OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and CTO Mira Murati sat down with ABC News to discuss GPT-4 and the societal shifts ahead. While calling AI humanity's greatest technological leap, Altman admitted he is genuinely worried about large-scale disinformation and automated cyberattacks. Altman stressed that society has limited time to figure out safety and regulation before less cautious players enter the race.
The US Copyright Office just ruled that images generated solely from text prompts in tools like Midjourney can’t receive copyright protection. Officials compared writing prompts to a client commissioning an artist, meaning the machine controls traditional authorship. Works combining human curation and AI elements may still qualify on a case-by-case basis.
The UK government just unveiled a sweeping tech funding package in its spring budget, aiming to build sovereign AI and compute capabilities. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced a new £1M annual "Manchester Prize" for AI research over the next decade, alongside £900M to build an exascale supercomputer. It is an ambitious state intervention, though delivering on these multi-year targets remains an uphill political climb.
Stripe just teamed up with OpenAI to power global checkout, recurring billing, and tax compliance for ChatGPT Plus and DALL·E. In return, Stripe is integrating OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4 into its own platform, kicking off with an AI-powered documentation search that lets developers query technical guides in plain English.
Microsoft just laid off its entire AI ethics and society team as part of its recent 10,000-person job cuts. The group was tasked with ensuring ethical principles made it into actual product design, including flagging risks around rapid OpenAI integrations. Why it matters: As leadership pressures teams to ship AI at breakneck speed, the internal guardrails are being dismantled, even while Microsoft claims its policy office remains intact.
TSA just rolled out an AI-based algorithm update to nearly 1,000 airport body scanners to slash false alarms and invasive manual pat-downs. The system moves away from rigid binary gender assumptions that often triggered erroneous flags, making checkpoint screening faster and less intrusive for all travelers.
General Motors is developing a virtual in-car assistant powered by OpenAI tech via Microsoft's Azure cloud. Moving beyond basic voice controls, the assistant is designed to diagnose dashboard warning lights, play step-by-step videos for changing a flat tire, and schedule repair appointments directly from your vehicle.
Ford just launched a new wholly-owned subsidiary called Latitude AI, bringing on about 550 former Argo AI staff to develop hands-free and eyes-off automated driving. The team will focus on upgrading systems like BlueCruise to Level 3 autonomy. Why it matters: Ford is officially moving away from costly robotaxi bets to focus on driver-assist tech that can actually make money today.
Microsoft just announced that its Bing search engine has crossed 100 million active users, driven largely by the launch of Bing Chat. Notably, a third of active preview users are completely new to Bing, suggesting the AI assistant is drawing searchers away from rivals like Google. While still dwarfed by Google's 1 billion users, AI is finally making the search war interesting.
Stability AI just made its first-ever acquisition, buying Init ML, the team behind the popular image-editing suite Clipdrop. With over 15 million users already on board, Init ML will operate as an independent subsidiary, integrating Stability’s latest open-source generative models directly into Clipdrop’s everyday creative apps.
Microsoft is hosting a "Future of Work with AI" event on March 16th, where CEO Satya Nadella will showcase how AI tech reshapes everyday office tools. Leaks point to incoming upgrades for Word and Outlook powered by OpenAI, while enterprise apps like Dynamics 365 just got their own AI Copilot.
Stability AI is reportedly in talks to raise new capital at a valuation of around $4 billion, according to Bloomberg. The startup behind Stable Diffusion reached unicorn status just months ago after a $101 million round. While final terms could still change, the huge leap underscores soaring investor appetite for generative AI.
ChatGPT just threw a massive wrench into the European Union's flagship AI Act. Lawmakers designed the bill around specific high-risk uses, but general-purpose bots that write both poetry and malware shattered that framework. Lawmakers are now scrambling to rewrite the rules, sparking fierce debates and heavy tech lobbying ahead of final negotiations.
OpenAI just updated its developer terms alongside the launch of ChatGPT and Whisper APIs, officially ending the practice of using API data to train models by default. API data will now default to a 30-day retention window, and manual app vetting is being replaced with automated monitoring to make the platform far more enterprise-friendly.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just announced a new top-level product group dedicated to generative AI. The team plans to build creative tools first, followed by long-term "AI personas" for WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram to assist users. Zuckerberg noted there is still plenty of foundational work to do before shipping fully fledged features.
Elon Musk is reportedly setting up a new AI research lab to build an alternative to ChatGPT, according to The Information. Frustrated by what he views as "woke" political bias in OpenAI's bot, Musk has approached former DeepMind researcher Igor Babuschkin to spearhead the effort. The project is still in its earliest stages with no finalized contracts or concrete product roadmap.
Anthropic just began opening access to its text-generating AI models to select partners, kicking off commercialization with legal tech startup Robin AI. Robin is fine-tuning the model to help lawyers draft and negotiate contracts. The move signals that the safety-focused research lab is ready to monetize and take on OpenAI directly.
OpenAI just published its roadmap for navigating artificial general intelligence. The company says it will stick to gradual deployment, pledging far more caution as models get smarter alongside calls for independent safety audits and public governance. Why it matters: It marks OpenAI's official shift from open-access idealism to tightly guarded, incremental releases.
