Last year Stack Overflow became one of the first websites to announce it would charge AI giants for access to content used to train chatbots. Now the popular Q&A service for coders has signed up its first customer--Google--in what CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says is the start of a "meaningful" new stream of revenue. The deal is significant, because it remains unclear how broadly Google and other AI developers will pay for content needed for AI projects. Millions of books and websites have fueled the development of AI systems, but most publishers have not been compensated, and some are suing over what they allege is misuse. Many publishers, including Stack Overflow, appear threatened by ChatGPT and other generative AI products, which can answer queries that would have previously sent coders their way.

Developing the AI systems behind tools such as ChatGPT and the image generator Dall-E costs hundreds of millions of dollars--and it's about to get more expensive. OpenAI, Google, and other companies building large-scale AI projects have traditionally paid nothing for much of their training data, scraping it from the web. But Stack Overflow, a popular internet forum for computer programming help, plans to begin charging large AI developers as soon as the middle of this year for access to the 50 million questions and answers on its service, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says. The site has more than 20 million registered users. Stack Overflow's decision to seek compensation from companies tapping its data, part of a broader generative AI strategy, has not been previously reported. It follows an announcement by Reddit this week that it will begin charging some AI developers to access its own content starting in June.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning dominate so much conversation about cybersecurity that any CISO is faced with the necessity of explaining this family of technologies to the board. This is always challenging, especially with technologies so heavily hyped, and so liable to easy misunderstanding. As one panelist (Sriram Chandrasekar, Co-Head, AI Investments, Point72 Venture) put it, his role as a venture capitalist is to discern "the faint shimmer of snake oil" that so often rides atop presentations about artificial intelligence." The panel took up the task of framing AI in ways that would be accessible to boards, and that would give them a realistic sense of what AI is, does, and doesn't do. The panel was moderated by Dr. Reggie Brothers, Chertoff Group Principal and former senior science and technology executive at both the US Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. In addition to Chandrasekar, the panelists included Walid Ali (Senior Director, Artificial ...

Billionaire Steve Cohen has opened a Palo Alto office to invest in early-stage companies focused on big data and machine learning, and he has hired two people who invested on behalf of the CIA. The two men leading the effort are Daniel Gwak and Sri Chandrasekar, who previously worked at In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that is mostly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The pair started their new roles on May 1, according to Matthew Granade, Point72's chief market intelligence officer. The new Silicon Valley office is part of Point72 Ventures, Cohen's venture capital unit, which is legally separate from his $11 billion family office, Point72 Asset Management. Cohen launched Point72 Ventures last year, hiring Pete Casella of JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments to help lead the effort.

Billionaire Steve Cohen has opened a Palo Alto office to invest in early-stage companies focused on big data and machine learning, and he has hired two people who invested on behalf of the CIA. The two men leading the effort are Daniel Gwak and Sri Chandrasekar, who previously worked at In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that is mostly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The pair started their new roles on May 1, according to Matthew Granade, Point72's chief market intelligence officer. The new Silicon Valley office is part of Point72 Ventures, Cohen's venture capital unit, which is legally separate from his $11 billion family office, Point72 Asset Management. Cohen launched Point72 Ventures last year, hiring Pete Casella of JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments to help lead the effort.

Nvidia and Baidu have agreed to collaborate on the incorporation of artificial intelligence in a cloud-to-car autonomous vehicle platform, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said Wednesday at the Baidu World Conference in Beijing. The companies plan to integrate Baidu's cloud platform and mapping technology with Nvidia's self-driving computing platform. They will work together to create solutions for high-definition maps, Level 3 autonomous vehicle control and automated parking. "We're going to bring together the technical capabilities and the expertise in AI and the scale of two world-class AI companies to build the self-driving car architecture from end-to-end, from top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car," Jen-Hsun said. "We can start applying these capabilities to solve the grand challenges of AI, one of which is intelligent machines," he added.