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☆ Mark Cuban says Elon Musk's AI company could create a 'virtual Elon' and calls it 'pretty scary'
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Grace Kay | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Mark Cuban says Elon Musk's Twitter purchase could give him a leg up in the AI arms race. The "Shark Tank" investor said Musk could even use it to create a "virtual Elon." Mark Cuban thinks Elon Musk's Twitter purchase could help his AI venture compete with OpenAI and other companies. "He can weigh his own tweets and those of the sources he likes and end up with a consumer-facing AI that can be a virtual Elon," Cuban wrote. In an emailed comment to Insider, Cuban said it will be "interesting to see what Elon does with it all."

☆ Elon Musk predicts a 'ChatGPT moment' for Tesla, warns of banking woes, and expects a tough year ahead. Here are his 15 best quotes this week.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Theron Mohamed | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Elon Musk predicts a "ChatGPT moment" for Tesla, and warns investors have a tough 12 months ahead. The Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX chief spoke during his automaker's shareholder meeting and a CNBC interview on Tuesday. "I think Tesla will have a ChatGPT moment, maybe if not this year, I'd say no later than next year." And I think that's just generally true for the economy." And now I think they're going to be slow to lower them."

☆ ChatGPT creator OpenAI is getting ready to release an open-source AI model, report says
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

OpenAI is preparing to release an open-source AI model, according to The Information. The outlet did not specify a timeline for the model's release. OpenAI is preparing to release an open-source AI model, The Information reported, citing a source with knowledge of the plan. The company's decision to release another open-source AI model comes amid mounting pressure from free alternatives to mainstream models. The Googler suggested that while Google had "done a lot of looking over" its shoulders at Microsoft-backed OpenAI, open-source engineers had been surpassing them both.

☆ Elon Musk says 'I am the reason OpenAI exists' and that he 'came up with the name.'
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Huileng Tan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Elon Musk took credit for the existence of OpenAI and said he came up with the startup's name. "I am the reason OpenAI exists," Musk told CNBC's David Faber in a Tuesday interview. "I came up with the name," Musk told CNBC. Musk told CNBC Microsoft could "cut off OpenAI" at any point and has a lot of control over the startup. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Musk did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.

☆ OpenAI CEO wows lawmakers at closed dinner: 'Fantastic…forthcoming'
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Lauren Feiner | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke to an engaged crowd of about 60 lawmakers at a dinner Monday about the advanced artificial technology his company produces and the challenges of regulating it. The wide-ranging discussion that lasted about two hours came ahead of Altman's first time testifying before Congress at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy and technology hearing on Tuesday. The dinner discussion comes at a peak moment for AI, which has thoroughly captured Congress' fascination. "There isn't any question where he pulls back on anything," she said, adding that lawmakers had very thoughtful things to ask. Khanna said the question of openness of the model is something he's discussed with Altman before, though not at Monday's dinner.

☆ I'm an AI ethicist. I make sure the tech is safely deployed to the world, but I am not an oracle.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-13 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Giada Pistilli, 31, is the principal ethicist at Hugging Face and helps ensure AI is safely deployed. Here is what Pistilli's job as an AI ethicist entails, as told to Insider's Aaron Mok. I'm a full-time AI ethicist making sure the tech is safely deployed to the world. I first approached Hugging Face to understand how I could help build Bloom, its large language model. For example, a journalist approached Hugging Face after he claimed one of his articles was plagiarized by the company's language model.

☆ Just one old tank, and no aircraft, were present at Russia's much-reduced Victory Parade this year, reflecting its major losses in Ukraine
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Sinéad Baker | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Russia's Victory Day celebrations were scaled back this year. Russia's military has been degraded in Ukraine, and experts said it planned smaller celebrations to hide that. Tuesday's military parade in Moscow did not include an air display or any military jets over the capital city. Russia also cancelled its Moscow Victory Day aerial display last year, the first event since it launched its invasion of Ukraine. Russia needs a lot of its equipment in Ukraine that it would usually show off in the parades, the ISW noted.

☆ IBM takes another shot at Watson as A.I. boom picks up steam
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Hayden Field | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

About 15 months ago, IBM sold its Watson Health unit for an undisclosed amount to private equity firm Francisco Partners. Now, Watson has given way to WatsonX, and IBM is trying to ride the latest boom in AI. The platform includes a feature for AI-generated code, an AI governance toolkit, and a library of thousands of large-scale AI models, trained on language, geospatial data, IT events and code, according to a release. IBM is partnering with HuggingFace, the buzzy AI startup and open source platform that reached a $2 billion valuation last year. "We allow an enterprise to use their own code to adapt the model to how they want to run their playbooks and their code," Krishna said.

“This is the second train, there was one like it just before.”The video, seemingly filmed in late March, shows old Soviet tanks being transported, somewhere in Russia. Moscow has been known to bring out older military equipment from storage to help it prosecute the war in Ukraine, but these are different. The tanks are T-55s, a model first commissioned by the Soviet Union’s Red Army in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II. Soviet T-54/T-55 tanks form a threatening ring round the Parliament buildings in Hungary on November 12, 1956. T-55 tanks drive through the streets of Prague, capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, in 1968.

And so whenever I get one of those notifications, I know I’m going to have a good time there. kevin roose[LAUGHS]: I actually don’t think I could’ve told you what IBM stood for. kevin rooseSo I’ve thought a lot and written a lot about how and when AI actually is a threat to jobs. The third category is just the jobs that I think are going to be protected, the jobs that we won’t let AI do. But I don’t actually think the speed of it matters at all.

☆ Drones over Kremlin likely launched from inside Russia, US experts say
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Mike Stone | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

Ostorozhno Novosti/Handout via REUTERSSummary Kremlin citadel has extensive anti-drone protections400-plus km journey from Ukraine unlikelyIf launched in Russia, multiple drone types possibleWASHINGTON, May 5 (Reuters) - The drones that crashed over the Kremlin earlier this week probably evaded an extensive number of defenses in and around Moscow, suggesting they might have been launched from inside Russia, U.S.-based drones experts said. "Spoofing" occurs when a counterfeit GPS signal is sent to replace a legitimate one, electronically fooling guidance systems on drones or other devices. "Of all the types of one-way attack drones, the aircraft used in this instance appears to have been a fixed-wing aircraft and among the larger one-way attack drones currently in use or development," said drone expert Dan Gettinger at the Vertical Flight Society, an engineering advocacy group. China, India, Taiwan and Ukraine are among a clutch of nations producing drones of this size and capability, Gettinger said. Gettinger, who published a paper on one-way attack drones on Thursday, said if the aircraft was launched from within Russia, there was a significantly greater number of aircraft capable of carrying out this attack.

☆ Google and OpenAI will lose the AI arms race to open-source engineers, a Googler said in a leaked document
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Hasan Chowdhury | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Google and OpenAI are not positioned to win the AI arms race, a Google engineer said in a leaked doc. A document written by a senior Google engineer suggests the open-source community is rivaling them. Google and OpenAI are not positioned to win a hotly contested AI arms race as the open-source community is "lapping" them, a senior engineer at the search giant has said. Sernau said open-source engineers were doing things with $100 that "we struggle with" at $10 million, "doing so in weeks, not months." He cited challenges around running AI models on a phone as one such major issue, which he said open-source engineers have managed to do on a Google Pixel 6.

☆ Russia is using the supposed Kremlin drone strike as an excuse to scale back its Victory Day celebrations and hide its military losses, experts say
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Sinéad Baker | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Russia is reducing its large-scale Victory Day parades, which are used to show its military strength. Experts said it is using an alleged Kremlin drone strike as an excuse to scale them back. But Russia likely wants to conceal its military losses in Ukraine, the ISW said. The ISW said the Kremlin "likely hopes to limit typical May 9 events to conceal the degradation of the Russian military." Russian T-90M and T-14 Armata tanks parade through Red Square during the rehearsal of the Victory Day military parade on May 7, 2022.

[1/4] A logo is on display in the office of Sberbank, Russia's state-owned dominant lender and one of the country's leading technology players, in Moscow, Russia, March 28, 2023. But it also highlights challenges as Russia's tech development becomes increasingly reliant on one state-owned player. Since 2020 it has cast itself as a technology company as well, and is now seeking a bigger slice of Russia's shrinking technology pie. "There are restrictions on some of them, it is a very complex technology," Belevtsev said. "There is already a lot of cooperation on engineers and technology," Belevtsev said.

☆ Google Cloud boss Kurian's rocky path to profit: 'We were not in a very good situation'
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-29 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +10 min

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, right, arrives on stage as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai exits during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco on April 9, 2019. Earlier this week, Alphabet said Google's cloud unit generated $191 million in operating profit, after losing a total of $4 billion in 2021 and 2022. Under Kurian's predecessor, VMware co-founder Diane Greene, critics said Google's cloud business hadn't matured enough to handle enterprises even as it was investing heavily to do so. The cloud division includes the Google Cloud Platform, which competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and the Google Workspace productivity software bundle that goes head-to-head with Microsoft Office. Google Cloud technology chief Will Grannis said Kurian's commitment to improving the division's offerings was evident right away.

☆ Meta shares pop 15% on guidance, sales increase
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Rohan Goswami | In Rohangoswamicnbc | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Mark Zuckerberg told the world in Oct. 2021 that he was rebranding Facebook to Meta as the company pushes toward the metaverse. Meta shares gained more than 15% in premarket trading Thursday, as analysts and investors digested positive guidance for the upcoming fiscal quarter and an unexpected sales increase for the first quarter of 2023. Meta reported first-quarter earnings per share of $2.20, beating the consensus estimate of $2.03, and revenue of $28.65 billion versus the $27.65 billion expected by analysts. As with other large-cap tech companies, analysts expect that artificial intelligence will be a positive point for Meta. Morgan Stanley holds an overweight rating for Meta and upped its price target from $250 to $300.

☆ Analysts see even more gains ahead for Meta Platforms after latest earnings report
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Brian Evans | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Analysts liked what they saw from Meta Platform 's latest earnings report. The company projects revenue between $29.5 billion and $32 billion, while analysts expected sales of $29.5 billion, per Refinitiv. Goldman's Eric Sheridan also hiked his price target to $300, noting Meta maintained its momentum from the fourth quarter of 2022. Meanwhile, Bank of America's Justin Post noted that Meta's revenue recovery can drive the next leg higher for the stock. He also hiked his price target on Meta shares to $305 from $270, implying upside of 45.6%.

☆ I used ChatGPT to talk to my boss for a week and she didn't notice. Here are the other ways I use it daily to get work done.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Jenna Gyimesi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

He used ChatGPT to help with work assignments for one week before telling his coworkers or manager. I used ChatGPT every day at work for a week and didn't tell anyone. And day to day, I could be coding, working in Google Sheets, fixing up dashboards, or doing other tasks. I waited until I used it for a full week before talking about it during our team's weekly meeting. When I first used ChatGPT at work, I was trying to create a new field in Looker that would classify records based on some criteria defined by an algorithm.

☆ Accused Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira posted sensitive US intelligence less than 48 hours after the Ukraine war began, a report says
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-22 | by ( Alia Shoaib | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

The New York Times found posts sharing secret intelligence less than 48 hours after Russia invaded Ukraine. The New York Times has discovered a Discord user profile matching Jack Teixeira's shared secret intelligence about the war in Ukraine less than 48 hours after Russia began its invasion. The affidavit said he had started posting classified information on social media around December 2022, according to Reuters. The user claimed to be posting information from the NSA, CIA, and other intelligence agencies. On some occasions, the user shared information about the Russian invasion that preempted events on the battlefield.

☆ Developer tool startups in Y Combinator's latest class are grabbing the attention of investors like Elad Gil and Google's Gradient Ventures. Here are 4 that have already landed funding.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Madeline Renbarger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Developer tool startups that were part of Y Combinator's latest class are drawing strong interest from several high-profile venture capitalists. Sequoia partner Lauren Reeder personally participated in the code review startup's recent funding round, according to a Sequoia spokesperson. That fundraising was at a $30 million post-money valuation, one person familiar with the deal said. Developer tool startups accounted for 26% of the companies in YC's winter 2023 batch, up from 16% of the summer 2022 class, according to the accelerator's startup directory. Have a tip on a startup funding round?

Belgorod Mayor Valentin Demidov wrote on his Telegram channel that several apartment buildings were damaged in the blast. Russian state media boasted about the country’s Su-34 warplanes last December, when it said a “new batch of … frontline bombers” had been delivered to Russian forces to use against Ukraine. Russia state media did not say what kind of munition fell on Belgorod late Thursday. The Belgorod region has been the scene of several explosions and bombings since Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022. Local media reported two drones dropped small bombs at the local thermal power plants, citing an anonymous source.

☆ Russia is 'going backwards' and will increasingly have to rely on Cold War-era weapons, experts and Western officials say
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Sinéad Baker | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Russia's military equipment is "going backwards" amid battlefield losses, Western officials say. One think tank said Russia will increasingly have to turn to Cold War-era stock. Russia has hemorrhaged equipment, and has brought decades-old tanks out of storage to fight. This has resulted in Russia relying on older equipment, including at least one elite Russian unit fighting with 60-year-old T-62 tanks. Russia is struggling to make tanks fast enough, partly due to Western sanctions aimed at denying it the materials it needs to make some advanced equipment.

☆ Russia having difficulty building new weapons, but might have enough older ones, report says
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Brad Lendon | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

“The quality of the Russian military in terms of advanced equipment will likely decline, at least over the near term,” the CSIS report says. Western officials, speaking during a briefing Tuesday, also noted the pressure on the Russian tank fleet. The CSIS report highlights the problem Russia faces in new tank construction, citing Russian media reports. ‘Less reliable suppliers’Sanctions have cut Russian access to optical systems – needed for tank gunners to pick out targets – ball bearings and machine tools, the CSIS report said. Russia still retains numerical advantages over Ukraine, the report said, because it has large inventories in reserve.

Databricks sells software tools for building AI systems. Ghodsi told Reuters that the company is releasing the free training data in the hope that other companies will use it to make their own AI systems, possibly using Databricks to do so. But it could not be used in commercial products because the data used to train the model was generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, whose terms of service forbid using its data to develop commercial AI systems that could compete with OpenAI. Using data generated by AI to train other AI systems has become common. Users will be able to examine the training data themselves, which they cannot do for models such as ChatGPT or Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Bard, whose training data wasn't released.

☆ Factbox: What is known about latest leak of U.S. secrets
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-10 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

Here is what we know and do not know about what appears to be the gravest leak of U.S. secrets in years:ARE THE DOCUMENTS REAL? Materials marked that way would have been seen by thousands of people with security clearances. But because not all of the documents are marked FVEY, U.S. officials believe whoever leaked them could be American. - China: Predictions about how China would respond to Ukrainian strikes inside Russia, along with details about British plans in the Indo-Pacific region. - South America: Information about Brazilian officials' plan to visit Moscow in April to discuss a Ukraine mediation scheme.

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