OpenAI has signed a new deal valued at $38bn with Amazon that will allow the artificial intelligence giant to run AI workloads across Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. The seven-year deal announced on Monday is the first big AI push for the e-commerce giant after a restructuring last week. Experts say this does not mean that it will allow OpenAI to train its model on websites hosted by AWS - which includes the websites of The New York Times, Reddit and United Airlines. "Running OpenAI training inside AWS doesn't change their ability to scrape content from AWS-hosted websites [which they could already do for anything publicly readable]. This is strictly speaking about the economics of rent vs buy for GPU [graphics processing unit] capacity," Joshua McKenty, CEO of the AI detection company PolyguardAI, told Al Jazeera. The deal is also a major vote of confidence for the e-commerce giant's cloud unit, AWS, which some investors feared had fallen behind rivals Microsoft and Google in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.

It's hard not to feel the ripple effect when big shifts happen. One such shift came Wednesday when Lionsgate--the studio responsible for the John Wick, Hunger Games, and Twilight franchises--announced it had teamed up with artificial intelligence firm Runway for a "first-of-its-kind partnership" that would give the AI firm access to the studio's archives in order to create a custom AI tool for preproduction and postproduction on its film and TV shows. Runway's forthcoming tool will "help Lionsgate Studios, its filmmakers, directors, and other creative talent augment their work" and "generate cinematic video that can be further iterated using Runway's suite of controllable tools," according to a press release announcing the deal. If that sounds like it might pique the interest of those who have been watching AI's influence on creatives' work, it did. If anything, the new deal could serve as a test of the AI protections that unions like the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) got in their contract negotiations with studios last year.

No one in Washington seems to know what the story is, or even where to set the dateline. Is it the culture war over masks, in the Florida sunshine? Is it the crisis along the southern border? CNN's prime-time viewership is down thirty-seven per cent, MSNBC's numbers are not much better, and even Fox's are in decline. The morning political-newsletter writers, and many of the rest of us, have been reduced to replaying the dramas of the Trump Administration (Why is John Boehner backing an Ohio congressman whom Trump opposes?) or even the Obama years (How much hold does Larry Summers have on the Democratic Party?). For a moment this week the story was whether one of the Bidens' German shepherds, Major, has a biting problem.

The Sony WH-1000XM4 noise-cancelling headphones are on an incredible discount right now at Amazon. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. Black Friday week is here, and though we're just a few weeks beyond Amazon's Prime Day 2020 savings event, the retailer has a ton of new deals to check out. Amazon Black Friday deals started on November 20th and new deals are dropping all the time. Current deals include streaming sticks (get the all-new Fire Stick, Fire Stick lite or Fire Stick 4K for up to 40% off), brand-name French cookware, self-cleaning Roombas, Ring doorbells, and the best deal: Sony's spectacular noise-cancelling headphones.

The working group will seek to promote the use of AI adoption in financial services as part of the government's'New Deal' policy initiative. South Korea's FSC (Financial Services Commission) on Thursday (16 July) held a kick-off meeting of a new working group tasked with promoting the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in financial services. "AI technology can help improve the effectiveness, inclusiveness and accountability while lowering costs in providing financial services," the FSC said, pointing to credit scoring, loan assessment, insurance and asset management as service areas that will benefit. The move to promote AI adoption in financial services is part of the government's KRW 114 trillion'New Deal' policy initiative, which centres on creating more tech sector jobs and promoting digitalisation of industries as a new post-coronavirus growth engine. At the meeting, participants discussed major trends and policies surrounding the application of AI in financial services, the working group's plans to promote the sector.

South Korea will make artificial intelligence and wireless communications centerpieces of what it is touting as a "New Deal" to create jobs and boost growth after the coronavirus pandemic subsides. The government, in a statement Thursday, said it will promote AI and fifth-generation wireless technology to support the economy once the virus is brought under control. The statement said funding would come from a third emergency budget being drafted now and from annual budgets through 2022, but didn't specify the amount. Korea's first two extra budgets already amount to biggest sum in decades President Moon Jae-in, after last month's big election victory, said his government would pursue large-scale state projects to boost jobs and innovation in the post-virus era. He compared his vision to the New Deal launched by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s to help the U.S. recover from the Great Depression.

At that time, the final contract was expected by the end of the year, and the arrangement was to be open to all member-institutions of Projekt DEAL, which comprises more than 700 publicly and privately funded academic and research organizations in Germany. On Thursday (January 9), media messaging from Springer Nature's director of communications, Susie Winter, indeed informed us that "Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH on behalf of Projekt DEAL today announce that the formal contract for the world's largest transformative open access (OA) agreement to date has been signed. Dated January 1, the agreement provides OA publishing services and full reading access to Springer Nature journals to scholars and students from across the German research landscape. "It follows the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the two parties on August 22, and is a giant step forward in the OA transition, enabling greater visibility, impact, efficiency, transparency, and sustainability in the dissemination of the fruits of German research, for the benefit of researchers everywhere." A full text of the agreement is to be released by the end of this month, and the deal is to be in force through 2022, with an option to renew for one more year, through 2023. The trend represented by the Projekt DEAL library consortium in Germany, Kaufman says, is unmistakable. "Major STM publishers are inking wide-ranging deals with customers on a national or even broader scale," he says. "In April, Elsevier inked an innovative'read and publish' agreement"--referred to as a RAP deal--"with the Norwegian academic community.

"Our ultimate goal is to provide a self-driving vehicle tailored to every trip and every purpose," said CEO John Krafcik on stage today at New York's Chelsea Piers. This year, Waymo will build out and begin testing self-driving I-Pace cars, but those vehicles won't become part of its fleet until 2020. This latest deal will no doubt sting Tesla, which has struggled with its autonomous technology. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with his repeated showboating of his car's advanced assisted-driver capabilities, put pressure on automakers and other self-driving car outfits to build their technology quickly. But the company's competitors appear to be surpassing the unconventional electric car company. So far, Waymo has been building its technology into Chrysler Hybrid Pacifica minivans, a vehicle more geared toward families.

Two of the most polarising words in the English language at the moment (aside from "Donald Trump") must be "artificial intelligence". Last week, Big Tech ramped up a campaign intended to convince people that robots will not take their jobs.. Read more at straitstimes.com.

Andrew Ng, formerly the head of AI for Chinese search giant Baidu and, before that, creator of Google's deep-learning Brain project, knows as well as anyone that artificial intelligence is coming for plenty of jobs. And many of us don't even know it. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's annual EmTech MIT conference in Cambridge, MA, on Tuesday, Ng said he's visited call centers and spoken to workers, knowing that his teams of software engineers will then write software that will automate aspects of their work. "There are many professions in the crosshairs of AI teams across the world," he said. Ng, who's currently working on a startup called Deeplearning.ai