The Israeli military's reliance on Microsoft's cloud technology and artificial intelligence systems surged during the most intensive phase of its bombardment of Gaza, leaked documents reveal. The files offer an inside view of how Microsoft deepened its relationship with Israel's defence establishment after 7 October 2023, supplying the military with greater computing and storage services and striking at least 10m in deals to provide thousands of hours of technical support. Microsoft's deep ties with Israel's military are revealed in an investigation by the Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication 972 Magazine and a Hebrew-language outlet, Local Call. It is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own story. The investigation, which also draws on interviews with sources from across Israel's defence and intelligence establishment, sheds new light on how the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) turned to major US tech companies to meet the technological demands of war. After launching its offensive in Gaza in October 2023, the IDF faced a sudden rush in demand for storage and computing power, leading it to swiftly expand its computing infrastructure and embrace what one commander described as "the wonderful world of cloud providers".

The emergence of artificial intelligence and digitization of the power grid introduced numerous effective application scenarios for AI-based services for the smart grid. Nevertheless, adopting AI in critical infrastructures presents challenges due to unclear regulations and lacking risk quantification techniques. Regulated and accountable approaches for integrating AI-based services into the smart grid could accelerate the adoption of innovative methods in daily practices and address society's general safety concerns. This paper contributes to this objective by defining accountability and highlighting its importance for AI-based services in the energy sector. It underlines the current shortcomings of the AI Act and proposes an approach to address these issues in a potential delegated act. The proposed technical approach for developing and operating accountable AI-based smart grid services allows for assessing different service life cycle phases and identifying related accountability risks.

Employees are submitting sensitive business data and privacy-protected information to large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, raising concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) services could be incorporating the data into their models, and that information could be retrieved at a later date if proper data security isn't in place for the service. In a recent report, data security service Cyberhaven detected and blocked requests to input data into ChatGPT from 4.2% of the 1.6 million workers at its client companies because of the risk of leaking confidential information, client data, source code, or regulated information to the LLM. In one case, an executive cut and pasted the firm's 2023 strategy document into ChatGPT and asked it to create a PowerPoint deck. In another case, a doctor input his patient's name and their medical condition and asked ChatGPT to craft a letter to the patient's insurance company. And as more employees use ChatGPT and other AI-based services as productivity tools, the risk will grow, says Howard Ting, CEO of Cyberhaven.

By Rahul De', Nitisha Ahuja, Palash Sanjay Kotgirwar As Artificial Intelligence (AI) based products and services proliferate across industries one question emerges as the most important: should these systems include a human in the loop or operate autonomously? This question underlies much of the services and products that we take for granted now. Consider, for example, using Google Maps. Many of us now take this AI-based service for granted, when it gives directions to go from one place to another we follow, nearly without thinking about where it is taking us. There is no human guide or moderator behind this tool; we cannot even call a number, like in a bank, and demand to speak to someone about getting wrong directions or being led off somewhere other than our destination.

Whatever class of the economy you belong to, at best, you're a consumer, one way or another. The impulses that go into decision-making as consumers sift through endless choices of goods, products, services, and offerings are anything but simple. Thanks to AI, consumers have been ushered into a life that is an endless stream of those impulses that come with virtually every choice to be made. With consumers, there is no shortage of varying perspectives when it comes to how goods, products, services, and offerings are perceived based on the level of AI deployment and use. When it comes to being a consumer of any sort in the age of AI, perception is a strong force in choices and decisions, and brands must pay serious attention to it.

Korean telecommunications company KT announced plans to invest 300 billion won ($257 million) over the next four years to become an artificial intelligence (AI) company, Korean press reported. The Korean telco also said it aims to hire nearly 1,000 specialists in the AI field with the aim of creating new value propositions in line with the deployment of 5G networks in the country. KT rolled out its AI-based service, called Giga Genie, in January of 2017. This AI service was initially offered in the form of a television set-top box. The company has been recently expanding the application of the AI-based service to speakers, apartments, hotels and cars.

For example, speech recognition combined with natural language understanding provides the ability for a service like Alexa or Google Assistant to interpret a voice command so that it can execute it. Even more magical is when you can then execute on a request based on a recognized pattern and do something interesting, like play music. Talking to our homes and surroundings is just the beginning of this seemingly magical experience. What we're starting to see is that AI-based services are reaching human-level error rates. Word Error Rates (WER) for speech transcription (in a perfect environment in English) reached human levels about a year ago.

In the last two decades, the software industry provided a healthy breeding ground for incubating new businesses and ideas. From solving the day-to-day problems of end-users to building complementary tools for software developed by large companies, startups thrive in the disruptive market. They compete to differentiate based on the value they deliver to customers. But the changing dynamics of the industry have made it extremely risky to be an independent software vendor or a startup in the cloud and AI market. There was a time when large platform companies delivering enterprise software chose not to compete with ISVs.