AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
BBC just detailed how artificial intelligence is resurrecting deceased icons like James Dean for the upcoming sci-fi film Back to Eden. Advanced digital cloning allows historic stars to act and speak alongside living casts, sparking intense debate across Hollywood over post-mortem likeness rights and whether dead actors will replace the living.
Thousands of writers just signed an open letter calling out OpenAI, Meta, and other AI developers for training language models on millions of copyrighted works without permission or compensation. The letter demands companies obtain licensing and fairly pay authors for both past and ongoing use, warning that unlicensed scraping threatens creators' livelihoods.
Qualcomm just announced a partnership with Meta to run its new open-source Llama 2 model directly on phone and PC chips starting in 2024. Instead of relying entirely on massive cloud data centers, running models locally on device could dramatically slash operating costs and unlock snappier on-device virtual assistants.
OpenAI just partnered with the American Journalism Project, committing $5M in direct funding and up to $5M in API credits to help local newsrooms deploy AI. The initiative includes a dedicated technology studio and pilot grants for roughly ten nonprofit news organizations. Why it matters: As the news industry grapples with generative AI risks, this collaboration attempts to give grassroots journalists a direct hand in shaping the tech.
Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque just warned that most outsourced coders in India could lose their jobs within the next year or two as generative AI drastically shrinks the headcount needed for software development. He pointed out that back-office roles away from human view are prime targets, though AI copilots will also push engineers toward higher-level collaboration.
New York police just used Rekor's AI surveillance system to bust a drug trafficker purely by analyzing his travel patterns. The software sifted through 16 million weekly license plate scans, flagging suspicious interstate routes and short stays. Automated plate readers are evolving fast from simple violation trackers into predictive crime monitors.
Elon Musk just revealed how his new startup xAI will leverage his wider empire, teaming up with Tesla on custom silicon and AI software while tapping Twitter data for training. Musk noted that public tweets will power text and video learning, while Tesla’s real-world driving data will teach the models about the physical world. Why it matters: Musk is bypassing third-party data and chip bottlenecks by turning his existing companies into a unified AI sandbox.
Hollywood actors just officially called a strike, putting AI replicas right at the center of the fight. SAG-AFTRA claims studios offered to pay background actors for a single scan and own their likeness forever, though studios deny this and say use is strictly limited. Why it matters: generative AI is triggering a full-scale labor war over who actually owns a performer's face.
OpenAI just inked a major partnership with the Associated Press to license the news organization's extensive text archives for AI model training. In return, the AP gets access to OpenAI's tech and expertise, though it made clear it won't be using generative AI to write actual news. The move gives OpenAI a legal, high-quality stream of data amid mounting copyright scrutiny.
Llion Jones, the last remaining author of the groundbreaking 2017 Transformer paper 'Attention is All You Need', just confirmed he is leaving Google to start his own company. All eight researchers behind the architecture powering ChatGPT and Midjourney have departed, launching startups like Cohere and Character.ai now valued at over $4.1 billion combined.
Bill Gates just pushed back on AI doomsday panic, arguing that while threats like deepfakes and job displacement are real, they are entirely manageable. Likening AI to the introduction of cars, he noted that society has always navigated transformative disruptions through smart safety standards and new technology.
Elon Musk just launched a new artificial intelligence company called xAI, setting an ambitious mission to "understand the true nature of the universe." The founding roster brings together researchers from DeepMind, OpenAI, and Google, with plans to lean on Twitter data and Tesla engineering to build a ChatGPT rival. Why it matters: Years after walking away from OpenAI, Musk is officially back in the frontier AI race with his own ecosystem to back him up.
OpenAI just signed a new six-year agreement with Shutterstock, securing training access to its massive library of images, videos, music, and metadata. In return, Shutterstock gets priority access to OpenAI's latest models, bringing advanced synthetic editing tools to its platform and GIPHY. High-quality, legally cleared training data is becoming the industry's ultimate moat.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis just confirmed that the viral leaked memo claiming tech giants have "no moat" against open-source AI is genuine. But he pushed back on the gloomy forecast, arguing that the newly united Google Brain and DeepMind teams are poised to lead the next decade of breakthroughs.
Comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors just slapped OpenAI and Meta with copyright infringement lawsuits in US District Court. The complaint alleges ChatGPT and LLaMA were trained on pirated books grabbed from "shadow libraries" like Bibliotik without consent, pointing to ChatGPT's book summaries as proof. The battle over AI training datasets is officially heating up.
UK finance expert Martin Lewis just sounded the alarm over an AI deepfake video circulating on Facebook that clones his likeness and voice to promote an investment scam. Lewis called the development terrifying and demanded regulatory crackdowns on big tech ad platforms, while Meta stated it proactively removed the offending videos.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw desktop and mobile web visits drop 9.7% in June, marking its first traffic decline since launch, according to Similarweb data. The dip likely stems from summer break for students and initial curiosity fading, though traffic may also just be migrating to its new iOS app. Why it matters: even with the drop, ChatGPT still easily crushes rivals like Google's Bard.
Shutterstock is rolling out full legal indemnification for enterprise customers using its generative AI images. The protection covers copyright and IP claims following an on-demand human review, matching the terms offered for traditional stock assets. It follows a similar move by Adobe as platforms race to assure cautious corporate buyers.
Google just updated its privacy policy to explicitly state that it may train AI models like Bard and Cloud AI on publicly available web data. While the company previously cited this practice for tools like Google Translate, the expanded wording effectively turns the open web into training fuel—without explaining how it handles copyrighted material.
Cal Fire is deploying AI-powered cameras that automatically detect smoke in remote areas, flagging potential wildfires with red boxes on dispatch monitors. Fire chiefs can also track predicted fire paths on their smartphones using terrain and wind models, taking human guesswork out of early detection.
