AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
McDonald's just announced it is ending its automated drive-thru ordering test with IBM, removing the voice AI from over 100 locations by July 26, 2024. The chain isn't abandoning voice AI altogether, but plans to evaluate new partners by the end of the year.
OpenAI just appointed retired General Paul Nakasone, the former director of the NSA and US Cyber Command, to its board's Safety and Security Committee. While OpenAI claims his cybersecurity expertise will protect its AI supercomputers from hackers, whistleblower Edward Snowden blasted the move as a calculated betrayal and warned the public never to trust the company.
Meta just suspended plans to launch its Meta AI assistant in Europe following objections from the Irish Data Protection Commission over training on user data. Meta called the move a setback, arguing that blocking access to European content leaves it with only a "second-rate experience." Privacy advocates at Noyb countered that Meta simply refused to ask for explicit consent.
Sussex businessman Steve Endacott just launched "AI Steve" to run in next month's UK general election. Powered by Neural Voice, the AI avatar chats with voters 24/7 via voice and text, while Endacott acts as its physical proxy in Parliament voting strictly based on constituent feedback. Why it matters: It is a radical experiment in continuous direct democracy, testing whether AI can actually make politicians more responsive.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just addressed the G7 Summit, revealing the company poured $5 billion into cloud and AI infrastructure across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Kenya over the past three months. Teaming up with UAE-based G42, Microsoft is building trusted data zones and driving sustainable data centers to bend the productivity curve in emerging markets.
OpenAI just appointed retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone to its Board of Directors and Safety and Security Committee. The cybersecurity veteran and former head of U.S. Cyber Command will help guide the company in protecting critical model weights and supercomputing infrastructure from cyber threats. Why it matters: As AI systems grow more capable, securing frontier model infrastructure is becoming a paramount defense challenge.
Apple and OpenAI just sealed an AI partnership, but neither side is handing over any cash. Apple is essentially paying OpenAI with front-row exposure to hundreds of millions of users in exchange for ChatGPT access. While it is a pure bartering deal for now, Apple plans to bring in rivals like Google and could eventually shift toward a revenue-sharing model.
OpenAI is teaming up with Microsoft and Oracle to run Azure AI workloads on Oracle's cloud infrastructure. The deal shows OpenAI needs more capacity than Microsoft alone can provide to keep ChatGPT running smoothly. Frontier model pre-training stays on Microsoft supercomputers, but the partnership also puts Oracle in the awkward position of supplying both OpenAI and rival xAI.
A photographer just won an AI image competition using an actual photo of a flamingo. Miles Astray took third place and the People’s Choice award at the 1839 Color Photography Awards before judges realized it was real and disqualified him. Astray pulled the stunt to prove nature can still beat the machine.
SEO.ai broken down whether Google can spot ChatGPT-generated text and penalize it in search results. While tools can analyze probability patterns to catch AI text, Google hasn't officially penalized content just for being machine-made. Basically, the algorithm cares about whether content genuinely helps users, not whether a human typed it.
Meta's AI is now injecting itself into Facebook comment sections to generate automated summaries, capturing everything from bizarre rants to lighthearted jokes. While the recaps often highlight just how chaotic discussions have become, the move is also reigniting privacy concerns over Meta training its models on user-generated content.
Google just detailed more than a dozen technical fixes to AI Overviews following viral blunders like suggesting users eat rocks or put glue on pizza. The company blamed data voids, satirical sites, and sarcastic forum posts for the hallucinations, and is now restricting user-generated content and humor from triggering AI answers.
California Governor Gavin Newsom just warned lawmakers that heavy-handed AI rules could stifle innovation and jeopardize the state's tech dominance. Speaking at the GenAI Summit, he noted 35 of the top 50 AI firms call California home, emphasizing that regulation is necessary but overreaching would put the state in a perilous position.
Intel, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and AMD just formed the UALink Promoter Group to establish an open standard for interconnecting AI accelerator chips in data centers. UALink 1.0 will connect up to 1,024 GPUs in a computing pod. Notably missing are Nvidia and AWS, as tech giants push to break Nvidia's grip on AI hardware.
OpenAI just banned accounts linked to five covert influence operations originating from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel. Malicious actors used OpenAI's models to churn out multilingual comments, write political articles, and debug bot code across platforms like X and Telegram. Why it matters: Despite using generative AI to scale up spam, none of these networks managed to break through or gain meaningful traction with real audiences.
Magic Leap just announced a strategic partnership with Google to build next-gen AR solutions. The deal pairs Magic Leap's high-precision optics and manufacturing with Google's software platforms. It signals that Google is quietly gearing up for another major push into spatial computing.
OpenAI just launched OpenAI for Nonprofits, offering discounted rates of up to 75% on ChatGPT Business and Enterprise plans. The initiative aims to help resource-strapped organizations draft grant proposals, analyze data, and expand their social impact with dedicated workspace tools and strict privacy standards.
Former Google Maps PM Bilawal Sidhu predicts the GTA title after GTA 6 will be built directly inside an AI-driven digital twin of reality rather than manually rendered by humans. Why it matters: Reality capture tech is setting up a shift where future game worlds replicate the physical world automatically.
OpenAI just struck a content and product partnership with The Atlantic, bringing the magazine's reporting into ChatGPT with direct attribution and links. The publisher's product team gets early access to OpenAI tech and will experiment via a new "Atlantic Labs" microsite. Why it matters: OpenAI is steadily locking down premium journalism deals as AI search heats up.
OpenAI just signed another major media deal, this time partnering with Vox Media. The agreement brings content and archives from properties like The Verge, Eater, and New York Magazine directly into ChatGPT with attribution and links. Vox Media also plans to use OpenAI's tech internally to supercharge its commerce recommendation tools and ad-targeting platform.
