Tech & Society
Fans of AI-driven music pressed play, while a major recording company reached for the stop button. AI grabbed listeners by the ears when it helped produce a new single by The Beatles, mimicked the voices of beloved stars, and generated music from text prompts.
Tech & Society
Angst at the prospect of intelligent machines boiled over in moves to block or limit the technology. Fear of AI-related doomsday scenarios prompted proposals to delay research and soul searching by prominent researchers. Amid the doomsaying, lawmakers took dramatic regulatory steps.
Tech & Society
Information may not want to be free after all. The age-old practice of training AI systems on data scraped from the web came into question as copyright owners sought to restrict AI developers from using their works without permission.
Tech & Society
The movie capital became a front line in the battle over workplace automation. U.S. film and television writers went on strike in May, and actors followed in July. They took up a variety of issues with their employers, but concern that AI would damage...
Year in Review
This year, AI became virtually synonymous with generative AI. Launched in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT ushered in a banner year for AI-driven generation of text, images, and an ever widening range of data types.
Data Points
This week's top AI news and research stories featured all about Google's Gemini, updates on the EU's AI Act, the AI Alliance led by Meta and IBM, and a novel twist on self-supervised learning. But first:
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch - AI News & Insights: Last week, I participated in the United States Senate’s Insight Forum on Artificial Intelligence to discuss “Risk, Alignment, & Guarding Against Doomsday Scenarios.”
Machine Learning Research
A novel twist on self-supervised learning aims to improve on earlier methods by helping vision models learn how parts of an image relate to the whole.
Tech & Society
A new consortium aims to support open source AI. Led by Meta and IBM, dozens of organizations from the software, hardware, nonprofit, public, and academic sectors formed the AI Alliance, which plans to develop tools and programs that aid open development.
Tech & Society
Europe’s sweeping AI law moved decisively toward approval. After years of debate, representatives of the European Union’s legislative and executive branches agreed on a draft of the AI Act, a comprehensive approach to regulating AI.
Tech & Society
Google unveiled Gemini, its bid to catch up to, and perhaps surpass, OpenAI’s GPT-4. Google demonstrated the Gemini family of models that accept any combination of text (including code), images, video, and audio and output text and images. The demonstrations and metrics were impressive...
Letters
Last week, I participated in the United States Senate’s Insight Forum on Artificial Intelligence to discuss “Risk, Alignment, & Guarding Against Doomsday Scenarios.”