"I'm not here to diminish the need for AI training for educators, or to chastise Common Sense Media's involvement with OpenAI. Rather, it's useful for me to look at what this relationship produced, as a way of making sense of the kind of thinking that OpenAI is engaged in around education. One criticism of the course’s design is that its videos lack closed captioning. That's a problem from accessibility, and little mention of accessibility is acknowledged here. In the sections below I want to provide some useful counter-arguments for what the OpenAI course is "teaching." My goal is to offer more nuance to its definitions and highlight the bias of its framing. Much of this will be analyzed through the lens of my piece on "Challenging the Myths of Generative AI," which offers a more skeptical framework for thinking through how we talk about and use AI."

Cybernetic Forests

How Does OpenAI Imagine K-12 Education?

Close Reading OpenAI's training module for educators If you’re taking a free online training, it's helpful to understand who wrote that lesson p...

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #K12 #Education #Schools

"OpenAI tried to recover the data — and was mostly successful. However, because the folder structure and file names were “irretrievably” lost, the recovered data “cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs’ copied articles were used to build [OpenAI’s] models,” per the letter. “News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time,” counsel for The Times and Daily News wrote. “The news plaintiffs learned only yesterday that the recovered data is unusable and that an entire week’s worth of its experts’ and lawyers’ work must be re-done, which is why this supplemental letter is being filed today.” The plaintiffs’ counsel makes clear that they have no reason to believe the deletion was intentional. But they do say the incident underscores that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools."

TechCrunch

OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit (updated) | TechCrunch

In a court filing, lawyers for The NY Times and Daily news say that OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence against it.

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #LLMs #AITraining #NYT Copyright #IP

"Instagram is flooded with hundreds of AI-generated influencers who are stealing videos from real models and adult content creators, giving them AI-generated faces, and monetizing their bodies with links to dating sites, Patreon, OnlyFans competitors, and various AI apps. The practice, first reported by 404 Media in April, has since exploded in popularity, showing that Instagram is unable or unwilling to stop the flood of AI-generated content on its platform and protect the human creators on Instagram who say they are now competing with AI content in a way that is impacting their ability to make a living. According to our review of more than 1,000 AI-generated Instagram accounts, Discord channels where the people who make this content share tips and discuss strategy, and several guides that explain how to make money by “AI pimping,” it is now trivially easy to make these accounts and monetize them using an assortment of off-the-shelf AI tools and apps. Some of these apps are hosted on the Apple App and Google Play Stores. Our investigation shows that what was once a niche problem on the platform has industrialized in scale, and it shows what social media may become in the near future: a space where AI-generated content eclipses that of humans."

WIRED

Inside the Booming ‘AI Pimping’ Industry

AI-generated influencers based on stolen images of real-life adult content creators are flooding social media.

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #Instagram #SocialMedia

"OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are demanding the New York Times Co. supply documents detailing the newspaper’s claims that the tech companies’ AI models have decreased subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue. Those details are important to analyze if the tech giants’ use of the Times’ content to train AI systems is “fair use” under the Copyright Act, according to OpenAI and Microsoft’s separate letters requesting a pre-motion conference on the documents filed Monday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The fourth prong of the fair use doctrine tests whether use of copyrighted content affects the market for the original work."

OpenAI, Microsoft Demand NYT Prove AI’s Hurting News Business

OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are demanding the New York Times Co. supply documents detailing the newspaper’s claims that the tech companies’...

#AI #GenerativeAI #NYT #OpenAI #Microsoft #Copyright #FairUse

LoL - OpenA: Money-wasting machine :-D "Business spending on generative AI surged 500% this year, from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $13.8 billion, according to data released by Menlo Ventures on Wednesday. The report also found that OpenAI ceded market share in enterprise AI, declining from 50% to 34%. Anthropic doubled its market share from 12% to 24%. The results came from a survey of 600 enterprise IT decision-makers from companies with 50 or more employees, per the report. Menlo is an investor in Anthropic. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Tim Tully, a partner at Menlo Ventures, told CNBC in an interview that the power shift is thanks in part to the advancement of Claude 3.5 and because the majority of companies are using three or more large AI models. Although OpenAI and Anthropic dominated companies’ AI model use, he said, people are “juggling models” and that habit is “not a well-understood piece of data.” “Developers are pretty savvy — they know how to go back and forth between models fairly quickly,” Tully explained. “They’re choosing the model that fits their use case best... and that’s likely Claude 3.5.”"

CNBC

Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 billion, says Menlo Ventures

Enterprise spending on generative AI surged 500% this year, hitting $13.8 billion — up from just $2.3 billion in 2023, according to a new Menlo V...

#AI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #OpenAI #Claude

"In the United States, the approach to governing artificial intelligence (AI) is still in its early stages. As policymakers, developers, and civil society work together to navigate an uncertain digital future, encouraging greater openness in the AI model ecosystem will be critical to upholding democratic values, serving the public interest, and promoting innovation. There are five essential aspects of openness that span both technical and non-technical features of models: (1) open code that can be modified, (2) open licenses that enable third-party use, (3) transparency about model inputs, (4) transparency about possible model misuse, and (5) open standards for interconnection among AI models. Promoting these five attributes of openness can create the kind of AI ecosystem that better serves public transparency and democratic accountability, innovation and competition, education and research, and security. We explore the relationship between open AI models and each of these benefits and recommend steps that policymakers, researchers, AI companies, developers, and civil society organizations should take."

New America

Openness in Artificial Intelligence Models

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #OpenSource #OpenModels

"Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the physical world. In a blog post published last week, first spotted by Garbage Day, Niantic says it is building a “Large Geospatial Model.” This name, the company explains, is a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic explains that a Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”"

404 Media

Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World

Niantic says it is using data generated by Pokémon Go players to create a “Large Geospatial Model” that can navigate the real world and power ...

#Niantic #Pokemon #AR #AugmentedReality #AI #LGM

"An AI-generated nude photo scandal has shut down a Pennsylvania private school. On Monday, classes were canceled after parents forced leaders to either resign or face a lawsuit potentially seeking criminal penalties and accusing the school of skipping mandatory reporting of the harmful images. The outcry erupted after a single student created sexually explicit AI images of nearly 50 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaster Online reported. Head of School Matt Micciche seemingly first learned of the problem in November 2023, when a student anonymously reported the explicit deepfakes through a school portal run by the state attorney’s general office called "Safe2Say Something." But Micciche allegedly did nothing, allowing more students to be targeted for months until police were tipped off in mid-2024." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/11/school-failed-to-report-ai-nudes-of-kids-for-months-now-parents-are-suing/ #USA #Pennsylvania #AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #DeepFakes

"Top Justice Department antitrust officials have decided to ask a judge to force Alphabet Inc.’s Google to sell off its Chrome browser in what would be a historic crackdown on one of the world’s biggest tech companies. The department will ask the judge, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, to require measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system, according to people familiar with the plans. Antitrust officials, along with states that have joined the case, also plan to recommend Wednesday that federal judge Amit Mehta impose data licensing requirements, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter. If Mehta accepts the proposals, they have the potential to reshape the online search market and the burgeoning AI industry. The case was filed under the first Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden. It marks the most aggressive effort to rein in a technology company since Washington unsuccessfully sought to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-18/doj-will-push-google-to-sell-off-chrome-to-break-search-monopoly #USA #DoJ #Google #Chrome #Antitrust #Search #SearchEngines #Monopolies #Oligopolies #AI #Android

MegaLoL - LLM tuga made in Barcelona (Espanha)!!! -> ""Vamos estar a trabalhar em cima de trabalho já desenvolvido por estes centros de investigação: portanto, há trabalho de vários anos nesta área, tanto na área dos dados para a língua portuguesa, trabalho feito pelo centro de investigação da Nova Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT), há trabalho feito também no âmbito do Técnico" e "também há trabalho que vai ser transferido do lado da Unbabel, por toda a experiência" que a tecnológica "tem a criar modelos multilíngue e modelos que estão sendo, neste momento, treinados em supercomputadores", diz. Em suma, "a equipa que vai estar a trabalhar na criação deste LLM é uma equipa que já tem muitos anos de experiência nesta área", sublinha Paulo Dimas. Em cima deste trabalho "é possível entregar este LLM no primeiro trimestre" e "a isso junta-se uma colaboração muito estreita com a Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, que criou condições a nível de computação", essencial para este tipo de modelos de grande escala. "E a Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia tem vindo a investir em capacidade computacional que vai ser usada aqui", já que "na prática vamos utilizar (...) um computador que está em Barcelona, mas que parte dele é português", prossegue. Ou seja, "temos um computador português que fisicamente está em Barcelona, mas uma percentagem é do Estado português", sintetiza."

CNN Portugal

ChatGPT português chama-se Amália e vai "escrever português correto, falado em Portugal". Projeto é lançado em 2026

Novo modelo de linguagem de Inteligência Artificial vai preservar o português de Portugal, a representatividade cultural e a proteção de dados

#IA #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Portugal #Unbabel

"Amazon’s race to create an AI-based successor to its voice assistant Alexa has hit more snags after a series of earlier setbacks over the past year. Employees have found there is too much of a delay between asking the technology for something and the new Alexa providing a response or completing a task. The problem, known as latency, is a critical shortcoming, employees said in an internal memo from earlier this month obtained by Fortune. If released as is, customers could become frustrated and the product—a particularly critical one to Amazon as it tries to keep up in the crucial battle to launch blockbuster consumer AI products—could end up as a failure, some employees fear. “Latency remains a critical issue requiring significant improvements,” before the new version of Alexa could launch, the memo said."

Fortune

Exclusive: Leaked Amazon memos identify critical flaws in the upcoming AI version of Alexa | Fortune

The planned update to voice assistant Alexa is bogged down with problems including latency, which requires "significant improvements,” an interna...

#AI #GenerativeAI #Amazon #Alexa #AIAgents #AIBubble #AIHype

"Meta’s open large language model family, Llama, isn’t “open-source” in a traditional sense, but it’s freely available to download and build on—and national defense agencies are among those putting it to use. A recent Reuters report detailed how Chinese researchers fine-tuned Llama’s model on military records to create a tool for analyzing military intelligence. Meta’s director of public policy called the use “unauthorized.” But three days later, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of public affairs, announced that Meta will allow use of Llama for U.S. national security. “It shows that a lot of the guardrails that are put around these models are fluid,” says Ben Brooks, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He adds that “safety and security depends on layers of mitigation.”"

IEEE Spectrum

Meta Opens Its AI Models for the (U.S.) Military

But will the second Trump administration see AI as a friend or foe?

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIWarfare #AISafety #DoD #Meta #Llama

#AI #BigTech #SiliconValley #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #AIHype: "Big Tech’s AI spending continues to accelerate at a blistering pace, with the four giants well on track to spend upwards of a quarter trillion dollars predominantly towards AI infrastructure next year. Though there have recently been concerns about the durability of this AI spending from Big Tech and others downstream, these fears have been assuaged, with management teams stepping out to highlight AI revenue streams approaching and surpassing $10 billion with demand still outpacing capacity. Below, I take a look at the growth in AI spending from Big Tech this year and yet, as it quickly approaches the quarter-trillion mark, and next week, I’ll discuss exactly what this means for the market’s biggest beneficiary." https://www.forbes.com/sites/bethkindig/2024/11/14/ai-spending-to-exceed-a-quarter-trillion-next-year/

"The facts on the ground show the reality: 15 years after Bitcoin was created, no-one uses it as a currency. It’s an asset. It’s still far slower and more expansive even for complex international money transfers than the “old world” financial system. Bitcoin and the other currencies around it are barely even useful for criminals: online drug markets proved much easier for law enforcement to infiltrate than traditional organised crime networks, and the traceability of crypto transactions has brought down crime kingpins across the globe. The failure of Bitcoin – or any other cryptocurrency – to actually get used as a currency has led to people searching for more outlandish explanations as to why is might have value, rather than just a high price. It was once claimed it would topple the existing financial order, but its embrace from hedge funds, big tech, and other financial world staples make those ring hollow. There is a deeply confused claim that because Bitcoin mining requires huge amounts of energy, that means that Bitcoins are themselves a store of energy – almost like a digital battery. This sounds clever to a certain sort of galaxy brained young man, but incredibly dumb to everyone else. The latter group are correct: a forest fire might incinerate a huge number of trees, but that does not make fire a store of wood."

The New World

Thanks to Trump, Bitcoin is booming.. but it is still useless

Key questions about the cryptocurrency remain unanswered even as the Republican’s victory causes it to soar

#USA #Trump #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Bitcoin

"AI researchers are still grappling for the right metaphors to understand our enigmatic creations. But as we humans make choices on how we deploy and use these systems, how we study them, and how we craft and apply laws and regulations to keep them safe and ethical, we need to be acutely aware of the often unconscious metaphors that shape our evolving understanding of the nature of their intelligence." https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adt6140?af=R #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #ChatBots #Metaphors #Language #Rhetoric

"Elon Musk might be in charge of the business of Grok, but the artificial intelligence has seemingly gone into business for itself, labeling Musk as one of the worst offenders when it comes to spreading misinformation online. User Gary Koepnick asked the AI which person spreads the most information on Twitter/X—and the service did not hesitate in pointing a finger at its creator. “Based on various analyses, social media sentiment, and reports, Elon Musk has been identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X since he acquired the platform,” it wrote, later adding “Musk has made numerous posts that have been criticized for promoting or endorsing misinformation, especially related to political events, elections, health issues like COVID-19, and conspiracy theories. His endorsements or interactions with content from controversial figures or accounts with a history of spreading misinformation have also contributed to this perception.”"

MSN

#AI #GenerativeAI #SocialMedia #Twitter #Musk #Disinformation

I'm not sure this kind of tools are legal in the European Union... "Fast-forward to today, and millions of artists have deployed two tools born from that Zoom: Glaze and Nightshade, which were developed by Zhao and the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab (an acronym for “security, algorithms, networking, and data”). Arguably the most prominent weapons in an artist’s arsenal against nonconsensual AI scraping, Glaze and Nightshade work in similar ways: by adding what the researchers call “barely perceptible” perturbations to an image’s pixels so that machine-learning models cannot read them properly. Glaze, which has been downloaded more than 6 million times since it launched in March 2023, adds what’s effectively a secret cloak to images that prevents AI algorithms from picking up on and copying an artist’s style. Nightshade, which I wrote about when it was released almost exactly a year ago this fall, cranks up the offensive against AI companies by adding an invisible layer of poison to images, which can break AI models; it has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times. Thanks to the tools, “I’m able to post my work online,” Ortiz says, “and that’s pretty huge.” For artists like her, being seen online is crucial to getting more work. If they are uncomfortable about ending up in a massive for-profit AI model without compensation, the only option is to delete their work from the internet. That would mean career suicide."

MIT Technology Review

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

The tools Glaze and Nightshade are giving artists hope that they can fight back against AI that hoovers internet data to train. Are they enough?

#AI #GenerativeAI #WebScraping #AITraining #GeneratedImages

"The fact that OpenAI did not publish the absolute values of the above chart’s x-axis is telling. If you have a way of outcompeting human experts on STEM tasks, but it costs $1B to run on a days worth of tasks, you can't get to a capabilities explosion, which is the main thing that makes the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI) so compelling to many people. Additionally, the y-axis is not on a log scale, while the x-axis is, meaning that cost increases exponentially for linear returns to performance (i.e. you get diminishing marginal returns to ‘thinking’ longer on a task). This reminds me of quantum computers or fusion reactors — we can build them, but the economics are far from working. Technical breakthroughs are only one piece of the puzzle. You also need to be able to scale (not that this will come as news to Silicon Valley). Smarter base models could decrease the amount of test-time compute needed to complete certain tasks, but scaling up the base models would also increase the inference cost (i.e. the price of prompting the model). It’s not clear which effect would dominate, and the answer may depend on the task. And if researchers really are reaching a plateau, they may be stuck with base models only marginally smarter than what’s published right now."

Is Deep Learning Actually Hitting a Wall?

And is there a “basically clear” path to AGI?

#AI #GenerativeAI #DeepLearning #PeakAI #AGI #AIBubble #AIHype

"The companies are facing several challenges. It’s become increasingly difficult to find new, untapped sources of high-quality, human-made training data that can be used to build more advanced AI systems. Orion’s unsatisfactory coding performance was due in part to the lack of sufficient coding data to train on, two people said. At the same time, even modest improvements may not be enough to justify the tremendous costs associated with building and operating new models, or to live up to the expectations that come with branding a product as a major upgrade. There is plenty of potential to make these models better. OpenAI has been putting Orion through a months-long process often referred to as post-training, according to one of the people. That procedure, which is routine before a company releases new AI software publicly, includes incorporating human feedback to improve responses and refining the tone for how the model should interact with users, among other things. But Orion is still not at the level OpenAI would want in order to release it to users, and the company is unlikely to roll out the system until early next year, one person said. The Information previously reported some details of OpenAI’s challenges developing its new model, including with coding tasks." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-google-and-anthropic-are-struggling-to-build-more-advanced-ai #AI #GenerativeAI #PeakAI #OpenAI #AIBubble #AIHype #AGI

"OpenAI is preparing to launch a new artificial intelligence agent codenamed “Operator” that can use a computer to take actions on a person’s behalf, such as writing code or booking travel, according to two people familiar with the matter. In a staff meeting on Wednesday, OpenAI’s leadership announced plans to release the tool in January as a research preview and through the company’s application programming interface for developers, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-nears-launch-of-ai-agents-to-automate-tasks-for-users #AI #AIAgents #OpenAI #PeakAI #Automation