Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 362, also known as the Delete Act, into law on Tuesday, giving California consumers the ability to demand all data brokers delete their personal information with a single request. The Delete Act expands privacy controls for state residents, giving the California Privacy Protection Agency more power to regulate data brokers, who will face strict penalties for failing to comply. The new law, authored by state Senator Josh Becker, makes California the first U.S. state to create a convenient deletion mechanism for consumers who don’t want their personal information held or sold by data brokers. Read more

Europe is moving forward in the supercomputer space, with two new exascale machines set to come online. Jupiter will be installed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Munich, with assembly set to start as early as Q1 2024. Scotland will be home to the UK’s first exascale supercomputer, to be hosted at the University of Edinburgh, with installation commencing in 2025. An exascale supercomputer can run calculations at speeds of one exaflop (1,000 petaflops) or greater. On completion, these two new supercomputers will land in the top percent of the world’s high-performers. Read more

OpenAI began previewing vision capabilities for GPT-4 in March, and the company is now starting to roll out the image input and output to users of its popular ChatGPT. The multimodal expansion also includes audio functionality, with OpenAI proclaiming late last month that “ChatGPT can now see, hear and speak.” The upgrade vaults GPT-4 into the multimodal category with what OpenAI is apparently calling GPT-4V (for “Vision,” though equally applicable to “Voice”). “We’re rolling out voice and images in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise users,” OpenAI announced. Read more

Startup Reka AI is releasing in preview its first artificial intelligence assistant, Yasa-1. The multimodal AI is described as “a language assistant with visual and auditory sensors.” The year-old company says it “trained Yasa-1 from scratch,” including pretraining foundation models “from ground zero,” then aligning them and optimizing to its training and server infrastructures. “Yasa-1 is not just a text assistant, it also understands images, short videos and audio (yes, sounds too),” said Reka AI co-founder and Chief Scientist Yi Tay. Yasa-1 is available via Reka’s APIs and as docker containers for on-site or virtual private cloud deployment. Read more

Yahoo is spinning out its Vespa platform, which leverages AI and data online at scale. The move is being positioned as an effort to make Vespa more widely available to third parties. After supporting Yahoo’s needs for 16 years, the unit in 2021 began serving external customers including Spotify, Wix and OkCupid for needs such as “searching millions of documents within a global organization, serving better data-driven online ads, or allowing AI-based language apps the ability to scale.” Yahoo says it will continue to invest in Vespa and remain its largest customer even after the split. Read more