AI Innovations

In a startling development that blurs the lines between privacy and profit, a new call recorder application has rocketed to the top of the mobile charts with a controversial proposition: it pays users to record their phone calls. The app, Neon, has rapidly become the #2 social app on the US App Store by offering cash in exchange for audio conversations, which it then sells to AI companies for model training. This business model raises immediate questions about legality, particularly concerning the differences between one party consent states and two party consent states. This meteoric rise is as stunning as its business model. On Wednesday, Neon was spotted in the No. 2 position on the iPhone’s top free charts for...

In the heart of the AI revolution, California serves as both the engine of innovation and the epicenter of the debate over its potential dangers. It was here that State Senator Scott Wiener staged his first major legislative battle for AI safety with SB 1047. The bill’s dramatic failure, crushed under the weight of fierce industry opposition and a decisive veto from Governor Gavin Newsom, seemed to be a clear victory for Big Tech. But the fight was not over. Wiener has returned to the political arena with a renewed push: SB 53, a successor bill crafted with the lessons of the first defeat. This time, the reception from Silicon Valley is surprisingly muted, even supportive in some corners. The...

It’s a figure so vast it borders on the abstract. Worldwide, around $3tn will be spent on data centres that support AI between now and 2029, according to an estimate from Morgan Stanley [1]. To put this colossal sum into perspective, it’s roughly equivalent to the entire annual economic output of France. This tidal wave of capital is funding the physical backbone of the artificial intelligence revolution – a global construction and technology project of unprecedented scale and expense, with half the cost going to buildings and the other half to the specialized hardware inside. But what exactly makes these new AI facilities so fundamentally different from the traditional data centers that already power our digital lives? And as the...

What are we truly measuring when one large language model is tasked with scoring another? This question lies at the core of a popular and powerful new evaluation paradigm: LLM-as-a-Judge (LAJ) evaluation. In essence, this is a method where a powerful AI, like GPT-4, is used to automatically score or rank the quality of another AI’s output. Instead of relying on human evaluators, an AI “judge” assesses a response against a given set of rules, or rubric. The appeal is undeniable – a promise of scalable, consistent, and rapid feedback. However, this automated convenience presents a double-edged sword. As this practice becomes more widespread, a chorus of concerns is growing louder, highlighting significant questions about the reliability, inherent biases, and...

Google figured out early on that video would be a great addition to its search business, so in 2005 it launched Google Video. Focused on making deals with the entertainment industry for second-rate content, and overly cautious on what users could upload, it flopped. Meanwhile, a tiny startup run by a handful of employees working above a San Mateo, California, pizzeria was exploding, simply by letting anyone upload their goofy videos and not worrying too much about who held copyrights to the clips. In 2006, Google snapped up that year-old company, figuring it would sort out the IP stuff later. (It did.) Though the $1.65 billion purchase price for YouTube was about a billion dollars more than its valuation, it...