The UK competition watchdog has stepped up its scrutiny of big tech involvement in artificial intelligence startups, asking for comment on three deals by Microsoft and Amazon. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that it was examining Microsoft's investment in the French firm Mistral and the hiring of the DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as head of the US company's new AI division. The watchdog is also scrutinising Amazon's 4bn ( 3.2bn) investment in the US AI firm Anthropic. The CMA has issued "invitations to comment" on the tie-ups, a procedural move that paves the way for a formal investigation, amid concerns that these partnerships are effectively giving the big tech companies backdoor control over potential rivals and stifling competition. The watchdog has already asked for comments on Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.

Deepfakes, or AI-generated videos that take a person in an existing video and replace them with someone else's likeness, are multiplying at an accelerating rate. According to startup Deeptrace, the number of deepfakes on the web increased 330% from October 2019 to June 2020, reaching over 50,000 at their peak. That's troubling not only because these fakes might be used to sway opinion during an election or implicate a person in a crime, but because they've already been abused to generate pornographic material of actors and defraud a major energy producer. Open source tools make it possible for anyone with images of a victim to create a convincing deepfake, and a new study suggests that deepfake-generating techniques have reached the point where they can reliably fool commercial facial recognition services. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org,

This week IBM, Microsoft and Amazon announced that they would suspend the sale of their facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies. But the moves from the tech giants also illustrate the inherent risks of AI, especially when it comes to bias and the potential for invasion of privacy. Note that there are already indications that Congress will take action to regulate the technology. In the meantime, many cities have already instituted bans, such San Francisco. Because of the advances of deep learning and faster systems for processing enormous amounts of data, facial recognition has certainly seen major strides over the past decade.

Some of the biggest companies in the world are pulling their facial recognition technologies from law enforcement agencies across the country. Amazon (AMZN), IBM (IBM), and Microsoft (MSFT) have said that they will either put a moratorium on the use of their technology by police -- or are completely exiting the field citing human rights concerns. The technology, which can be used to identify suspects in things like surveillance footage, has faced widespread criticism after studies found it can be biased against women and people of color. And according to at least one expert, there needs to be some form of regulation put in place if these technologies are going to be used by law enforcement agencies. "If these technologies were to be deployed, I think you cannot do it in the absence of legislation," explained Siddharth Garg, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, told Yahoo Finance.

This week IBM, Microsoft and Amazon announced that they would suspend the sale of their facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies. But the moves from the tech giants also illustrate the inherent risks of AI, especially when it comes to bias and the potential for invasion of privacy. Note that there are already indications that Congress will take action to regulate the technology. In the meantime, many cities have already instituted bans, such San Francisco. Because of the advances of deep learning and faster systems for processing enormous amounts of data, facial recognition has certainly seen major strides over the past decade.

Google has announced that it will stop developing AI tools for oil and gas companies following a report from Greenpeace which criticised the search giant as well as Microsoft and Amazon. The latest report just shows that while firms may wish to present themselves as pro-renewable energy, if you scratch beneath the surface, things aren't as rosy as they appear to be. Responding to Google's decision to cut these ties with gas and oil firms, Elizabeth Jardim, senior corporate campaigner at Greenpeace USA, said: "While Google still has legacy contracts with oil and gas firms that we hope they will terminate, we welcome Google's move to no longer create custom solutions for upstream oil and gas extraction." "We hope Microsoft and Amazon will quickly follow with commitments to end AI partnerships with oil and gas firms, as these contracts contradict their stated climate goals and accelerate the climate crisis." According to the Greenpeace report, Microsoft has the most contracts with gas and oil companies and offers AI capabilities in all phases of oil production.

When NVIDIA announced breakthroughs in language understanding to enable real-time conversational AI, we were caught off guard. We were still trying to digest the proceedings of ACL, one of the biggest research events for computational linguistics worldwide, in which Facebook, Salesforce, Microsoft and Amazon were all present. While these represent two different sets of achievements, they are still closely connected. Here is what NVIDIA's breakthrough is about, and what it means for the world at large. As ZDNet reported yesterday, NVIDIA says its AI platform now has the fastest training record, the fastest inference, and largest training model of its kind to date.

There is a problem with artificial intelligence. It can be amazing at churning through gigantic amounts of data to solve challenges that humans struggle with. But understanding how it makes its decisions is often very difficult to do, if not impossible. That means when an AI model works it is not as easy as it should be to make further refinements, and when it exhibits odd behaviour it can be hard to fix. But at an event in London this week, Google's cloud computing division pitched a new facility that it hopes will give it the edge on Microsoft and Amazon, which dominate the sector.

There is a problem with artificial intelligence. It can be amazing at churning through gigantic amounts of data to solve challenges that humans struggle with. But understanding how it makes its decisions is often very difficult to do, if not impossible. That means when an AI model works it is not as easy as it should be to make further refinements, and when it exhibits odd behaviour it can be hard to fix. But at an event in London this week, Google's cloud computing division pitched a new facility that it hopes will give it the edge on Microsoft and Amazon, which dominate the sector.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is pressing forward with a lawsuit involving the facial recognition software offered by Amazon and Microsoft to government clients. In a complaint filed in a Massachusetts federal court, the ACLU asked for a variety of different records from the government, including inquiries to companies, meetings about the piloting or testing of facial recognition, voice recognition, and gait recognition technology, requests for proposals, and licensing agreements. At the heart of the lawsuit are Amazon's Rekognition and Microsoft's Face API, both facial recognition products that are available for customers of the companies' cloud platforms. The ACLU has also asked for more details on the US government's use of voice recognition and gait recognition, which is the automated process of comparing images of the way a person walks in order to identify them. Police in Shanghai and Beijing are already using gait-analysis tools to identify people.