A week in Generative AI: Lilli, Biomes and a copyright ruling

News for the week ending 20th August 2023

cyberpunk news presenter, male, long hair, behind desk, facing camera, in clean pixel art style, neon colors --ar 16:9

There’s lots to unpack this week with some really good long reads as well as news on AI copyright, and from Google, McKinsey and OpenAI.

---

Timnit Gebru, Rumman Chowdhury, Safia Noble, Seeta Peña Gangadharran & Joy Buolamwini

These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI

I shared this on LinkedIn earlier in the week, but it’s too important an article not to share again here. A must read for anyone interested in the ethics of artificial intelligence but more importantly ethics and equality in general.

Source

---

Judge Rules Wholly AI-Created Art Can't Get Copyright Protections

This is the first significant ruling I’ve seen in an AI copyright case, essentially ruling that copyright is only applicable for human-made content. The judge said that copyright can only be granted to “an originator with the capacity for intellectual, creative, or artistic labor”. Fully expect this to change in the coming months/years!

Source

---

Google DeepMind’s CEO Says Its Next Algorithm Will Eclipse ChatGPT

Great article from Wired on Gemini, the next big generative AI model that’s coming from Google’s DeepMind. I’ve been speculating for a while that they would combine the experience they have from AlphaGo and strategy/long-term planning with the capabilities of a large language model to leapfrog ChatGPT. Really excited to see what they release later this year!

Source

---

McKinsey launch Lilli, their generative AI tool

Lilli is a platform that provides McKinsey employees with a ‘streamlined, impartial search and synthesis of the firm’s vast stores of knowledge’. I suspect this is built using their partnership with Cohere, and is the first of these types of models I’ve heard of being deployed at scale.

Source

---

OpenAI acquires AI design studio Global Illumination

This is the first acquisition OpenAI has ever made, so it’s an interesting one on many levels. It seems the thing Global Illumination are best known for is for creating Biomes which is kind of like an open source Minecraft. Be interesting to see where this one goes!

Source

---

Google’s AI Can Now Summarise an Article Directly in Search Results

I’m not sure how useful this feature will be in practice, but it’s good to see Google experimenting with how they can enhance the search experience with generative AI.

Source

---

This week’s long reads

• McKinsey - A CIO and CTO technology guide to generative AI

• Wired - The World Isn’t Ready for the Next Decade of AI

• AI Supremacy - How far are we from AGI?

• Every.to - The internet is still early

---

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

---