sapeon Korea announced they have signed a definitive merger agreement as they seek to challenge global industry leaders such as?Nvidia. Sapeon's shareholders include SK Telecom and SK Hynix.

Applied Materials to ride AI-powered revenue surge

US semiconductor equipment maker Applied Materials has forecast Q4 revenue of about $6.93bn, slightly above Wall Street estimates, amid an anticipated surge in AI-fuelled demand for its products. It reported Q3 revenue of $6.78bn, with revenue from China down 24% sequentially, to $2.15bn.