Artificial Intelligence

Hey, remember the guy who’s responsible for funding WeWork’s delusional business plan? Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son is really into AI and he’s aiming to flood the area with money. His clearest targets are Nvidia chips and energy startups.

Though Kurzweil still can’t explain precisely how he’s going to “merge” with a machine, he’s out here telling The New York Times he expects it to happen before he dies.

For the realists out there, I recommend Seneca.

Tech giants are rewriting the rules on web scraping, blaming unnamed third parties for disregarding robots.txt, and seemingly claiming the right to reuse anything posted anywhere for AI.

Now, Cloudflare is telling customers on its CDN that it can find and block AI bots that try to get around the rules.

The upshot of this globally aggregated data is that we can immediately detect new scraping tools and their behavior without needing to manually fingerprint the bot, ensuring that customers stay protected from the newest waves of bot activity.

Meta’s AI research team has a new system to create or retexture 3D objects based on a text prompt. It combines text-to-3D and text-to-texture generation models to go beyond AI-generated emoji or still images,

Their paper (pdf) claims 3D Gen’s output is “3× to 60× faster” and preferred by professional artists in comparison to alternatives.

Google spit out a surprise Pixel 9 hardware event announcement last week. It’s set for August 13th, two months earlier than the October phone events it’s held in the last few years.

But why? AI reasons? Yeah, probably, as David Pierce and Nilay Patel discussed on The Vergecast.

Bloomberg reports that Rain AI, which has OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as one of its backers, has hired Apple chip exec Jean-Didier Allegrucci to oversee the development of new AI processors that are supposed to reduce power consumption with “in-memory compute.”

Rain AI:

[Allegrucci] has worked and led silicon teams across a broad range of applications, including CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, ISPs, SoCs, and many others....At Apple, he oversaw the development of more than 30 SoCs used for flagship products, including iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple Watch, and many more.

Apple cited “regulatory uncertainties” and “interoperability requirements” under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) as reasons for delaying its AI features on EU iPhones, but Margrethe Vestager suggested something more sinister is at play at a Forum Europa event on Thursday:

“I find that very interesting, that they say ‘we will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition.’ I think that is the most stunning, open declaration that they know 100 percent that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.”

It joins other media companies like News Corp, Axel Springer, The Financial Times, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and The Associated Press in licensing content for training AI models like ChatGPT.

Financial details for the deal have not been disclosed. Time COO Mark Howard says:

“This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally as we continue to embrace innovative new ways of bringing Time’s journalism to audiences globally.”

Uh oh!

In multiple scenarios, Perplexity relied on AI-generated blog posts, among other seemingly authentic sources, to provide health information. For instance, when Perplexity was prompted to provide “some alternatives to penicillin for treating bacterial infections,” it directly cited an AI-generated blog.

The NYT profiles the big consulting firms raking in cash selling AI “solutions.” And it’s a lot of cash:

[Boston Consulting Group] now earns a fifth of its revenue — from zero just two years ago — through work related to artificial intelligence [...] Accenture, which provides consulting and technology services, booked $300 million in sales last year. About 40 percent of McKinsey’s business this year will be generative A.I. related, and KPMG International, which has a global advisory division, went from making no money a year ago from generative-A.I.-related work to targeting more than $650 million in business opportunities in the United States tied to the technology over the past six months.

Everyone better hope these systems can actually do all the things these companies claim they can do!

That’s the ol’ internet axiom that ran through my head as I read this New York Times roundup of T&C changes that have quietly occurred over the last year, coinciding with the need to feed the hungry AI machines with more and more data. The piece does a good job of showing the before and after language using images like this one for Google: