Tag: openai

AI4Bharat Researchers Said to Raise $12 Million Funding From Peak XV, Lightspeed

Researchers at India’s AI4Bharat are raising $12 million (nearly Rs. 100 crore) from venture capital firms Peak XV and Lightspeed Venture for an artificial intelligence startup, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The larger-than-usual seed funding round underscores the growing interest in generative AI, after OpenAI‘s ChatGPT dazzled users with its ability to engage in human-like conversations. Most seed rounds are usually up to $1 million (nearly Rs. 8 crore) to $2 million (nearly Rs. 16 crore).

Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who worked on developing AI models for speech recognition and translation at AI4Bharat, are launching a new venture called Sarvam that will develop custom-made large language models (LLMs) for India-centric use-cases, the sources said. 

Peak XV and Lightspeed did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

LLMs are computer algorithms that understand and generate text in a human-like fashion. They power virtual assistants widely in use on smartphones and the Internet.

The move comes months after Indian-government backed AI4Bharat unveiled a mobile assistant that aims to make information on government schemes accessible in multiple languages.

The investment is among the first from Peak XV Partners after rebranding from Sequoia Capital India and SEA following a split with its US-based parent fund last month.

Peak XV’s other AI investments include voice assistant firm AI Rudder, computer vision firm Mad Street Den and enterprise marketing platform Insider, according to its website.

The buzz around generative AI among both consumers and businesses has helped related start-ups draw funding even as an uncertain economy saps investments for other companies.

Indian AI start-ups have raised $583 million (nearly Rs. 4,800 crore) this year, as of June, according to data from Venture Intelligence. They raised a total of $2.45 billion (nearly Rs. 20,650 crore) last year.

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Draft EU Artificial Intelligence Rules Could Hurt Europe

The proposed EU Artificial Intelligence legislation would jeopardise Europe’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty, according to an open letter signed by more than 160 executives at companies ranging from Renault to Meta.

EU lawmakers agreed to a set of draft rules this month where systems like ChatGPT would have to disclose AI-generated content, help distinguish so-called deep-fake images from real ones and ensure safeguards against illegal content.

Since ChatGPT became popular, several open letters have been issued calling for regulation of AI and raising the “risk of extinction from AI”.

Signatories of previous letters included Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio – two of the three so-called “godfathers of AI”.

The third, Yann LeCun, who works at Meta, signed Friday’s letter challenging the EU regulations. Other signatories included executives from a diverse set of companies such as Spanish telecom company Cellnex, French software company Mirakl and German investment bank Berenberg.

Those companies, along with Renault and Meta, did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

We are principally aiming at the European Parliament version because they decided to move from a risk-based approach to a technology-based approach, which was not in the initial text, Cedric O, former digital minister of France and one of the three organizers of the letter, told Reuters.

He, along with Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, founding partner of La Famiglia VC, and René Obermann, Airbus chairman, organised the open letter.

The letter warned that under the proposed EU rules technologies like generative AI would become heavily regulated and companies developing such systems would face high compliance costs and disproportionate liability risks.

Such regulation could lead to highly innovative companies moving their activities abroad and investors withdrawing their capital from the development of European AI in general, it said.

OpenAI’s Altman, who had in May threatened to pull ChatGPT from Europe if it becomes too hard to comply with upcoming AI laws, later reversed his position and said the company has no plans to exit.

“I am convinced they have not carefully read the text but have rather reacted on the stimulus of a few who have a vested interest in this topic,” Dragos Tudorache, who co-led the drafting of EU proposals, told Reuters.

The suggestions made in the letter are already in the draft legislation, he said.

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Inflection AI Raises $1.3 Billion Investment From Microsoft and Nvidia

Inflection AI, a startup backed by several Silicon Valley heavyweights, said on Thursday it had raised $1.3 billion (nearly Rs. 10,670 crore) from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia, amid a boom in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.

The investment, a mix of cash and cloud credit, valued the one-year-old company at $4 billion (nearly Rs. 32,840 crore), a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Inflection released its chatbot Pi last month. Founded by Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, it focused on building consumer-faced AI products and is considered a top rival of OpenAI.

Pi uses generative AI technology, similar to ChatGPT, to interact with users through dialogues, allowing people to ask questions and share feedback. Inflection said it wants to build a personal AI that will help people plan, schedule, gather information and perform other tasks.

Palo Alto, California-based Inflection AI has about 35 employees. It raised $225 million (nearly Rs. 1,850 crore) in a first round of funding in early 2022 from Greylock, Microsoft and Reid Hoffman.

Last week, it released a report on its model Inflection-1, which powers Pi, and claims it has outperformed most models available.

Most of the funding will be used to build computing power to develop a more powerful foundation model, according to Suleyman, chief executive at Inflection.

“We’ll be building a cluster of around 22,000 H100s. This is approximately three times more compute than what was used to train all of GPT4. Speed and scale are what’s going to really enable us to build a differentiated product,” Suleyman said at Collision Conference on Thursday.

The AI space has been hailed as the next frontier for technology after OpenAI’s bot ChatGPT became a viral sensation late last year.

The industry has drawn several investors in the past few months as corporates examine ways to integrate the technology into their businesses, while regulators have been mulling over how to tackle the technology.

Microsoft, an existing investor and also backer of rival OpenAI, participated in Inflection’s latest fundraise.

Nvidia, which has stepped up its AI investments recently, Hoffman, Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also participated in the latest round, Inflection said.

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Apple unveiled its first mixed reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, at its annual developer conference, along with new Mac models and upcoming software updates. We discuss all the most important announcements made by the company at WWDC 2023 on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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OpenAI Sued in US for Allegedly Misusing Artists’ Work to Train ChatGPT

Two US authors sued OpenAI in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday, claiming in a proposed class action that the company misused their works to “train” its popular generative artificial-intelligence system ChatGPT.

Massachusetts-based writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad said ChatGPT mined data copied from thousands of books without permission, infringing the authors’ copyrights.

Matthew Butterick, an attorney for the authors, declined to comment. Representatives for OpenAI, a private company backed by Microsoft, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several legal challenges have been filed over material used to train cutting-edge AI systems. Plaintiffs include source-code owners against OpenAI and Microsoft’s GitHub, and visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt.

The lawsuit targets have argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted work.

ChatGPT responds to users’ text prompts in a conversational way. It became the fastest-growing consumer application in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million active users in January only two months after it was launched.

ChatGPT and other generative AI systems create content using large amounts of data scraped from the internet. Tremblay and Awad’s lawsuit said books are a “key ingredient” because they offer the “best examples of high-quality longform writing.”

The complaint estimated that OpenAI’s training data incorporated over 300,000 books, including from illegal “shadow libraries” that offer copyrighted books without permission.

Awad is known for novels including ’13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl’ and ‘Bunny’. Tremblay’s novels include ‘The Cabin at the End of the World’, which was adapted in the M. Night Shyamalan film ‘Knock at the Cabin’ released in February.

Tremblay and Awad said ChatGPT could generate “very accurate” summaries of their books, indicating that they appeared in its database.

The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of money damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works OpenAI allegedly misused.

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Apple unveiled its first mixed reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, at its annual developer conference, along with new Mac models and upcoming software updates. We discuss all the most important announcements made by the company at WWDC 2023 on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Baidu Says Its Latest Ernie 3.5 AI Model Outperformed OpenAI’s ChatGPT on Multiple Key Metrics

Baidu, China’s leading search engine provider, said the latest iteration of its ChatGPT-style service had surpassed the widely popular Microsoft-backed OpenAI chatbot on multiple key metrics.

Baidu said in a statement on Tuesday that Ernie 3.5, the latest version of its Ernie AI model, had surpassed “ChatGPT in comprehensive ability scores” and outperformed “GPT-4 in several Chinese capabilities”.

The Beijing-based company cited a test that the state newspaper China Science Daily ran using datasets including AGIEval and C-Eval, two benchmarks used to evaluate the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) models.

OpenAI did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment outside of usual business hours.

The Baidu announcement comes amid a global AI buzz kicked off by ChatGPT that has spread to China, prompting a flurry of domestic companies to announce rival products.

Baidu was the first big Chinese tech company to debut a AI product to rival ChatGPT when it unveiled its language AI Ernie Bot in March. Ernie Bot, built on Baidu’s older Ernie 3.0 AI model, has been in invite-only tests for the past three months.

Other big Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, have all since revealed their respective AI models.

Baidu said its new model comes with better training and inference efficiency, which positions it for faster and cheaper iterations in the future. Baidu also said its new model would support external “plugins”.

Plugins are additional applications that will allow Baidu’s AI to work on more specific scenarios such as summarizing long text and generating more precise answers.

ChatGPT rolled out plugin support in March. 

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Meta, OpenAI CEO Express Support for EU Regulation on AI

Technology company executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman expressed support for government oversight of artificial intelligence after discussions with European Commission Thierry Breton.

The commissioner said Friday that he and Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms, were “aligned” on the EU’s regulation of artificial intelligence, which is now in final negotiations. They agreed on the bloc’s risk-based approach and to measures like watermarking, Breton said.

Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said he, too, agrees with the EU approach on AI, adding “I really appreciate the European institution here, and the foresight on taking this issue so seriously, for the rest of the world, too.”

“We look forward to working with you to be running well in advance and offering a European service in compliance with the European market,” Altman told Breton. OpenAI developed the popular chatbot ChatGPT, which has created intense interest in the possibilities of generative AI, the technology that produces text or images in response to a user’s prompts.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said his company “shared our support for the objectives of the AI Pact. While we need to study the details, we recognize it’s important for tech companies to be open about the work they’re doing on AI & engage collaboratively across the industry, governments & civil society.”

The discussions on Friday were part of Breton’s tour this week of technology companies. After his visit to Meta, Breton said the owner of Facebook and Instagram appears well-prepared to meet Europe’s new strict content moderation rules, but will submit to a stress test of its systems next month.

Meta presented “a lot of information” about its work to comply with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, but were also happy to take a stress test “not to forget anything,” he said.

Zuckerberg agreed to a test in mid-July to assess how the company handles content moderation rules. Breton said Meta has roughly 1,000 people working on DSA implementation.

Meta’s CEO was interested in a future test of how the company’s platforms will handle upcoming competition rules set out by the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Companies have to self-report as gatekeepers with certain core platform services on July 3.

Breton also said he urged Zuckerberg to increase resources fighting disinformation, especially Russian disinformation in Eastern European countries about the war in Ukraine. And he discussed a report from the Wall Street Journal about child predators targeting kids on Meta’s Instagram photo-sharing site.

Clegg, in a tweet, called it a “constructive” conversation. “We’ve invited his team to our Dublin campus to see how we’re stress-testing our processes ahead of implementation,” he said.

Separately, Breton discussed artificial intelligence with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world’s most-valuable chipmaker, which leads the market in supplying processors for AI. After the sit-down, Huang told reporters it was “extremely likely” that Nvidia would invest in Europe.

On Thursday, Breton met with Twitter owner Elon Musk and new CEO Linda Yaccarino and told reporters that the social media site needs to put more resources toward addressing sensitive content if it wants to comply with the EU’s rules ahead of an August deadline. 

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Softbank CEO Says He is ‘Heavy User’ of ChatGPT, Speaks to OpenAI’s Sam Altman Often

SoftBank Group‘s Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said on Tuesday he is a “heavy user” of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot from Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI.

Son said he is speaking “almost everyday” to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has made high-profile visits to Tokyo this year as he looks to capitalise on interest in generative AI and exert influence on the regulation of the burgeoning technology around the world.

“I am chatting with ChatGPT everyday – I am a heavy user,” Son told shareholders of the group’s telecoms subsidiary.

Son has stepped back from public pronouncements in recent months to focus on the planned listing of chip designer Arm as his technology investment conglomerate books heavy loss due to the sliding value of its portfolio.

The group holds its annual general meeting on Wednesday with the market looking for details of Son’s investment outlook at a time when excitement over AI is driving capital expenditure around the world.

Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz said on Thursday last week US drivers could power some of their luxury vehicles with ChatGPT in a test program starting June 16.

Compatible with some 900,000 vehicles that have the automaker’s “MBUX” systems, ChatGPT will download over the air after drivers opt in via a Mercedes app or by voice command, the company said. The test will last three months during which Mercedes will see how drivers use the technology.

Mercedes said ChatGPT would make its car system’s answers sound more natural and would let drivers ask for destination information or address other queries, like what to cook for dinner.

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UN Advocates for International AI Watchdog Body Similar to IAEA

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday backed a proposal by some artificial intelligence executives for the creation of an international AI watchdog body like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Generative AI technology that can spin authoritative prose from text prompts has captivated the public since ChatGPT launched six months ago and became the fastest growing app of all time. AI has also become a focus of concern over its ability to create deepfake pictures and other misinformation.

“Alarm bells over the latest form of artificial intelligence – generative AI – are deafening. And they are loudest from the developers who designed it,” Guterres told reporters. “We must take those warnings seriously.”

He has announced plans to start work by the end of the year on a high-level AI advisory body to regularly review AI governance arrangements and offer recommendations on how they can align with human rights, the rule of law and common good.

But on Monday he added, “I would be favourable to the idea that we could have an artificial intelligence agency… inspired by what the international agency of atomic energy is today.”

Guterres said such a model could be “very interesting” but noted that “only member states can create it, not the Secretariat of the United Nations”. The Vienna-based IAEA was created in 1957 and promotes the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies while watching for possible violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has 176 member states.

ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI said last month that a body like the IAEA could place restrictions on deployment, vet compliance with safety standards and track usage of computing power.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also supported the idea and said he wants Britain to be home to global AI safety regulation. Britain is due to host a summit later this year on how coordinated international action can tackle the risks of AI.

Guterres said he supported the plan for a summit in Britain, but said it should be preceded by “serious work”. He said he plans to appoint in the coming days a scientific advisory board of AI experts and chief scientists from UN agencies.

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The Motorola Edge 40 recently made its debut in the country as the successor to the Edge 30 that was launched last year. Should you buy this phone instead of the Nothing Phone 1 or the Realme Pro+? We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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OpenAI Against Regulating Smaller Startups in AI Field, Says CEO on India Visit

OpenAI is against regulating smaller startups in the field of artificial intelligence, Sam Altman, Chief Executive of the firm behind ChatGPT, said at a conference in India’s New Delhi.

“We have explicitly said there should be no regulation on smaller companies. The only regulation we have called for is on ourselves and people bigger,” he said, speaking at an event hosted by national daily Economic Times.

Altman is on a whirlwind tour around the world, meeting heads of states of several countries.

OpenAI has so far raised $10 billion (nearly Rs. 82,620 crore) from Microsoft at a valuation of almost $30 billion (nearly Rs. 2,47,870 crore) as it invests in building computing capacity.

In other news, Dutch privacy watchdog DPA said on Wednesday it is “concerned” about the use of personal data by software makers developing artificial intelligence (AI) and it has sent a letter to Microsoft-backed OpenAI seeking more information.

Governments including the European Union are considering how to regulate the technology after OpenAI’s ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

“The DPA is concerned about how organizations that make use of so-called ‘generative’ artificial intelligence treat personal information,” the agency said.

The agency “will be taking various actions in the future. As a first step we have asked OpenAI by letter to clear up some things about ChatGPT.”

DPA said it was seeking information about how the company has gathered the data it used to create its software and how it stores data, including information gleaned from user questions.

Concerns are mounting about potential abuse of the technology and the possibility that bad actors and governments may use it to produce far more disinformation than before.

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Google I/O 2023 saw the search giant repeatedly tell us that it cares about AI, alongside the launch of its first foldable phone and Pixel-branded tablet. This year, the company is going to supercharge its apps, services, and Android operating system with AI technology. We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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European Commission Says Companies Deploying AI Tools Like ChatGPT, Bard Should Label Content

Companies deploying generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard with the potential to generate disinformation should label such content as part of their efforts to combat fake news, European Commission deputy head Vera Jourova said on Monday.

Unveiled late last year, Microsoft-backed OpenAI‘s ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history and set off a race among tech companies to bring generative AI products to market.

Concerns however are mounting about potential abuse of the technology and the possibility that bad actors and even governments may use it to produce far more disinformation than before.

“Signatories who integrate generative AI into their services like Bingchat for Microsoft, Bard for Google should build in necessary safeguards that these services cannot be used by malicious actors to generate disinformation,” Jourova told a press conference.

“Signatories who have services with a potential to disseminate AI-generated disinformation should in turn put in place technology to recognise such content and clearly label this to users,” she said.

Companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta Platforms that have signed up to the EU Code of Practice to tackle disinformation should report on safeguards put in place to tackle this in July, Jourova said.

She warned Twitter, which quit the Code last week, to expect more regulatory scrutiny.

“By leaving the Code, Twitter has attracted a lot of attention and its actions and compliance with EU law will be scrutinised vigorously and urgently,” Jourova said.

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The Motorola Edge 40 recently made its debut in the country as the successor to the Edge 30 that was launched last year. Should you buy this phone instead of the Nothing Phone 1 or the Realme Pro+? We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

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