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  • Google hires founders of chatbot start-up Character.AI

Google hires founders of chatbot start-up Character.AI

Also: Nvidia reportedly delays its next AI chip due to a design flaw

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AI KATANA
August 04, 2024

Morning!

In today’s newsletter, we explore a series of significant developments in the AI industry. Google has acquired talent from Character.AI to boost its AI research division, DeepMind. Meanwhile, Sam Altman’s increasing influence and ethical controversies at OpenAI highlight the growing concerns over AI regulation. Meta’s partnership with celebrities for its AI assistant demonstrates the company’s innovative approach to user engagement. Nvidia faces a delay in its new AI chip due to a design flaw, impacting key clients. The academic world grapples with AI-induced plagiarism issues, calling for clearer guidelines. Google retracts an ad for its Gemini AI after backlash over its portrayal of AI in personal contexts. Additionally, we delve into the cultural and regulatory divides in AI policy debates, offer updates on AI job opportunities and tools, and cover venture capital movements, including a significant investment in the Korean AI startup Rebellions.

Sliced:

  • 👩🏻 Google hires founders of chatbot start-up Character.AI

  • 💡 OpenAI’s Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid

  • 🎤 Meta courts celebs like Awkwafina to voice AI assistants ahead of Meta Connect

  • ⚠️ Nvidia reportedly delays its next AI chip due to a design flaw

  • 🧑🏽‍🔬 AI is complicating plagiarism. How should scientists respond?

  • ⛔️ Google pulls 'Dear Sydney' Gemini AI ad after online backlash

  • 👨🏻‍💻 What Tech Bros Really Think About AI

has hired Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, co-founders of Character.AI, along with several other staff members, to join its AI research division, DeepMind. This move is part of Google's strategy to enhance its AI capabilities by acquiring talent and technology from promising start-ups. Character.AI, backed by venture capital and known for its LLM-based conversational models, will license its technology to Google while most of its team continues to develop its products independently. This deal mirrors similar partnerships in the AI sector, highlighting the intense competition and high development costs associated with cutting-edge AI advancements.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has become a pivotal figure in the AI landscape, promising transformative economic impacts through technologies like ChatGPT. However, concerns about his transparency and the ethical practices of OpenAI are mounting. Despite public endorsements of AI regulation, Altman and OpenAI have been accused of lobbying against stringent controls, prioritizing growth and profit over safety. Altman's indirect financial interests in AI and questionable candidness have further fueled skepticism. As AI's influence expands, the need for robust, transparent oversight is emphasizedwith calls for international cooperation to ensure AI benefits humanity broadly rather than serving a few powerful entities.

Meta is rapidly securing deals with high-profile celebrities, such as Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key, and Judi Dench, to voice its new AI assistant, MetaAI, which will be unveiled at the upcoming Meta Connect conference in September. The company aims to integrate these celebrity voices across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. These deals, facilitated through top Hollywood talent agencies, involve substantial financial incentives, with some contracts potentially worth millions. This initiative follows the discontinuation of a previous celebrity AI chatbot feature, emphasizing Meta's continued investment in enhancing user engagement through familiar and appealing voices.

Nvidia has postponed the production of its upcoming AI chip, the Blackwell B200, due to a late-discovered design flaw. This delay, extending the production timeline by at least three months, means the chips won't be available in significant quantities until next year. Nvidia communicated this setback to major clients, including Microsoft and another cloud provider. The Blackwell B200 chips are highly anticipated as successors to the H100 chips, which are integral to many AI cloud services and have contributed significantly to Nvidia's market value. Nvidia is collaborating with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to address the issue and ensure the chips are ready for release in the first quarter of next year.

The rapid adoption of generative AI tools in academia is raising complex questions about plagiarism and ethical writing practices. While AI tools like ChatGPT can improve writing efficiency and clarity, their use blurs the lines between original work and unauthorized content generation. The academic community is grappling with defining plagiarism in the context of AI, with some experts suggesting that unattributed machine-generated text may not constitute traditional plagiarism but still raises ethical concerns. High-profile cases of alleged plagiarism and ongoing lawsuits highlight the tension between innovation and intellectual property rights. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into writing tools, the challenge of detecting and regulating its use intensifies, necessitating clearer guidelines and policies in academic publishing.

⛔️ Google pulls 'Dear Sydney' Gemini AI ad after online backlash

Google has retracted its "Dear Sydney" ad for the Gemini AI chatbot following significant online backlash. The commercial, featuring a father using Gemini to help his daughter write a fan letter to Olympic athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, was criticized for undermining genuine human expression and authenticity. Critics, including media professionals and the general public, found the ad unsettling and out of touch, arguing that it missed the mark by implying AI-generated text is preferable to personal, heartfelt communication from children. This incident highlights ongoing concerns about the role of AI in creative and personal contexts, with many calling for a reevaluation of how these technologies are marketed and integrated into everyday life.

The debate surrounding AI policy is marked by four key fault lines. First, the cultural divide between Washington, D.C., where regulatory and legislative concerns dominate, and Silicon Valley, where the focus is on AI safety and risk management. Second, the timelines and probabilities related to the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) are contentious, with many fearing existential risks (x-risk) like human extinction. Third, the legal challenges associated with AI regulation are significant, with many in tech lacking legal literacy on issues such as First Amendment implications and the dormant Commerce Clause. Lastly, the construction of x-risk itself is debated, with varying opinions on whether rapid development of AGI leads to higher x-risk. These discussions reveal a broader struggle to balance the precautionary principle with the need for innovation and progress in AI development.

🧑🏽‍💻 AI Jobs

🛠️ AI tools updates

Black Forest Labs has introduced FLUX.1, an advanced AI image generator known for its proficiency in creating human hands, a notable improvement over previous models like Stable Diffusion. Developed by key researchers who pioneered the latent diffusion technique, FLUX.1 aims to surpass competitors such as Midjourney and DALL-E in image quality and text prompt accuracy. The model features a hybrid architecture combining transformer and diffusion techniques, boasting 12 billion parameters. Despite its technical achievements, there are ethical concerns regarding its training data, suspected to involve unauthorized image scraping. Black Forest Labs plans to expand into video generation, building on FLUX.1's capabilities.

💵 Venture Capital updates

South Korean AI chipmaker Rebellions has secured an additional $15 million in funding from Wa’ed Ventures, a $500 million fund owned by Saudi Aramco, bringing its total Series B funding to $225 million. This strategic investment aims to accelerate Rebellions' growth and expand its business opportunities, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where technology investment is thriving. Rebellions, founded in 2020, specializes in AI inference accelerators and plans to release its third chip, named Rebel, in the second half of 2024 with the support of Samsung Foundry. This funding underscores Saudi Arabia's commitment to advancing its semiconductor industry as part of its broader technological development vision.

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