Tech Insights: Emerging French AI makes waves, EU probes AI risks, Google faces backlash over fake ads and phishing threats incorpo

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?? France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round at a $260M valuation to take on OpenAI

AI is well and truly off to the races: a startup that is only four weeks old has picked up a $113 million round of seed funding to compete against OpenAI in the building, training and application of large language models and generative AI.

Mistral AI, based out of Paris, is co-founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta and will be focusing on open source solutions and targeting enterprises to create what CEO Arthur Mensch believes is currently the biggest challenge in the field: “To make AI useful.” It plans to release its first models for text-based generative AI in 2024.

??? Consumer group calls on EU to urgently investigate ‘the risks of generative AI’

European regulators are at a crossroads over how AI will be regulated — and ultimately used commercially and noncommercially — in the region.?

Today the EU’s largest consumer group, the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), weighed in with its own position: Stop dragging your feet, and “launch urgent investigations into the risks of generative AI” now, it said.

“Generative AI such as ChatGPT has opened up all kinds of possibilities for consumers, but there are serious concerns about how these systems might deceive, manipulate and harm people. They can also be used to spread disinformation, perpetuate existing biases which amplify discrimination, or be used for fraud,” said Ursula Pachl, deputy director general of BEUC, in a statement.?

“We call on safety, data and consumer protection authorities to start investigations now and not wait idly for all kinds of consumer harm to have happened before they take action. These laws apply to all products and services, be they AI-powered or not and authorities must enforce them.”

The BEUC, which represents consumer organizations in 13 countries in the EU, issued the call to coincide with a report today from one of its members, Forbrukerr?det in Norway.

That Norwegian report is unequivocal in its position: AI poses consumer harms (the title of the report says it all: “Ghost in the Machine: Addressing the consumer harms of generative AI”) and poses numerous problematic issues.

While some technologists have been ringing alarm bells around AI as an instrument of human extinction, the debate in Europe has been more squarely around the impacts of AI in areas like equitable service access, disinformation, and competition.

?? Otter is introducing a meeting-oriented AI chatbot

Automatic transcription service Otter announced a new AI-powered chatbot today that will let participants ask questions during and after a meeting and help them collaborate with teammates.

Otter AI Chat will help you catch up to the meeting if you ask “I’m late to the meeting! What did I miss?” or generate a follow-up email with action points after the meeting is finished. The new chatbot helps users get contextual answers based on what was discussed in the meeting.

In March, Zoom announced a similar feature for its users to provide meeting summaries in case they are late.

The company said that Otter’s bot can provide answers to multiple people — unlike bots like ChatGPT, which focus on 1:1 conversations. Teammates can also tag each other for clarification or action items. Until now, Otter let you do that through comments on the transcript.

Otter mentioned that it is transcribing over 1 million spoken words every minute. But it didn’t specify if the Otter AI Chat was trained on that data.

???? ?? Facebook and Instagram to discontinue news sharing for Canadian users

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is following through on its promise to block the sharing of news content on both platforms throughout Canada.?

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is following through on its promise to block the sharing of news on both platforms throughout Canada in response to Ottawa's legislation on online news, which was recently enacted.

"Today, we are affirming that the availability of news will cease on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the implementation of the Online News Act (Bill C-18)," states a blog post from the internet giant.

"We have consistently communicated that, in order to comply with Bill C-18, which was passed in Parliament today, content from news sources, including publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be accessible to individuals using our platforms in Canada."

When will the sharing on Facebook and Instagram be discontinued?

Bill C-18 received royal approval and formally became law after being passed by the Senate in a final vote on Thursday afternoon. However, this doesn't signify the immediate enforcement of the bill.?

The process of finalizing the regulations associated with the legislation could take up to six months or potentially longer. Meta Canada has simply stated that it will carry out its threat at some point before the conclusion of this time frame. The company will also provide updates to Canadians about any changes to its services prior to the official implementation, so it remains uncertain how the ban will manifest for users accessing Facebook or Instagram.

?? Apple Is taking on apples in a truly weird trademark battle

Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits.?

But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.

“We have a hard time understanding this because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple,” Fruit Union Suisse director Jimmy Mariéthoz says, referring to the company’s iconic logo. “Their objective here is really to own the rights to an actual apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal … that should be free for everyone to use.”

While the case has left Swiss fruit growers puzzled, it’s part of a global trend. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s records, Apple has made similar requests to dozens of IP authorities around the world, with varying degrees of success.?

Authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have acquiesced. Apple’s quest to own the IP rights of something as generic as a fruit speaks to the dynamics of a flourishing global IP rights industry, which encourages companies to compete obsessively over trademarks they don’t really need.

?? Google made millions from Ads for fake abortion clinics

The search giant took $10 million in ads and gave grants to, “crisis pregnancy centers” that work to prevent women from accessing abortions.

As a growing number of US states suppress abortion services and reproductive health information, online resources have become increasingly vital for people seeking to terminate a pregnancy.?

But a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks disinformation, claims that Google made more than $10 million over the past two years from ads for “crisis pregnancy centers,” anti-choice clinics that aim to convince women not to have abortions.

Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, says that Google’s dominance and reputation as a source of trusted information make the findings even more egregious. “It’s one of the most morally offensive things I’ve seen among these companies, to build up such trust as a source of epistemic authority and then to sell it out on such a critical issue for essentially peanuts. In terms of Google’s revenues, $10 million is nothing really,” says Ahmed. “When people say ‘Google it,’ they don’t mean ‘go find lies.’”?

Using data from the SEO and marketing analytics tool Semrush, researchers at CCDH found that 188 crisis pregnancy centers placed ads on Google worth an estimated total of more than $10 million over two years.?

There was a major spike in advertising about six months before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, which struck down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected the right to abortion.?

Many of the fake clinics, which are registered as 501c3 nonprofits, also take advantage of Google’s ad grants, CCDH says. The grants allow qualifying nonprofits to get up to $10,000 worth of ads per month for free.?

?? How AI protects (and attacks) your inbox

Criminals may use artificial intelligence to scam you. Companies, like Google, are looking for ways AI and machine learning can help prevent phishing.

Generative AI is poised to fundamentally alter how people communicate over email.? A broader subset of AI, called machine learning, already performs a kind of safety dance long after you've logged off. “Machine learning has been a critical part of what we’ve used to secure Gmail,” Pappu tells WIRED.

Neil Kumaran, a product lead at Google who focuses on security, explains that machine learning can look at the phrasing of incoming emails and compare it to past attacks. It can also flag unusual message patterns and sniff out any weirdness emanating from the metadata.

Kumaran points out that it also can be used to track the people responsible for phishing attacks. He says, “At the time of account creation, we do evaluations. We try to figure out, ‘Does it look like this account is going to be used for malicious purposes?’”?

In the event of a successful phishing attack on your Google account, AI is involved with the recovery process as well. The company uses machine learning to help decide which login attempts are legit.

On the reverse side, what’s instigating even more phishing attacks on your email inbox??

Just like when people use AI-generated images and videos to create fairly convincing deep fakes, attackers may use AI-generated text to personalize phishing attempts in a way that’s difficult for users to detect.

Multiple companies focused on email security are working on models and using machine-learning techniques in an effort to further protect your inbox. In supervised learning, someone adds labels to a portion of the email data. Which messages are likely to be safe? Which ones are suspicious? This data is extrapolated to help a company flag phishing attacks with machine learning.

Cybercriminals will remain intent on hacking your online accounts, especially your business email. Those who utilize generative AI may be able to better translate their phishing attacks into multiple languages, and chatbot-style applications can automate parts of the back-and-forth messages with potential victims.