In a joint statement, bodies representing thousands of creatives dismissed the proposal made by ministers on Tuesday that would allow companies such as Open AI, Google and Meta to train their AI systems on published works unless their owners actively opt out. The coalition includes the British Phonographic Industry, the Independent Society of Musicians, the Motion Picture Association and the Society of Authors as well as Mumsnet, the Guardian, Financial Times, Telegraph, Getty Images, the Daily Mail Group and Newsquest. Their intervention comes a day after the technology and culture minister Chris Bryant told parliament the proposed system, subject to a 10-week consultation, would "improve access to content by AI developers, whilst allowing rights holders to control how their content is used for AI training". The Conservative chair of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, Caroline Dinenage, alleged the government had "fully drunk the Kool-Aid on AI". But Bryant told MPs: "If we were to adopt a too tight a regime based on proactive, explicit permission, the danger is that international developers would continue to train their models using UK content accessed overseas, but may not be able to deploy them in the UK … this could significantly disadvantage sectors across our economy, including the creative industries, and sweep the rug from underneath British AI developers."

New virtual machines for Microsoft Azure allow developers to create generative AI apps that can be scaled to work with thousands of Nvidia H100 GPUs. The ND H100 v5 VM series on Azure, which works in tandem with Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, boosts the performance of large-scale deployments by companies such as OpenAI, creators of the much talked about ChatGPT, and Nvidia's chips. The new supercomputing system in the cloud provides the type of infrastructure required to handle the latest large-scale AI training models, according to Matt Vegas, principal product manager for Azure HPC and AI at Microsoft. "Generative AI applications are rapidly evolving and adding unique value across nearly every industry," Vegas wrote in a blog post this week. "From the newly released AI-powered Bing and Edge to AI-powered assistance in Microsoft Dynamics 365, AI is becoming a pervasive component of software and how we interact with it. We want to ensure that our AI infrastructure will be there to pave the way."