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☆ Microsoft's $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-08 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +10 min

Microsoft's cumulative investment in OpenAI has reportedly swelled to $13 billion and the startup's valuation has hit roughly $29 billion. What does that mean for Microsoft's investment and broader arrangement? The structure changed in 2019, when two top executives published a blog post announcing the formation of a "capped-profit" entity called OpenAI LP. Microsoft has an exclusive license on GPT-4 and all other OpenAI models, the OpenAI spokesperson said. When considering potential exits for OpenAI, Microsoft — which does not hold an OpenAI board seat — would be the natural acquirer given its close entanglement.

☆ U.S. reviewing whether Ukraine war documents were leaked
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-07 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

A member of the Ukrainian special force engages in zeroing his weapon prior to a mission, amid Russia?s attack on Ukraine, in the region of Bakhmut, Ukraine, April 6, 2023. They are not war plans and they provide no details on any planned Ukraine offensive. If the published documents are authentic to any degree, however, the leak of classified data is troubling and raises questions about what other information about the Ukraine war — or any coming offensive — could be distributed. The Justice Department released a statement Friday night saying, "We have been in communication with the Department of Defense related to this matter and have begun an investigation." One U.S. official said the documents resemble data produced daily by the Joint Staff, although some numbers are wrong.

☆ Ukraine discusses preventing military leaks after report of breach
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-07 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

[1/2] Ukrainian servicemen prepare to fire a mortar, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, near the city of Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine April 6, 2023. REUTERS/Oleksandr KlymenkoKYIV, April 7 (Reuters) - Ukraine's president and top security brass discussed ways to prevent leaks of military information at a meeting on Friday, Kyiv said, after secret documents detailing Western help for Ukraine reportedly ended up online. It also did not refer to a New York Times report that said documents about U.S. and NATO plans to build up the Ukrainian military had been leaked online. A spokesperson for Ukrainian military intelligence said it was possible the information in the posts was entirely fictitious, and that there had been no leak. One part offered an estimate for Ukrainian military losses that was far higher than Western estimates made available so far.

☆ Vector database Chroma scored $18 million in seed funding at a $75 million valuation. Here's why its technology is key to helping generative AI startups.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-06 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Chroma helps manage vector embeddings, or numerical representations of data AI models can process. The startup raised $18 million in seed funding at a $75 million valuation led by Quiet Capital. The company recently closed a $18 million seed round led by Quiet Capital at a $75 million valuation. Originally, Chroma's tech aimed to serve machine learning engineers who were training and deploying AI models. Because this limits the model's context window, this approach tends to prevent hallucinations, or confident but incorrect responses from AI, Troynikov told Insider.

☆ Ukrainian forces were spotted firing anti-aircraft guns from the 1940s as old weapons make a comeback in Russia's bloody war
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-04 | by ( Jake Epstein | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Kyiv's troops were recently spotted firing, possibly in training, decades-old anti-aircraft guns identified as KS-19 100 mm systems. The video was flagged by UA Weapons Tracker, an open source monitor for weapons used in the war in Ukraine. —🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 1, 2023UA Weapons Tracker identified the rounds that were used by the Ukrainians as ones manufactured in the early 1960s and able to travel around a dozen miles. And Ukraine has even older weapons too, such as the aforementioned KS-19s and World War I-era Maxim machine guns. Some examples of this include Soviet-era tanks like the T-62, which are more vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks, and less-accurate missiles that are more like to cause greater collateral damage.

☆ Exclusive: How generative AI startup Treat scored $8.5 million in funding from Greylock to help companies create personalized product photos
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-04 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Treat uses generative AI technology to create personalized product images based on customer data. The startup recently raised $8.5 million in seed funding from Greylock Partners. Their startup Treat, which leverages generative AI to create personalized product photos, recently landed $8.5 million in seed funding from Greylock Partners. A number of other up-and-coming generative AI startups, like Flair AI, have emerged to tackle the issue of creating branded product photos quickly. With its new seed funding, Treat is planning to hire more machine learning, sales, and operations talent.

☆ Welcome to the era of viral AI generated 'news' images
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-02 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

None of these things actually happened, but AI-generated images depicting them did go viral online over the past week. The images ranged from obviously fake to, in some cases, compellingly real, and they fooled some social media users. There are also concerns that AI-generated images could be used for harassment, or to further drive divided internet users apart. Eliot Higgins, founder and creative director of the investigative group Bellingcat, posted fake images of former President Donald Trump to Twitter last week. Many of the recent viral AI-generated images were created by a tool called Midjourney, a less than year-old platform that allows users to create images based on short text prompts.

☆ Welcome to the era of viral AI generated ‘news’ images
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-02 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

Multiple experts identified the presence of malware on the Pinduoduo app that exploited vulnerabilities in Android operating systems. Evidence of sophisticated malware in the Pinduoduo app comes amid intense scrutiny of Chinese-developed apps like TikTok over concerns about data security. Pinduoduo has previously rejected “the speculation and accusation that Pinduoduo app is malicious.”CNN has contacted PDD multiple times over email and phone for comment, but has not received a response. Google Play is not available in China, and Android users in the country download their apps from local stores. Engineers also found their access to big data, data sheets and the log system revoked, the source said.

☆ Dozens of AI enthusiasts gathered in San Francisco's Cerebral Valley for a summit on Thursday. Here are the top 3 takeaways from the event.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-31 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Dozens of AI enthusiasts gathered in SF's Cerebral Valley on Thursday for Eric Newcomer's AI summit. The handful of streets between San Francisco's Fillmore and Mission neighborhoods have been called a variety of names in recent times — Cerebral Valley, Bayes Valley, Hayes Valley — but on a Thursday morning in March, they were the home for dozens of AI enthusiasts, founders, and VCs looking to learn more about the space at independent journalist Eric Newcomer's Cerebral Valley AI Summit. The model to rule them allWith representation from several OpenAI competitors, including Anthropic, Adept, and Stability AI, a common question during panels was how the landscape of AI model providers would shake out. Others, like Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque, claimed that the question of AI models went beyond performance or cost to issues around transparency and accessibility. The future of codingWith the recent AI boom, a flock of startups have emerged to help developers build AI and non-AI applications.

It suspended its probe in November 2021 at the request of the Philippines after Manila said it was carrying out its own investigations. The ICC investigation was reopened in January 2023 and on March 27 the ICC rejected Manila's request to suspend it pending an appeal questioning the court's jurisdiction and authority. It is not clear even among some government officials what cutting contact meant or whether the Philippines will completely drop its appeal against the ICC investigation. Police say they killed 6,200 suspects during anti-drug operations that ended in shootouts but reject accusations by human rights groups of systematic executions and cover-ups. There doesn't seem to be any political will within the Philippine government to seriously investigate," Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told CNN Philippines.

☆ Here are 9 Twitter promises that Elon Musk has failed to deliver on as ‘chief Twit’
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Oliver Darcy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

New York CNN —Elon Musk’s record on delivering on the deluge of pledges he has made as “chief Twit” is less than ideal. Since then, Musk has made a number of wild changes and promises pertaining to Twitter. ► Maximal free speech: Musk repeatedly talked about Twitter being a home for free speech. When I reached out to Musk on Wednesday morning with questions about his failed promises, he didn’t respond. But I did receive an auto-reply poop emoji from the press@twitter.com email address, a feature Musk recently said he would implement.

OAKLAND, California, March 28 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence chip startup Cerebras Systems on Tuesday said it released open source ChatGPT-like models for the research and business community to use for free in an effort to foster more collaboration. Silicon Valley-based Cerebras released seven models all trained on its AI supercomputer called Andromeda, including smaller 111 million parameter language models to a larger 13 billion parameter model. Cerebras said the smaller models can be deployed on phones or smart speakers while the bigger ones run on PCs or servers, although complex tasks like large passage summarization require larger models. Most of the AI models today are trained on Nvidia Corp's (NVDA.O) chips, but more and more startups like Cerebras are trying to take share in that market. The models trained on Cerebras machines can also be used on Nvidia systems for further training or customization, said Feldman.

☆ Twitter executives reportedly think an ex-employee leaked the company's source code under the name 'FreeSpeechEnthusiast'
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-27 | by ( Grace Kay | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Twitter is leading a manhunt for a GitHub user who posted some of the company's source code online. Some Twitter execs think the leaker is an employee who left last year, The New York Times reported. In the past, Musk has said he plans to make some of Twitter's code public. Most recently, he said he would open source Twitter's code for recommending tweets by March 31. Read The New York Times' full story in its website.

☆ Twitter source code leaked online, court filings show
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-26 | by ( Ashley Capoot | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

Twitter issued a subpoena on March 24 to the software collaboration platform GitHub, where a user identified as "FreeSpeechEnthusiast" shared excerpts of Twitter's source code without permission, according to the filings. The purpose of the subpoena is to identify the person responsible for sharing the code, Twitter's counsel said in the documents. Musk has previously claimed that Twitter will open source the code used to recommend tweets on March 31. According to the DMCA request shared by GitHub, the company removed "proprietary source code for Twitter's platform and internal tools." It is unclear if the source code used to recommend tweets is part of the leak.

☆ Elon Musk reportedly left OpenAI's board in 2018 after Sam Altman and other cofounders rejected his plan to run the company
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-24 | by ( Sarah Jackson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Elon Musk tried to take over OpenAI in 2018 but walked away after Sam Altman and other founders rejected the idea, Semafor reported. Musk was a founder and board member of OpenAI before he left in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with Tesla. Upon Musk's departure in February 2018, OpenAI said he'd continue to provide funding and advice to the organization. Since leaving OpenAI, Musk has become an outspoken critic of the company. On a Twitter thread posted by Altman, Musk commented, "ChatGPT is scary good.

☆ Google's AI teams are experiencing a brain drain. Here's where its top researchers are now.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

Top AI researchers have been leaving for startups where their work can have more impact. That frustration over Google's slow movement has been corroborated by other former Google researchers who spoke to Insider. Niki Parmar left Google Brain after five years to serve as a co-founder and CTO of Adept, though like Vaswani she recently left for a stealth startup. Lukasz Kaiser left Google Brain after over seven years to join OpenAI in 2021. Sharan Narang, another contributor to the T5 paper, left Google Brain in 2022 after four years.

☆ OpenAI CEO admits a bug allowed some ChatGPT users to see others' conversation titles
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Ryan Browne | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday disclosed a bug that allowed some users of its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT to view messages from others. "A small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users' conversation history." Some users had reported seeing messages from others as early as Monday. Another person on Twitter shared a screenshot of their ChatGPT, showing chat titles from conversations they had never had. It took TikTok nine months to reach 100 million users, with Instagram achieving the same popularity after two and a half years.

On Tuesday at its developer conference GTC, Nvidia unveiled CUDA Quantum, a platform for building quantum algorithms using popular classical computer coding languages C++ and python. "CUDA Quantum will do the same for quantum computing, enabling domain scientists to seamlessly integrate quantum into their applications and gain access to a new disruptive computing technology," said Tim Costa, Nvidia's director of HPC and quantum. One difference, Costa said, is while CUDA is proprietary, CUDA Quantum is open source and was developed with input from many quantum computing companies. Nvidia also launched a new hardware system called DGX Quantum to connect the quantum computer with classical computers. "We see more and more demand to integrate these quantum computers with standard computers," said Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines.

☆ Google got a pandemic boost for its Workspace software but blew it, insiders say. Now it plans to attack Microsoft with a new push in AI.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Rosalie Chan | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +14 min

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian spent much of his time at a partner meeting talking about Workspace, tweeted Tony Safoian, CEO of Google Cloud partner SADA Systems. "Around the globe, more than nine million paying organizations, and more than three billion users rely on Google Workspace for communication and collaboration. Other major customers like Deutsche Bank use Google Cloud for cloud infrastructure, but Microsoft Office for collaboration software. Forty-four percent of software procurers whose organization plans to or currently uses Microsoft's collaboration software also use Google Workspace, according to the 2022 Forrester study. While Google Cloud is still unprofitable, it has decreased losses to $480 million, down from $890 million last year.

Powering AI Dungeon's text-generation software was the GPT language technology offered by the Microsoft -backed AI research lab OpenAI. The high cost of training and "inference" — actually running — large language models is a structural cost that differs from previous computing booms. Many entrepreneurs see risks in relying on potentially subsidized AI models that they don't control and merely pay for on a per-use basis. Companies making the foundation models, semiconductor makers, and startups all see business opportunities in reducing the price of running AI software. "Latitude is going to continue to evaluate all AI models to be sure we have the best game out there."

☆ Stock futures rise after Dow slides five straight days on bank rout: Live updates
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-13 | by ( Sarah Min | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Bank stocks rebounded somewhat after getting pummeled during Monday's trading session. U.S. stock futures rose on Monday night after the Dow Jones Industrial Average notched a fifth day of losses. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell after a plan to backstop depositors in Silicon Valley Bank failed to buoy bank stocks, as well as the S&P 500 . On the other hand, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite bucked the trend, rising 0.45%, as some investors bet the collapse at Silicon Valley Bank could mean a pause in future interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve. Due out Tuesday before the bell, the February consumer price index is expected to show a rise of 0.4% last month, according to consensus estimates from Dow Jones.

☆ OpenAI's GPT-4 upgrade will let you turn text into video, Microsoft exec says ahead of upcoming release
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-13 | by ( Pete Syme | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

A Microsoft executive said OpenAI's new model will be released this week, per a German news outlet. GPT-4 will be able to turn text into video, a feature already included in Google and Meta AIs. Braun added that the more powerful AI will be introduced this week, putting an end to speculation over its release. The OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati, has also said "I think less hype would be good," but added it may "broaden opportunities," per FastCompany. Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, sent outside US working hours.

☆ Russia is showing off advanced military tech around the world while its troops in Ukraine struggle with obsolete Soviet-era weapons
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-03 | by ( Sinéad Baker | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Russia has been showing off advanced military technology around the world, according to the UK MOD. But its soldiers are struggling in Ukraine with Soviet-era equipment and limited supplies. This comes at the same time as Russia's own soldiers are dying in droves in Ukraine using old Soviet-era equipment. TASS also said that other Russian defense companies were due to show off "more than 200 full-scale samples of weapons and military equipment, ammunition and gear" at the event. As a result, the country's military has had to take Soviet-era tanks out of storage to fight, and has been using less-accurate Soviet-era missiles.

☆ Russia has just one tank factory churning out 20 tanks a month, with demand outstripping production by a factor of ten, says report
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-28 | by ( Joshua Zitser | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Russia has just one tank factory, which can produce around 20 new tanks every month. Demand for tanks is now outstripping production by a factor of ten, according to The Economist. The British publication reported that Russia now has just one tank factory, UralVagonZavod, a massive 1930s-built industrial complex in eastern Russia. Russia is losing around 150 tanks a month in Ukraine, according to an analysis by open source intelligence platform Oryx. Ukraine has also struggled to produce new tanks, with its only tank factory destroyed at the start of the war.

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