Edition # 9

Hello Readers,

Welcome to this edition of our Data Diplomacy Pulse Newsletter!

The European Union has taken a pioneering step by setting a global benchmark with landmark AI laws and establishing an 'AI Office' to regulate this transformative technology. Following suit, the United States makes strides with Colorado's historic AI Act, while Japan embarks on a debate about AI regulations aimed at maximizing benefits and minimizing risks.

As governments grapple with the balance of risks and benefits, stakeholders such as publishers and artists voice their concerns. Google’s AI-driven search innovations leave publishers scrambling, while artists call for urgent action from a slow-to-respond Congress. The second global AI summit, backed by G7 economies, sees leading companies commit to safety, reflecting a broader push for responsible AI development. Meanwhile, Chinese state media warns that AI could exacerbate job discrimination and violate labor laws.

Energy consumption emerges as another critical issue, with ChatGPT reportedly using ten times more energy than traditional Google searches. On the digital trade front, a research paper predicts a 12.3% growth in the UAE's digital trade between 2023-2028, and Hungary and China strengthen their digital trade links. The US delays AI chip exports to the Middle East over concerns that China might access the technology via data centers, highlighting ongoing geopolitical tensions.

Nvidia’s CEO envisions a future dominated by 'AI factories' and robotics, while Nobel laureate Paul Romer cautions about AI's diminishing returns, advocating foreign direct investment as the true driver of economic growth. Privacy issues also take center stage, with concerns about the implications of ChatGPT-4 and women’s health apps.

Dive into our comprehensive coverage to explore these pivotal developments and their potential impact on the world.?

Happy reading!

AI

Europe sets benchmark for rest of the world with landmark AI laws

Reuters: ?Europe's landmark rules on artificial intelligence will enter into force next month after EU countries endorsed on Tuesday a political deal reached in December, setting a potential global benchmark for a technology used in business and everyday life.

The European Union's AI Act is more comprehensive than the United States' light-touch voluntary compliance approach while China's approach aims to maintain social stability and state control.

"This landmark law, the first of its kind in the world, addresses a global technological challenge that also creates opportunities for our societies and economies," Belgian digitisation minister Mathieu Michel said in a statement.

"With the AI Act, Europe emphasizes the importance of trust, transparency and accountability when dealing with new technologies while at the same time ensuring this fast-changing technology can flourish and boost European innovation," he said.

The AI Act imposes strict transparency obligations on high-risk AI systems while such requirements for general-purpose AI models will be lighter.

It restricts governments' use of real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces to cases of certain crimes, prevention of terrorist attacks and searches for people suspected of the most serious crimes.

The new legislation will have an impact beyond the 27-country bloc, said Patrick van Eecke at law firm Cooley.

"The Act will have global reach. Companies outside the EU who use EU customer data in their AI platforms will need to comply. Other countries and regions are likely to use the AI Act as a blueprint, just as they did with the GDPR," he said, referring to EU privacy rules.

While the new legislation will apply in 2026, bans on the use of artificial intelligence in social scoring, predictive policing and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage will kick in in six months once the new regulation enters into force.

EU creates 'AI Office' to regulate tech under tough new law.

Brussels (Belgium) (AFP): The 140-member AI Office will be established within the commission, which is the EU's executive arm and also acts as the bloc's powerful tech regulator.

"The Office will foster a European AI ecosystem that is innovative, competitive and respectful of EU rules and values," the EU's top tech enforcer, Thierry Breton, said.

The EU's law known as the "AI Act" has tougher rules for general-purpose AI systems such as ChatGPT and takes a risk-based approach to the technology.

The higher the risk to Europeans' rights or health, for example, the greater the systems' obligations to protect individuals from harms.

"Together with developers and a scientific community, the office will evaluate and test general purpose AI to ensure that AI serves us as humans and upholds our European values," commission executive vice president Margrethe Vestager said.

Companies will have to comply with the EU's law by 2026, but rules covering AI models like ChatGPT will apply 12 months after the law becomes official.

Colorado Makes History with the Nation's First Comprehensive AI Act

Reuters: ? Colorado is taking center stage in the national and international conversation on responsible AI governance.

The Colorado AI Act (CAIA) responds to the increasing use of AI in decision-making, particularly across sectors like healthcare, education, and employment. While AI holds immense potential for societal advancement, it also poses risks, including well-documented cases of algorithmic discrimination. In today's evolving technological landscape, AI presents great power but requires great responsibility, as it can either perpetuate existing biases or mitigate them. The CAIA seeks to achieve the latter.

Although most agree that civil rights laws already apply to these sectors in theory, whether humans or machines are conducting relevant tasks, applying these laws from the 1960s to modern AI is murky and lacks transparency. The CAIA aims to fill this gap by providing guidelines and measures to identify and mitigate algorithmic discrimination and establishing a governance framework with proper testing, documentation, transparency, guardrails, and oversight to ensure AI's potential benefits are realized while addressing inherent biases in decision-making processes.

Debate on AI Regulations Starts at Expert Panel; Japan Govt Policy Based on ‘Maximizing Benefits, Reducing Risk’

Japan News: The government began discussing regulations for artificial intelligence at an expert panel Wednesday, kicking off a debate on the pros and cons of introducing such rules that will take several years.

The government in April established non-binding guidelines that require AI providers to consider security. The basic policies state that appropriate regulations must be considered against “high-risk AI systems and AI that could lead to human rights violations and crimes.” They also note that major AI developers could be categorized as high risk since their products have a significant impact on the public, and that “a legal system to supplement the guidelines may be necessary for public safety and security.”

As to AI-based disinformation, the policies note the usefulness of “disseminating technologies that provide information on where content comes from and its history,” a reference to technologies such as Originator Profile, which identifies who created a piece of information online.

Google’s A.I. Search Leaves Publishers Scrambling

Business Standard: In May, Google announced that the A.I.-generated summaries, which compile content from news sites and blogs on the topic being searched, would be made available to everyone in the United States. And that change has Mr. Pine and many other publishing executives worried that the paragraphs pose a big danger to their brittle business model, by sharply reducing the amount of traffic to their sites from Google.

“It potentially chokes off the original creators of the content,” Mr. Pine said. The feature, AI Overviews, felt like another step toward generative A.I. replacing “the publications that they have cannibalized,” he added.

Artists Urge Action on AI, but Congress Is Slow to Respond

Variety: Scarlett Johansson called out OpenAI this week for mimicking her voice for a new chatbot, underscoring the urgency that many artists feel about regulating artificial intelligence.

But in Congress, taking on AI is starting to resemble wrestling an octopus. It’s so sprawling, it’s hard to know how to begin.

The Senate AI Working Group issued a “roadmap” last week. But that left it vague where Congress is going or when it will get there.

Some have warned against stifling innovation. And while some regulation is likely to happen eventually, it appears it will be done piecemeal — one tentacle at a time.

Second global AI summit secures safety commitments from companies

Reuters: ? Sixteen companies at the forefront of developing Artificial Intelligence pledged on Tuesday at a global meeting to develop the technology safely at a time when regulators are scrambling to keep up with rapid innovation and emerging risks.

The companies included U.S. leaders Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, Meta (META.O), opens new tab, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and OpenAI, as well as firms from China, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.

They were backed by a broader declaration from the Group of Seven (G7) major economies, the EU, Singapore, Australia and South Korea at a virtual meeting hosted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, known as a "godfather of AI", welcomed the commitments but noted that voluntary commitments would have to be accompanied by regulation.

Since November, discussion on AI regulation has shifted from longer-term doomsday scenarios to more practical concerns such as how to use AI in areas like medicine or finance, said Aidan Gomez, co-founder of large language model firm Cohere on the sidelines of the summit.

China, which co-signed the "Bletchley Agreement" on collectively managing AI risks during the first November meeting, did not attend Tuesday's session but will attend an in-person ministerial session on Wednesday, a South Korean presidential official said.

Tesla's Elon Musk, former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, Samsung Electronics' Chairman Jay Y. Lee and other AI industry leaders participated in the meeting.

The next meeting is to be in France, officials said.

Chinese state media warns AI could worsen job discrimination and break labor laws:

SCMP: Beijing aims to use the technology in its economic recovery and counter long-term economic challenges, including a shrinking workforce. Chinese state media have warned that job interviews conducted by AI could worsen gender and age discrimination and violate labour laws as the country seeks to leverage the technology for its economic recovery. The article said that while AI could make preliminary screening of job candidates more efficient, current algorithms and standards for AI interviews could “hardly fully reflect the complexity and diversity of human behaviour”

Personal information, such as gender, age and place of birth, might affect the assessment and worsen workplace discrimination, it said.

ChatGPT: 'The Achilles heel of artificial intelligence is its energy consumption'

Le Monde: ChatGPT consumes 10 times more energy than Google's search engine. However, the major digital players – Microsoft, Amazon and Google – are in the process of spending tens of billions of dollars to deploy data centers adapted to this new technology all over the world.

This is great news for power companies, whose profits are soaring, but it poses yet another challenge for the energy transition. We had foreseen the gradual switch to electric cars, but not that artificial intelligence would overtake it with such vigor. Creating as many new problems as we set out to solve – that too is the curse of Prometheus.

Digital Trade

12.3% growth in UAE's digital trade between 2023-2028, research paper shows

Emirates News Agency WAM: The research paper revealed that about 49 percent of consumers in the UAE shop online frequently, with about 47 percent of the population relying on credit cards, which is much higher than the global average of 18 percent.

The research paper stated that it is expected that 20.1 percent of total global retail purchases will be completed online in 2024, while digital retail activity is expected to constitute about 25 percent of total global sales by 2027.

Government official: Hungary, China to further strengthen digital trade links.

The Budapest Times: ? Chine is one of the most important trade partners for Hungary outside the Europe, so the cooperation between the two nations is crucial in the areas of infrastructure, trade, and especially digital trade. The agreement servers to assess the necessary conditions for digital trading, and to establish and develop good practices .

US delays AI chip exports to Middle East by Nvidia, AMD over concern that China can access the tech via data centres

SCMP: ? US officials have slowed the issuing of licences to chip makers such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices for large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator shipments to the Middle East, according to people familiar with the matter, while officials conduct a national security review of AI development in the region.

partly over concerns that Chinese companies could get their hands on the chips through data centers in the Middle East.

The US Commerce Department is also investigating whether a South Korean chipmaker, Ronda Korea, is selling technology to Chinese firms sanctioned by Washington, according to The Information.

China has become one of the Middle East’s most important partners in helping the Gulf transition away from its oil-dependent economy, with Chinese AI firms looking to the region as a new tech hub, according to the China Talk substack. US-sanctioned Chinese tech giant Huawei, for instance, is building an AI data center in Riyadh, promising a more than $400 million investment in Saudi Arabia’s cloud sector over the next five years. Chinese researchers and students are also flooding Middle East universities focusing on AI, which some see as Beijing’s way to skirt US chip sanctions and access advanced semiconductors, China Talk wrote. Two universities in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have ordered more than 3,000 NVIDIA chips for AI research, according to the Financial Times.

An era of robotics, ‘AI factories’ powered by Nvidia’s chips and software is ‘in our near future’, CEO Jensen Huang says

Yahoo! Finance: Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang on Sunday unveiled his vision for a new era of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics for industries, powered by the chips, software and other advanced solutions from the company and its various hi-tech partners.

?In a speech ahead of the opening of Taiwan’s Computex trade show, Huang presented how ‘AI factories’ and ‘physical AI’ would help transform industries, he was referring to fast growing massive data centres.?

Data centres provide the computing infrastructure where large language models and generative AI services like ChatGPT and other chatbots are being developed

Nobel laureate Paul Romer sees diminishing returns for AI, as FDI still ‘killer app’ for emerging economies

News Portal: Economist Paul Romer believes that foreign direct investment (FDI) is the key to economic growth, not waiting for AI to boost productivity. He emphasizes the importance of workers gaining new skills through job opportunities, which then have positive effects on the economy.

Romer also highlights the limitations of AI in understanding rare events compared to human comprehension.

China’s approach to AI development and economic growth through protectionism is a topic of discussion, with Romer suggesting a focus on letting investors explore market opportunities. The competition between the US and China in technological innovation is noted, emphasizing the need for positive competition that benefits global progress.

In the midst of evolving AI technologies and economic strategies, Romer envisions a future where competition between nations drives growth and development for the benefit of all. The potential for AI, when combined with effective investment and innovation, holds promising opportunities for global progress.

ChatGPT-4o Is Wildly Capable, But It Could Be A Privacy Nightmare

Forbes: The privacy implications of ChatGPT are two-pronged, says Oliver Willis, partner at BDB Pitmans. “From a user’s perspective, how does ChatGPT collect and use data about you when you are using it? From everyone else’s perspective, was ChatGPT trained on information about you and what will it tell users about you?”

Privacy remains an issue with several women’s health apps

Science News: The women's health app market, projected to surpass $18 billion by 2031, is booming with millions of global users. Despite their popularity, these apps are among the least trusted due to their extensive data collection practices, which include users' menstrual cycles, sex lives, pregnancy status, phone numbers, and email addresses. Privacy violations have increasingly come under scrutiny.

A recent evaluation of 20 popular women's health apps on the U.S. and U.K. Google Play Store revealed significant privacy concerns. Researchers found covert data collection, inconsistent privacy policies, flawed data deletion mechanisms, and more. Notably, some apps linked user data to web searches, compromising anonymity. Additionally, some apps required users to disclose sensitive information, like miscarriage or abortion history, to access data-deletion features, exemplifying manipulative practices known as dark patterns.

Read the full interview with the study's author in the article.