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Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicA Times investigation shows how the country’s biggest technology companies, as they raced to build powerful new artificial intelligence systems, bent and broke the rules from the start. Cade Metz, a technology reporter for The Times, explains what he uncovered.

Persons: Cade Metz Organizations: Spotify, Times, The Times

☆ Computer Theorist Wins $1 Million Turing Award
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-11 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that this year’s Turing Award will go to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who specializes in randomness. Often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize. The award is named for Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped create the foundations for modern computing in the mid-20th century. Other recent winners include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who helped create the computer-generated imagery, or C.G.I., that drives modern movies and television, and the A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, who nurtured the techniques that gave rise to chatbots like ChatGPT.

Persons: Turing, Avi Wigderson, Alan Turing, Ed Catmull, Pat Hanrahan, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio Organizations: Association for Computing Machinery Locations: Israeli, British

The artificial intelligence lab had exhausted every reservoir of reputable English-language text on the internet as it developed its latest A.I. It could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, yielding new conversational text that would make an A.I. Ultimately, an OpenAI team transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos, the people said. The texts were then fed into a system called GPT-4, which was widely considered one of the world’s most powerful A.I. models and was the basis of the latest version of the ChatGPT chatbot.

Persons: OpenAI, Greg Brockman Organizations: YouTube, Google

☆ What to Know About Tech Companies Using A.I. to Teach Their Own A.I.
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-06 | by ( Cade Metz | Stuart A. Thompson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

OpenAI, Google and other tech companies train their chatbots with huge amounts of data culled from books, Wikipedia articles, news stories and other sources across the internet. That’s because tech companies may exhaust the high-quality text the internet has to offer for the development of artificial intelligence. Does that mean tech companies want A.I. Rather than training A.I. models with text written by people, tech companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic hope to train their technology with data generated by other A.I.

Persons: OpenAI, A.I Organizations: Google, The New York Times, Microsoft

Online data has long been a valuable commodity. For years, Meta and Google have used data to target their online advertising. Political candidates have turned to data to learn which groups of voters to train their sights on. Over the last 18 months, it has become increasingly clear that digital data is also crucial in the development of artificial intelligence. models become more accurate and more humanlike with more data.

Persons: — Organizations: Meta, Google, Netflix, Spotify

☆ An A.I. Researcher Takes On Election Deepfakes
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( Cade Metz | Tiffany Hsu | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For nearly 30 years, Oren Etzioni was among the most optimistic of artificial intelligence researchers. But in 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. And by the middle of last year, he said, he was distressed that A.I.-generated deepfakes would swing a major election. He founded a nonprofit, TrueMedia.org in January, hoping to fight that threat. The tools, available from the TrueMedia.org website to anyone approved by the nonprofit, are designed to detect fake and doctored images, audio and video.

Persons: Oren Etzioni, Etzioni Organizations: University of Washington, Allen Institute for A.I, TrueMedia.org

☆ OpenAI Unveils A.I. Technology That Recreates Human Voices
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-29 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

First, OpenAI offered a tool that allowed people to create digital images simply by describing what they wanted to see. Then, it built similar technology that generated full-motion video like something from a Hollywood movie. Now, it has unveiled technology that can recreate someone’s voice. start-up said on Friday that a small group of businesses was testing a new OpenAI system, Voice Engine, that can recreate a person’s voice from a 15-second recording. If you are an English speaker, for example, it can recreate your voice in Spanish, French, Chinese or many other languages.

Persons: OpenAI

☆ In Latest A.I. War Escalation, Elon Musk Releases Chatbot Code
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-17 | by ( Kate Conger | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Elon Musk released the raw computer code behind his version of an artificial intelligence chatbot on Sunday, an escalation by one of the world’s richest men in a battle to control the future of A.I. Grok, which is designed to give snarky replies styled after the science-fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product from xAI, the company Mr. Musk founded last year. While xAI is an independent entity from X, its technology has been integrated into the social media platform and is trained on users’ posts. By opening the code up for everyone to view and use — known as open sourcing — Mr. Musk waded further into a heated debate in the A.I. Mr. Musk, a self-proclaimed proponent of open sourcing, did the same with X’s recommendation algorithm last year, but he has not updated it since.

Persons: Elon Musk, snarky, Musk Organizations: Galaxy Locations: xAI

Companies like OpenAI and Midjourney build chatbots, image generators and other artificial intelligence tools that operate in the digital world. Now, a start-up founded by three former OpenAI researchers is using the technology development methods behind chatbots to build A.I. technology that can navigate the physical world. Its goal is to help robots gain an understanding of what is going on around them and decide what they should do next. The technology also gives robots a broad understanding of the English language, letting people chat with them as if they were chatting with ChatGPT.

Locations: Emeryville, Calif

OpenAI said on Friday that Sam Altman, its high-profile chief executive, would rejoin its board of directors more than three months after he was briefly pushed out of the company. The move caps a highly anticipated report by a law firm hired by OpenAI’s board of directors to investigate Mr. Altman and his sudden removal from the company in November. “The special committee recommended and the full board expressed their full confidence in Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman,” Mr. Taylor said, referring to Greg Brockman, the company president who quit in protest after Mr. Altman was removed. “We are excited and unanimous in our support for Sam and Greg.”The company said that the report found that OpenAI’s board acted within its broad discretion to terminate Mr. Altman, but also found that his conduct did not mandate removal. Mr. Taylor said the company would continue to expand its board.

Persons: OpenAI, Sam Altman, Altman, Bret Taylor, . Brockman, ” Mr, Taylor, Greg Brockman, Greg, ”

☆ Dozens of Top Scientists Sign Effort to Prevent A.I. Bioweapons
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-08 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Dario Amodei, chief executive of the high-profile A.I. start-up Anthropic, told Congress last year that new A.I. technology could soon help unskilled but malevolent people create large-scale biological attacks, such as the release of viruses or toxic substances that cause widespread disease and death. Senators from both parties were alarmed, while A.I. Now, over 90 biologists and other scientists who specialize in A.I.

Persons: Dario Amodei, Frances Arnold Locations: United States

☆ OpenAI Says Elon Musk Tried To Merge It With Tesla
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-05 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

OpenAI, in its first public comments about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the influential artificial intelligence research lab, said that Mr. Musk tried to transform the lab from a nonprofit into a for-profit operation before he left the company in early 2018. The comments, made in a blog post published on Tuesday evening, are part of an escalating feud between Mr. Musk and OpenAI, which is now at the forefront of an industrywide A.I. The company said it intended to move to dismiss all the claims in Mr. Musk’s suit. Mr. Musk filed the suit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on Friday, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of building A.I. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I.

Persons: Elon, Musk, Musk’s, Sam Altman, OpenAI Organizations: OpenAI, Microsoft, New York Times

Microsoft filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss parts of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company. The Times sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI on Dec. 27, accusing the two companies of infringing on its copyrights by using its articles to train A.I. In its motion, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Microsoft argued that large language models, or L.L.M.s — the technologies that drive chatbots — did not supplant the market for news articles and other materials they were trained on. The tech giant compared L.L.M.s to videocassette recorders, arguing that both are allowed under the law. than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet or search engine),” the motion read.

Persons: OpenAI Organizations: Microsoft, The New York Times Company, The Times, Southern, of Locations: U.S, of New York

☆ A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Challenges OpenAI and Google With New Chatbot
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-04 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

start-up Anthropic released a new version of its Claude chatbot on Monday, saying it outperforms other leading chatbots on a range of standard benchmark tests, including systems from Google and OpenAI. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive and co-founder, said the new technology, called Claude 3 Opus, was particularly useful when analyzing scientific data or generating computer code. Anthropic is among a small group of companies at the forefront of generative A.I., technology that instantly creates text, images and sounds. Dr. Amodei and other Anthropic founders helped pioneer the technology while working as researchers at OpenAI, the start-up that launched the generative A.I. Chatbots like ChatGPT can answer questions, write term papers, generate small computer programs and more.

Persons: Anthropic, Claude chatbot, Dario Amodei, Claude, Opus, Amodei Organizations: Google, OpenAI

☆ Why Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit Leans on A.I. Research From Microsoft
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-02 | by ( Karen Weise | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

When Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breach of contract on Thursday, he turned claims by the start-up’s closest partner, Microsoft, into a weapon. He repeatedly cited a contentious but highly influential paper written by researchers and top executives at Microsoft about the power of GPT-4, the breakthrough artificial intelligence system OpenAI released last March. In the “Sparks of A.G.I.” paper, Microsoft’s research lab said that — though it didn’t understand how — GPT-4 had shown “sparks” of “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do everything the human brain can do. It was a bold claim, and came as the biggest tech companies in the world were racing to introduce A.I. into their own products.

Persons: Elon Musk, OpenAI, Sam Altman Organizations: Microsoft Locations: A.G.I

☆ OpenAI Seeks to Dismiss Parts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-27 | by ( Cade Metz | Katie Robertson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

OpenAI filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss some key elements of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company. The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing them of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

Persons: OpenAI, Chatbots, ” “, “, ” Organizations: The New York Times Company, The Times, Microsoft, Southern, of, New York Times Locations: U.S, of New York

☆ China’s AI stocks are surging. Here are the names to watch
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-25 | by ( Evelyn Cheng | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +7 min

The investment analyst team led by Gary Yu has a $140 price target and overweight rating on Baidu's U.S.-listed shares. "We believe the current AI cloud integration between Galaxy AI and Ernie is just the first step," Yu said. For all the interest in AI stocks, China markets this year are still grappling with worries about whether Beijing is doing enough to support economic growth. They have a price target of 160 yuan on Shanghai-listed shares of Cambricon — upside of 12% from Friday's levels. They have a price target of 380 yuan on Shanghai-listed Kingsoft, up more than 50% from Friday's levels.

Persons: Morgan Stanley, Gary Yu, Yu, Ernie chatbot, Ernie, Fawne Jiang, Jiang, Baidu, Alex Yao, Yao, Geoffrey Hinton, Cade Metz, Hinton, Metz, it's, Sinodata, Microsoft didn't, EPFR, Bernstein, monetization Organizations: Bloomberg, Baidu, U.S, Huawei, Galaxy, Benchmark, JPMorgan China, Mavericks, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Shanghai, China Equity Funds, Nvidia Locations: China, U.S, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai

In November, a year after ChatGPT’s release, a relatively unknown Chinese start-up leaped to the top of a leaderboard that judged the abilities of open-source artificial intelligence systems. system as an alternative to options like Meta’s generative A.I. Mr. Lee’s start-up then built on Meta’s technology, training its system with new data to make it more powerful. Even as the country races to build generative A.I., Chinese companies are relying almost entirely on underlying systems from the United States. China now lags the United States in generative A.I.

Persons: Kai, Fu Lee, Lee, Lee’s Locations: China, United States

☆ Google Is Giving Away Some of the A.I. That Powers Chatbots
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-21 | by ( Cade Metz | Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Now, in an indication that critics of sharing A.I. Google released the computer code that powers its online chatbot on Wednesday, after keeping this kind of technology concealed for many months. Much like Meta, Google said the benefits of freely sharing the technology — called a large language model — outweighed the potential risks. The company said in a blog post that it was releasing two A.I. language models that could help outside companies and independent software developers build online chatbots similar to Google’s own chatbot.

Persons: Meta, Gemma 2B, Gemma 7B Organizations: Google

☆ Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.’s Hottest Start-Ups
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-20 | by ( Erin Griffith | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Last May, Anthropic, one of the world’s hottest artificial intelligence start-ups, raised $450 million from investors including Google and Salesforce. By August, Anthropic had landed $100 million from two Asian telecoms. Then Amazon committed $4 billion to it, followed by $2 billion more from Google. This month, the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures closed a deal to invest $750 million in Anthropic. Its five funding deals stood out not just for their speed and size, but for their unusual structures.

Persons: Anthropic Organizations: Google, Menlo Ventures Locations: Anthropic

OpenAI has completed a deal that values the San Francisco artificial intelligence company at $80 billion or more, nearly tripling its valuation in less than 10 months, according to three people with knowledge of the deal. The company would sell existing shares in a so-called tender offer led by the venture firm Thrive Capital, the people said. The deal lets employees cash out their shares in the company, rather than a traditional funding round that would raise money for business operations. The deal is another example of the Silicon Valley deal-making machine pumping money into a handful of companies that specialize in generative A.I. The funding boom kicked off early last year, after OpenAI captured the public’s imagination with the release of the online chatbot ChatGPT.

Persons: OpenAI Organizations: SpaceX Locations: San Francisco

☆ In Big Election Year, A.I.’s Architects Move Against Its Misuse
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-16 | by ( Tiffany Hsu | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

is used in a year stacked with major elections around the world. start-up, joined its peers by prohibiting its technology from being applied to political campaigning or lobbying. In a blog post, the company, which makes a chatbot called Claude, said it would warn or suspend any users who violated its rules. It added that it was using tools trained to automatically detect and block misinformation and influence operations. “We expect that 2024 will see surprising uses of A.I.

Persons: chatbot, Bard, Anthropic, Claude, “, ” Organizations: Google

☆ OpenAI Unveils A.I. That Instantly Generates Eye-Popping Videos
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-15 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

In April, a New York start-up called Runway AI unveiled technology that let people generate videos, like a cow at a birthday party or a dog chatting on a smartphone, simply by typing a sentence into a box on a computer screen. The four-second videos were blurry, choppy, distorted and disturbing. But they were a clear sign that artificial intelligence technologies would generate increasingly convincing videos in the months and years to come. Just 10 months later, the San Francisco start-up OpenAI has unveiled a similar system that creates videos that look as if they were lifted from a Hollywood movie. A demonstration included short videos — created in minutes — of woolly mammoths trotting through a snowy meadow, a monster gazing at a melting candle and a Tokyo street scene seemingly shot by a camera swooping across the city.

Persons: OpenAI, — Locations: New York, San Francisco, Tokyo

☆ OpenAI Gives ChatGPT a Better ‘Memory’
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-13 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

OpenAI is giving ChatGPT a better memory. The San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up said on Tuesday that it was releasing a new version of its chatbot that would remember what users said so it could use that information in future chats. If a user mentions a daughter, Lina, who is about to turn 5, likes the color pink and enjoys jellyfish, for example, ChatGPT can store this information and retrieve it as needed. Now, ChatGPT can draw on a much wider and more detailed array of information. “We think that the most useful assistants are those that evolve with you — and keep up with you,” said Joanne Jang, an OpenAI product lead who helps oversee its memory project.

Persons: Lina, ”, OpenAI, Apple’s Siri, Alexa, Joanne Jang Locations: San Francisco

☆ Google Releases Gemini, an A.I.-Driven Chatbot and Voice Assistant
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-08 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

First, there were talking digital assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Then there were online chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard. On Thursday, Google introduced Gemini, a smartphone app that behaves like a talking digital assistant as well as a conversational chatbot. Immediately available to English speakers in more than 150 countries and territories, including the United States, Gemini replaces Bard and Google Assistant. The new app is designed to do an array of tasks, including serving as a personal tutor, helping computer programmers with coding tasks and even preparing job hunters for interviews, Google said.

Persons: Siri, Google Bard, Google Organizations: Google, Gemini Locations: United States

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