Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Earlier this week, a group of more than 1,800 artificial intelligence (AI) leaders and technologists ranging from Elon Musk to Steve Wozniak issued an open letter calling on all AI labs to immediately pause development for six months on AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 due to "profound risks to society and humanity." While a pause could serve to help better understand and regulate the societal risks created by generative AI, some argue that it's also an attempt for lagging competitors to catch up on AI research with leaders in the space like OpenAI. According to Gartner distinguished VP analyst Avivah Litan, who spoke with VentureBeat about the issue, "The six-month pause is a plea to stop the training of models more powerful than GPT-4. GPT 4.5 will soon be followed by GPT-5, which is expected to achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence). Once AGI arrives, it will likely be too late to institute safety controls that effectively guard human use of these systems."

One of the stultifying but ultimately true maxims of the analytics movement in sports says that most narratives around player performance are lies. Each player has a "true talent level" based on their abilities, but the actual results are mostly up to variance and luck. If a player has, say, the true talent to hit thirty-one home runs in a season, the timing of those home runs is mostly random. If someone hits a third of those in April, that doesn't really mean he's a "hot starter" who is "building off a great spring"--it just means that if you take thirty-one home runs and toss them up in the air to land randomly on a time line, sometimes ten of them float over to April. What does matter, the analytics guys say, are plate appearances: you have to clock in enough opportunities to realize your true talent level.

A tech mogul has described the sprint to perfect artificial intelligence (AI) as the 21st century's nuclear arms race. Kevin Baragona was one of the more than 1,000 leading experts who signed an open letter on The Future of Life Institute, calling for a pause on the'dangerous race' to develop ChatGPT-like AI. Like the invention of the atomic bomb in the 1940s, Baragona told DailyMail.com'Many

In recent months, Mr. Altman has done more than anyone else to usher in this future--and commercialize it. OpenAI, the company he leads, in November released ChatGPT, the chatbot with an uncanny ability to produce humanlike writing that has become one of the most viral products in the history of technology. In the process, OpenAI went from a small nonprofit into a multibillion-dollar company, at near record speed, thanks in part to the launch of a for-profit arm that enabled it to raise $13 billion from Microsoft Corp., according to investor documents. This success has come as part of a delicate balancing act. Mr. Altman said he fears what could happen if AI is rolled out into society recklessly. He co-founded OpenAI eight years ago as a research nonprofit, arguing that it's uniquely dangerous to have profits be the main driver of developing powerful AI models. He is so wary of profit as an incentive in AI development that he has taken no direct financial stake in the business he built, he said--an anomaly in Silicon Valley, where founders of successful startups typically get rich off their equity.

Sam Altman, the 37-year-old startup-minting guru at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom, has long dreamed of a future in which computers could converse and learn like humans. One of his clearest childhood memories is sitting up late in his bedroom in suburban St. Louis, playing with the Macintosh LC II he had gotten for his eighth birthday when he had the sudden realization: "Someday, the computer was going to learn to think," he said.

Large language models (LLMs) trained on more text will generally be superior to an LLM with less. As a result, expect publishers with valuable text content to become a licensing battleground for LLM makers and for language acquisition costs (LAC) to become a real expense. Google is said to pay $15B per year to be the default search engine on Apple devices. These traffic acquisition costs (TAC) are in aggregate over $50B a year for Google -- but the exclusivity gained is critical for Google to cement its search lead. With the battle for large language model (LLM) supremacy underway, exclusive access to language/text will also become critical.

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received a new complaint today from the Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP), which calls for an investigation of OpenAI and its product GPT-4. The complaint argues that the FTC has declared that the use of AI should be "transparent, explainable, fair, and empirically sound while fostering accountability," but claims that OpenAI's GPT-4 "satisfies none of these requirements" and is "biased, deceptive, and a risk to privacy and public safety." CAIDP is a Washington, D.C.-based independent, nonprofit research organization that "assesses national AI policies and practices, trains AI policy leaders, and promotes democratic values for AI." It is headed by president and founder Marc Rotenberg and senior research director Merve Hickok.

AI hands are reaching further into the tech industry. Microsoft has added Security Copilot, a natural language chatbot that can write and analyze code, to its suite of products enabled by OpenAI's GPT-4 generative AI model. Security Copilot, which was announced on Wednesday, is now in preview for select customers. Microsoft will release more information through its email updates about when Security Copilot might become generally available. Microsoft Security Copilot is a natural language artificial intelligence data set that will appear as a prompt bar.

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.

There appears to be no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data in order to'train' the algorithms on which the platform relies,