Two days after an open letter called for a moratorium on the development of more powerful generative AI models so regulators can catch up with the likes of ChatGPT, Italy's data protection authority has just put out a timely reminder that some countries do have laws that already apply to cutting edge AI: it has ordered OpenAI to stop processing people's data locally with immediate effect. The Italian DPA said it's concerned that the ChatGPT maker is breaching the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and is opening an investigation. Specifically, the Garante said it has issued the order to block ChatGPT over concerns OpenAI has unlawfully processed people's data as well as over the lack of any system to prevent minors from accessing the tech. The San Francisco-based company has 20 days to respond to the order, backed up by the threat of some meaty penalties if it fails to comply. It's worth noting that since OpenAI does not have a legal entity established in the EU, any data protection authority is empowered to intervene, under the GDPR, if it sees risks to local users. The GDPR applies whenever EU users' personal data is processed.

Generative A.I.s can already answer questions, write poetry, generate computer code and carry on conversations. As "chatbot" suggests, they are first being rolled out in conversational formats like ChatGPT and Bing. But that's not going to last long. Microsoft and Google have already announced plans to incorporate these A.I. technologies into their products. You'll be able to use them to write a rough draft of an email, automatically summarize a meeting and pull off many other cool tricks.

Italy's privacy watchdog has temporarily banned ChatGPT, after raising concerns about a recent data breach and the legal basis for using personal data to train the popular chatbot. The Italian Data Protection Authority described the move as a provisional measure "until ChatGPT respects privacy". The watchdog said it was imposing an "immediate temporary limitation on the processing of Italian users' data" by ChatGPT's owner, the San Francisco-based OpenAI. ChatGPT has been a sensation since its launch last November due to its ability to generate plausible-sounding responses to questions, as well as creating an array of content including poems, academic essays and summaries of lengthy documents when prompted by users. It is powered by a groundbreaking artificial intelligence system that is trained on a vast amount of information culled from the internet.

The Italian government's privacy watchdog has temporarily blocked the artificial intelligence (AI) software ChatGPT over data privacy concerns. The announcement on Friday made Italy the first Western country to take such action against the popular AI chatbot. The Italian Data Protection Authority described its action as provisional "until ChatGPT respects privacy". Its measure involves temporarily limiting the company from holding Italian users' data. The watchdog said ChatGPT developer OpenAI had no legal basis to justify "the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of'training' the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform".

Italy's privacy regulator ordered a temporary ban on OpenAI's ChatGPT, saying the artificial-intelligence chatbot has improperly collected and stored information, accelerating the rush by policy makers to roll out new AI rules. The order calls on OpenAI to suspend processing the data of Italian users, which could effectively mean OpenAI must block access to its chatbot from Italy. The platform was still accessible on Friday afternoon.

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. OpenAI's powerful new language model, GPT-4, was barely out of the gates when a student uncovered vulnerabilities that could be exploited for malicious ends. The discovery is a stark reminder of the security risks that accompany increasingly capable AI systems. Last week, OpenAI released GPT-4, a "multimodal" system that reaches human-level performance on language tasks. But within days, Alex Albert, a University of Washington computer science student, found a way to override its safety mechanisms.

With the release of platforms like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, diffusion generative models have achieved mainstream popularity, owing to their ability to generate a series of absurd, breathtaking, and often meme-worthy images from text prompts like "teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s." But a team of researchers at MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) thinks there could be more to diffusion generative models than just creating surreal images -- they could accelerate the development of new drugs and reduce the likelihood of adverse side effects. A paper introducing this new molecular docking model, called DiffDock, will be presented at the 11th International Conference on Learning Representations. The model's unique approach to computational drug design is a paradigm shift from current state-of-the-art tools that most pharmaceutical companies use, presenting a major opportunity for an overhaul of the traditional drug development pipeline. Drugs typically function by interacting with the proteins that make up our bodies, or proteins of bacteria and viruses.

For years, Google was seen as one of the most cutting-edge developers of A.I. But, with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT, and other chatbots beating Google to market, is that distinction still the case? Google's chief executive is in an unenviable position: Scramble to catch up or, in the face of potentially harmful technology, move slowly.

Generative AI – including large language models such as GPT-4, and image generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion – is advancing in a "storm of hype and fright", as some commentators have observed. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have yielded warnings that the rapidly developing technology may result in "ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control". That's according to an open letter signed by more than 1,000 AI experts, researchers and backers, which calls for an immediate pause on the creation of "giant" AIs for six months so that safety protocols can be developed to mitigate their dangers. But what is the technology currently capable of doing? Midjourney creates images from text descriptions.

Italians might not have access to ChatGPT for much longer. Italy's Privacy Guarantor has ordered ChatGPT blocked over concerns OpenAI is violating the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through its data handling practices. The regulator claims there's no "legal basis" for OpenAI's bulk collection of data for training ChatGPT's model. The sometimes-inaccurate results also indicate the generative AI isn't processing data correctly, the Guarantor says. Officials are particularly concerned about a flaw leaked sensitive user data last week.