"While using books as part of data sets is not inherently problematic, using pirated (or stolen) books does not fairly compensate authors and publishers for their work," the plaintiffs, which include Huckabee, and Christian writers and podcasters including Tsh Oxenreider and Lysa TerKeurst, said in the lawsuit. The suit targets Meta, Microsoft and financial data provider Bloomberg L.P., all of which have trained their own "large language models" -- the giant algorithms that power tools like ChatGPT -- using data from the web.

Microsoft and Meta are extending their ongoing AI partnership, with Meta selecting Azure as "a strategic cloud provider" to accelerate its own AI research and development. Microsoft officials shared more details about the latest on the Microsoft-Meta partnership on Day 2 of the Microsoft Build 2022 developers conference. Microsoft and Meta -- back when it was still known as Facebook -- announced the ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) format in 2017 in the name of enabling developers to move deep-learning models between different AI frameworks. Microsoft open sourced the ONNX Runtime, which is the inference engine for models in the ONNX format, in 2018. Today, Meta officials said they'll be using Azure to accelerate research and development across the Meta AI group.

Data centers, which drive the apps, websites, and services that billions of people use every day, can be hazardous places for the workers that build and maintain them. Workers sometimes have to service a data center's electrical equipment while it's being energized. And they can become exposed to chemicals like chlorine, which is used as a sterilizing agent for the water circulated through liquid cooling systems for computers and servers. In June 2015, five people had to be taken to a hospital after a chlorine gas leak at an Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Data centers are safer than they used to be.