OpenAI’s China block leads to new developments

AI meets reality with humanoid robots

Author

Hamza Tahir
July 14, 2024

Welcome to AI and Security.

This edition includes:

  • OpenAI’s China block leads to new developments

  • AI meets reality with humanoid robots

  • Threat actors obtained phone numbers associated with Authy, Twilio says

  • and much more…

Reading time: 8 minutes.

 

AI News: Headliners

In the wake of OpenAI’s block, one of China’s leading artificial Intelligence companies, SenseTime unveils it’s latest model, SenseNova 5.5. Rising tensions between Washington and Beijing has already resulted in a ban on semiconductor exports but many in the Chinese community say that AI technologies should always be globally available. However, this provides a great opportunity for companies like SenseTime as it gives away 50m free tokens to help clients migrate from OpenAI. SenseNova 5.5 is comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-4. Will Chinese and other regional comapanies be able to fill the gap left by OpenAI ? Only time will tell.

The original lawsuit made 22 claims against GitHub, OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of violating copyright laws by training their AI powered GitHub copilot on developers work. However, the recent ruling deals a blow to these accusations, saying that the copilot suggested code was not close enough to the developers orignal work.

The cost of training AI models is rising sharply, with current models around the $100 million mark, future models could rise upto $100 billion.

AI News: Eye catching

AI powered robots are enjoying a new surge in interest as companies like Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia invest billions of dollars into their development. These human-like robots have been around for decades but recent leaps in AI will enable them to interpret language and follow commands. The market for humanoid robots is set to grow massively and in the words of Elon Musk such robots are “going to transform the world to a degree even greater than cars”. Before the robot hype becomes a reality, the considerable research challanges it poses have to be solved. In the words of Henrik Christensen, a profesor of computer science at the University of California at San Diego, “Robotics is where AI meets reality”.

According to a recent poll 75% of Democrats and 75% Republicans believe in a controlled approach to AI development over moving towards powerful AI as fast as possible.

The Securities and Exchange commission charged two investment advisors for making false claims about their purported use of Artificial Intelligence. The term they used for such false claims of using AI tools is “AI Washing” and SEC is committed to protect investors from such practices.

Occidental announced an agreement with Microsoft to sell 500,000 metric tonnes of Carbon Dioxide removal (CDR) credits over six years. Direct air capture is uniquely suited to remove residual emissions and the worlds largest corporations are integrating it into their net-zero carbon strategy.

The collaboration seeks to study the benefits and risks of using generative AI in an active laboratory. With leaps in language processing and computer vision, AI will become a very important aspect of all future research endeavours so this joint effort comes at a good time.

No one denies that AI holds transformative potential for companies world wide but the current investment optimism belies the fact that there is a sustained need for innovation and value creation for the AI industry to break even in the coming years. David Cahn of Sequoia Capital beleives that AI companies will collectively have to earn around $600 billion per year to pay for their infrastucture.

Cybersecurity News

An unauthenticated and unsecured API endpoint from Authy, a two factor authentication service that Twilio uses, has allowed threat actors to obtain data containing phone numbers of Twilio users. They might be used to carry out phishing attacks and other scams.

US Intelligence agencies use generative AI in classified settings for search and discovery assistance, ideation and brainstorming. They partner with cloud services like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS to have access to classified spaces for their work.

Tools

Moshi: A chatbot that thinks and responds at the same time

Leonardo AI: A suit of generative AI tools to enhance your artistic flair

TTSynth: Convert text to speech with natural voices and multiple languages

Nudge Security: Categorize all SaaS applications your employees are using to stay secure

ElevenLabs: Clone your voice

Knowledge and Wisdom

AI Class Gap
In the coming years there is going to be a divide in the AI haves and have not. Only a small group of people will have a proper undrstanding of AI technologies and how we can use them to optimize our work and everything else. The rest will only be passive users of AI when they interact with the products created by the first group. It is on us to decide which group we want to be in.

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