The U.S. Copyright Office is warning of an urgent national need for protection against deepfakes. In the first installment of a multipart report on the adverse effects of artificial intelligence on copyright, the office recommends the immediate enactment of a law to combat AI-driven “digital replicas.” Acknowledging that copyright has always had a symbiotic relationship with technology, as well as AI’s tremendous potential, the report nonetheless decries the proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes, “from celebrities’ images endorsing products to politicians’ likenesses seeking to affect voter behavior.” Continue reading Copyright Office Calls for Federal Law Regulating Deepfakes

New documents submitted to state regulators for license applications are shedding light on how Elon Musk plans to make his X app into a payment platform that competes with services like Venmo and PayPal. Plans include letting users store money within their X accounts that can then be applied to purchases — including in physical stores — or issuing payment to other individuals or businesses. The filings come as X seeks to expand its revenue pool beyond advertising, which had in its Twitter days accounted for as much as 90 percent of sales. Ad income is said to have fallen below that threshold since Musk purchased the company in October 2022. Continue reading Musk Takes Next Step Toward Making X an ‘Everything App’

YouTube is experimenting with a feature that allows viewers to add contextual “Notes” under videos, similar to what X does with its Community Notes. The Google-owned company says the intent is to provide clarity around things like “when a song is meant to be a parody,” when newly reviewed products are available for purchase, or “when older footage is mistakenly portrayed as a current event.” However, the timing preceding a pivotal U.S. presidential election and facing concerns about deepfakes and  misinformation is no doubt intentional. The pilot will initially be available on mobile in the United States. Continue reading YouTube to Tackle Misinformation with Crowdsourced Notes

California tech companies are bristling at a state bill that would force them to enact strict safety protocols, including installing “kill switches” to turn-off AI models that present a public risk. Silicon Valley has emerged as a global AI leader, and the proposed law would impact not only OpenAI, but Anthropic, Cohere, Google and Meta Platforms. The bill, SB 1047, focuses on what its lead sponsor, State Senator Scott Wiener, calls “common sense safety standards” for frontier models. Should the bill become law, it could affect even firms like Amazon that provide AI cloud services to California customers even though they are not based in the state. Continue reading Tech Firms Push Back Against California AI Safety Regulation

OpenAI has begun training a new flagship artificial intelligence model to succeed GPT-4, the technology currently associated with ChatGPT. The new model — which some are already calling GPT-5, although OpenAI hasn’t yet shared its name — is expected to take the company’s compute to the next level as it works toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), intelligence equal to or surpassing human cognitive abilities. The company also announced it has formed a new Safety and Security Committee two weeks after dissolving the old one upon the departure of OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Continue reading OpenAI Is Working on New Frontier Model to Succeed GPT-4

Elon Musk’s xAI has secured $6 billion in Series B funding. While the company says the funds will be “used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development,” some outlets are reporting a significant portion is earmarked to build an AI supercomputer to power the next generation of its foundation model Grok. The company publicly released the open-source Grok-1 as a chatbot on X social in November, and recently debuted Grok-1.5 and 1.5V iterations with long-context capability and image understanding. Continue reading Musk Said to Envision Supercomputer as xAI Raises $6 Billion

Meta Platforms is testing its own TweetDeck-like app for Threads, the text-and-image focused social network it launched in early July 2023 to rival what was then Twitter (becoming X later that month). The new feature allows test users to pin up to 100 feeds on a homepage and display them on a single screen, making it simple to peruse posts from different follows, recommendation feeds or content propagated through specific topics or keywords. The experimental layout is currently being tested only for Threads on the web. Threads currently has more than 150 million users. Continue reading Threads Tests New Feature That Draws Comparisons to X Pro

Social platform X, formerly Twitter, has added news summaries generated by Grok, the chatbot of Elon Musk’s xAI, exclusively for Premium subscribers. The personalized trending “Stories” appear in the For You tab of the app’s Explore section. The feature is available on the web and for iOS users for now. For You consists of trending items shared across the platform and within individual networks, along with recommended posts. Grok essentially becomes the voice of X’s news aggregator, teasing articles with short blurbs that link to what X users are saying on the subject. Critics are concerned about Grok’s tone, interpretation of information, and potential for creating fake news. Continue reading X Premium Intros News Blurbs Generated by Musk’s Grok AI

Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) is preparing to launch a streaming video app for smart TVs. Though still in development, with no formal launch date announced, X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted a “sneak peek” that indicates the app will have a “trending” algorithm that pushes popular content and will be AI-powered to deliver a “personalized experience.” Yaccarino said the X video app will also have “effortless casting” so content can be easily sent to a larger screen from a mobile device. Availability is billed as “coming soon to most smart TVs.” Continue reading Yaccarino Says X Streaming Video App for TVs ‘Coming Soon’

Microsoft-owned business and employment-focused social platform LinkedIn plans to add games and a vertical-scroll feed of short videos. But the career-centric platform will still be all work, even as it adds play. The intent is to have the TikTok-like video feed filled with professionally themed content, and the games will be geared toward relationship building, while also potentially getting people to spend more time using LinkedIn. The video feed is in the test phase, while code hinting at the direction of the gaming feature has been discovered by some astute app watchers. Continue reading LinkedIn Tests Vertical Video Feed, Experiments with Games

Nvidia unveiled what it is calling the world’s most powerful AI processing system, the Blackwell GPU, purpose built to power real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at what the company says will be up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessors. Blackwell’s capabilities will usher in what the company promises will be a new era in generative AI computing. News from Nvidia’s GTC 2024 developer conference included the NIM software platform, purpose built to streamline the setup of custom and pre-trained AI models in a production environment, and the DGX SuperPOD server, powered by Blackwell. Continue reading GTC: Nvidia Unveils Blackwell GPU for Trillion-Parameter LLMs

Elon Musk’s xAI has released its Grok chatbot and open-sourced part of the underlying Grok-1 model architecture for any developer or entrepreneur to use for purposes including commercial applications. Musk unveiled Grok in November and announced that it would be publicly released this month. The chatbot itself is available to X social premium members, who can ask the cheeky AI questions and get answers with a snarky attitude inspired by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” sci-fi novel. The training for Grok’s foundation LLM is said to include X social posts. Continue reading Grok-1 Architecture Open-Sourced for General Release by xAI

Decentralized social platform Bluesky has open-sourced a tool called Ozone that facilitates custom moderation. Debuting this week, Ozone lets individuals or teams collaboratively review and label content on the platform. “We’re opening up the ability to run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app,” the company says, explaining “you’ll be able to create and subscribe to additional moderation services” on top of that which is administered by Bluesky’s moderation team, “giving you unprecedented control over your social media experience.” Continue reading Ozone Helps Users Customize Content Moderation on Bluesky

Elon Musk wants to bring videos posted to X (formerly Twitter) to a bigger screen. The social platform plans to launch a YouTube-like app on smart TVs, starting with Samsung TVs and Amazon Fire TVs. Since purchasing Twitter in October 2022, Musk has emphasized its evolution to a “video-first” platform as part of its rebranding as X. Internal research claims X users watch videos in eight out of 10 visits, which would make it an obvious opportunity for expansion. In the early stages, it appears the focus will be long-form video, which can more easily accommodate advertising. Continue reading X Teases Launch of a YouTube-Like Video App for Smart TVs

Bluesky — Jack Dorsey’s alternative to X (formerly Twitter) — has been quietly ramping up, recently opening for general public sign-ups while adding hashtag support and the ability for users to host their own servers. The company last month appointed Aaron Rodericks to the newly created position of head of trust and safety, a title he held at Twitter before Elon Musk purchased it and decimated the division (which he now co-heads with X CEO Linda Yaccarino). The technical updates will make it easier for users to sort threads for topics of interest and takes a big step toward federation and allowing users to freely move their accounts. Continue reading Bluesky Opens to the Public Ahead of the Presidential Election