?? Wiser! #139: Duet AI Signals Google's AI Strategy | Warnings Of AI Child Abuse Material | Disjointed AI Regulations | Smart Home Surveillance

This is issue #139 of Wiser!, the newsletter that gives you insights and information about today’s technologies shaping tomorrow’s digital world. To ensure that you get Wiser! every week for free copy, join the mailing list.

What's In Wiser! This Week

Google may have been caught by surprise when ChatGPT woke up the world to artificial intelligence last November, but they’ve wasted little time regaining their position as the preeminent AI company. It’s worth remembering that Google, who turn 25 years old this month, bought Deepmind, a UK- based business, that can predict the structure of almost every protein known to science, a decade ago. With very deep pockets, an almost infinite compute capability, and a dominance in everything digital that isn’t Apple, Google has all of the pieces to become the dominant force in AI.

WiserPLUS! readers get my twopenneth on Google’s latest set of AI announcements at their Cloud conference last week.

In other stories, I was pleased to see the open letter from all 50 US attorneys general calling on action to combat AI generated child abuse content. It’s a global problem that will need a coordinated solution. Which is a challenge given the disparate attitudes and approaches to regulating AI across the globe.

The other story was about smart home gadgets and how they’re spying on us. A new report from Which? shows a surprising level of unnecessary data is being collected with our consent!

On the verge of the iPhone 15, my chart of the week looks at the declining levels of interest in new releases of the iPhone, probably because Apple have run out of cool new features to build into them.

Plus, of course, a round up of this week’s tech news headlines.

ATB, Rick

P.S. REMEMBER: Insight and Information Gives You Leverage! (Build your own competitive advantage by being 1% smarter than your competition.)

w/WiserPLUS!

Duet AI Signals Google’s Intent To Dominate AI

At Google Cloud’s annual show and tell last week, CEO Sundar Pichai and the leadership team unveiled a host of new AI features that will make AI accessible and integrated into the everyday person’s daily routine. Whether that is for personal or professional use, these impressive-looking new AI tools are designed and built to improve personal productivity and make our digital lives easier.

To top it off, Google also unveiled the fastest AI computer chip in the world, an incredibly powerful new AI processor to challenge NVIDIA’s dominance of AI computing.

For this week’s PLUS! readers, I provide a breakdown what you need to know about Google’s newest announcements.

Read it here... (€)

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w/Artificial Intelligence

The Fight Against AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material

“We are engaged in a race against time to protect the children of our country from the dangers of AI”

This is the message from the attorneys general of all 50 states in America in an?open letter to the US Congress. The prosecutors are asking lawmakers for increased protective measures against AI-enhanced child sexual abuse images.

Here’s The Thing You Need To Know: Mainstream image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney are not the problem. These platforms have built in guardrails to stop the creation of child sexual abuse material. It’s the open-source versions of AI software and tools that are often developed without guardrails. One example is open-source AI platform Stable Diffusion?which allows the creation of AI-generated pornography with ease. Since these AI models are openly available and can be run locally, there’s nothing to prevent anyone from creating?sexualised images?of children. It’s a sorry, but all too familiar, tale of human (male) behaviour and new technologies that sadly has no obvious and immediate answer.

Associated Press Release / 404 Report / Arstechnica Report / YouTube Explainer

w/Surveillance Economy

Are Your Home Gadgets Spying On You?

With security cameras sending data to TikTok, washing machines demanding to know your age, and TVs watching you while you watch them, why are our smart homes spying on us? This is the question that the consumer watchdog, Which?, has attempted to answer in a new report out this week. Which? found that:

• Bose smart speakers share user data with Meta,
• All smart cameras used tracking services from Google. Ezviz's smart camera devices also provided data to TikTok, Huawei and Meta,
• Smart home security gadgets Blink and Ring tracked data for parent company Amazon,
• Smart TVs use a system called automatic content recognition that tracks what you watch,
• Smart washing machines collect data they don’t need to wash your smalls, such as name, date of birth, email, contacts, your precise location and phone number.

Here’s The Thing You Need To Know: It’s all about advertising. Targeted ads to be precise, because they make much more money than regular ads. And targeted ads feed on only one thing…data about you! The size of this pie is huge. Digital advertising is dominated by Meta and Alphabet (that’s Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube) and last year they reported almost $400 billion of revenue which comes primarily from selling digital ads. That’s more than the UK Government spends on Health, Education, Defence and Transportation, it’s four largest spending departments, combined. The issue is that despite regulations like GDPR intended to protect consumers, these brands get around privacy rules and regulations by burying the consent of the user inside the small print of the terms and conditions that everyone just accepts and nobody ever reads. The next time an ad pops up for a product you were only talking about yesterday, it’s more than just a coincidence!

The Which? report... / Chrome Targeted Ads / Big Tech Little Tech Ep #33

w/Artificial Intelligence

How Is AI Regulated Around The World?

The Washington Post has released a report detailing the global approach to regulating AI, highlighting the disparity between rapid adoption in countries like the UAE and the overly stringent approach of countries like Italy. This comes at the same time as a report by Pew Research that found 52% of Americans are more worried than excited about AI.

Here’s The Thing You Need To Know: Brazil and the European Union are leading when it comes to trying to regulate the AI gold rush. Their respective sets of regulations places the onus of responsibility on developers?and has strict user protection regulations. By contrast, Israel and Japan favour a?softer approach, emphasising self-regulation and shying away from industry-wide legislation. Then there’s the likes of Italy which has allocated a significant budget to support workers at potential risk from digital transformations having temporarily banned ChatGPT earlier this year. The point is that everyone is doing their own thing. In the race for AI domination is it at all possible for nations to coordinate put their own self interests second?

Pew Research / Washington Post

w/Chart Of The week

The Decline In iPhone Buzz

The world's largest company has scheduled September 12 for an event called "Wonderlust," where they are expected to unveil the new iPhone 15. Rumours suggest that the phone will have improved satellite communication, better wireless charging, and a bigger screen. As expected, given global inflation, Apple's manufacturing struggles, and the 14 previous editions of the phone, the iPhone 15 is likely to be the most expensive to date. Forbes predicts prices ranging from $799 to $2,000.

However, the hype surrounding new models seems to have faded. In the decade since Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's first mobile phone in 2007, worldwide Google Trends data shows that people would routinely search for "new iPhone" whenever a new model was announced, but recent releases have not generated the same level of online buzz. The iPhone 12 Pro in 2020 only garnered a third of the search volume that the XS/Max models in 2018 and the 5C/5S models in 2013 did.

• China intensifies its crackdown on officials using iPhones, the dominant high end smartphone in China.

For more data driven insights from Chartr.

What Else Is Happening In Tech?

• The European Union has confirmed the first?six tech gatekeepers?that must follow the rules of its Digital Markets Act (DMA): Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. The DMA stipulates that gatekeepers can't favour their own services over rivals' offerings and can't keep users locked into their own ecosystems. They have to let third-party entities interoperate with their services.
• Apple is reportedly spending “billions of dollars a day” working on bringing more AI to Siri as it lags behind OpenAI. Apple’s in house large language model is called AjaxGPT. According to various reports, Apple's LLM only has 200 billion parameters compared to GPT4’s 1,800 billion.
• Meta may team up with LG for a new Quest Pro.?The two companies are reportedly looking to debut a?new high-end headset?in 2025.
• Chinese internet giant Tencent has released its artificial intelligence model that can power applications similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Tencent said in a statement that its new model, called Hunyuan, is now available in China for business use, allowing enterprise customers to build new AI applications based on Tencent’s model.
• Hearing aid makers are?leveraging AI to create smart devices that make hearing aids more valuable and appealing, especially for younger users. The tech aims to reduce stigma and get people help sooner — particularly for the younger generation, with reportedly 1 in 7 teenagers suffering from hearing loss.
• Twitter/X is to collect user data including biometric, job, and education data and use it, along with other public info, to train the AI models for Musk’s latest venture xAI.
• Zoom just launched?AI Companion,?an AI assistant embedded across its platform to increase productivity at no extra cost for paid users.
• Researchers have created an?AI model?that can predict how a chemical will smell just from its molecular structure, matching human testers.
• Bumble’s?CEO Whitney Wolfe?says?AI will play an important role in dating by helping users improve their flirting skills.
• Bhutan, a small Himalayan nation with less than 800,000 people, is to roll out the world’s first national digital identity system for all its citizens. The ID system has been built using blockchain technology and will provide each individual a “self-sovereign” identity, meaning it can only be controlled by the citizen and no other entity, similar to how cryptocurrencies work. The national digital ID will enable the digitisation of online services from banks, hospitals, taxation and education.

Further Reading

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