Matthias Bastian
Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER, exploring how AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between humans and computers.
Read full article about: Deepmind says AI can help with climate change by understanding, optimizing and accelerating solutions
Deepmind is using AI to tackle climate change in three ways, according to Sims Witherspoon, Deepmind's head of climate action. First, AI can help understand climate change through better prediction and monitoring models. Second, AI can optimize current systems and existing infrastructure, such as improving energy efficiency in data centers. Finally, AI can accelerate breakthrough science, such as controlling plasma shapes in nuclear fusion reactors for carbon-free energy. However, challenges include access to climate-critical data and collaboration with domain experts. You can read the full interview with Witherspoon at WIRED.
Read full article about: OpenAI in talks to sell employee shares at $86 billion valuation
OpenAI is in talks to sell employee shares at a valuation of $86 billion, making it one of the world's most valuable private companies, Bloomberg reports. The AI startup, known for its GPT language models and ChatGPT, is negotiating the offer with potential investors.
Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI, which is reportedly on track to generate $1.3 billion in annual revenue, exceeding investor expectations. The biggest revenue driver is subscriptions to ChatGPT Plus. The new figure suggests more than $100 million in monthly revenue, but due to the high cost of training and deploying large language models, OpenAI doesn't expect to be profitable in the near term. The company will likely continue to raise funds for computing costs to develop and maintain its AI systems.
Read full article about: Yoshua Bengio fears catastrophic AI risks, calls for 'defense of humanity' organization
In an interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio discussed the potential threats AI poses to humanity. Bengio, a Turing Award winner and founder of the Quebec AI institute Mila, believes that the development of artificial intelligence could outpace our ability to regulate it, posing a significant threat to democracy, national security, and our collective future. He suggests that the creation of an organization to defend humanity could help mitigate these risks. Bengio also warns against the concentration of AI power in a few companies, which could lead to economic dominance and potential political control.
Time is of the essence, and regulation can reduce the probabilities of catastrophes or, equivalently, push back the time when something really bad is going to happen. Or minimize the amplitude of what may happen.
Yoshua Bengio
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Source: The Bulletin
Read full article about: Google says learning isn't stealing in one of its AI copyright lawsuits
Google has urged a California federal court to dismiss a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the company's data scraping for generative AI violates privacy and property rights. The tech giant defended its use of public data to train systems like its Bard chatbot, claiming that the lawsuit would "take a sledgehammer to not only Google's services, but the very idea of generative AI," and that "using publicly available information to learn is not stealing." The lawsuit was filed by eight individuals in July, accusing Google of misusing content from social media and Google platforms to train AI. Google's general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, called the lawsuit "baseless" and said U.S. law supports using public information for new beneficial uses.
