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This week, Ilya Sutskever launched a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just a month after formally leaving OpenAI. Sutskever, along with Jan Leike, was integral to OpenAI’s efforts to improve AI safety with the rise of “superintelligent” AI systems. However, both Sutskever and Leike left the company after a dramatic dispute with leadership over how to address AI safety.
In electric vehicle news, Fisker requested Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, capping months of problems with its Ocean SUV that included recalls and dozens of lemon law lawsuits. This is the second vehicle company named after Henrik Fisker that ends in bankruptcy. His first venture began in 2007 and he filed for bankruptcy in 2013.
Change Healthcare confirmed this week that a February ransomware attack resulted in the theft of medical records affecting a “substantial proportion of people in the United States.” The company processes patient insurance and billing for thousands of hospitals, pharmacies and physician offices and has access to massive amounts of health information on approximately one-third of all Americans.
News
The Department of Justice against Adobe: The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Adobe alleging that the company hides cancellation fees and makes it difficult to cancel subscriptions. Read more
OpenAI acquires Rockset: OpenAI announced it has acquired Rockset, which creates tools to power real-time search and data analytics, as the company continues to invest in its enterprise sales and technology organizations. Read more
The buttons are back: Clicks released a nostalgic BlackBerry-style phone case that adds a keyboard with physical buttons to the bottom of your iPhone. We have to try one for ourselves. Read more
Where humans and AI coexist: Butterflies is a social network where humans and AI interact with each other through posts, comments, and direct messages in an effort to have more creative relationships with AI. Read more
Apple kills payment after: After launching in late March 2023, Apple’s Pay Later feature no longer exists. Instead, Apple Pay users will be able to access loans through a partnership with third-party app Affirm. Read more
Beware, Outlook users: A researcher has found a bug that allows anyone to impersonate Microsoft corporate email accounts, making phishing attempts appear credible and more likely to fool their targets. Read more
Perplexity takes over Google: The AI-powered search startup now displays results for objective queries, such as the weather and time in a location, currency conversion, and answers to simple mathematical queries directly through cards. Read more
Runway presents Gen-3: The company’s latest artificial intelligence model for generating videos offers a “significant” improvement in speed, as well as greater control over the structure, style and movement of the generated videos. Read more
Analysis
What should AI be like?: From black holes to colored blobs, representing AI in user interfaces can be challenging. While approaches differ from the supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing brand of intelligence, Devin Coldewey explores how companies have coalesced around the idea that the AI avatar should be non-threatening, abstract, but relatively simple and non-anthropomorphic. Read more
Why Fisker failed: As Fisker files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, many are wondering what’s next for the ill-fated electric vehicle startup. Sean O’Kane maintains that whatever happens to Fisker or its assets, it won’t change the fundamental problem: that it wasn’t prepared to deal with bringing a defective car to market. Read more
Pushing the cultural boundaries of ChatGPT: The current ChatGPT offers overly generalized answers to specific questions that cater to certain communities, as its training seems Eurocentric and Western in its bias. Since most AI models are not built with people of color in mind, Dominic-Madori Davis and Tage Kene-Okafor report on black-owned chatbots and ChatGPT versions that specifically serve black and brown communities, and They help founders capitalize on OpenAI’s cultural slippage. Read more