Idaho lawmakers introduced a bill that would bar AI systems from receiving "personhood status." Sponsoring Rep. Tammy Nichols, a Republican, said that the goal is to prevent people in the future from being "inferior to artificial intelligence." More: - The bill, recently introduced by the House State Affairs Committee, would also ban animals and natural resources from gaining the status, which grants some of the same legal rights afforded to people.
- Nichols said it's becoming a trend that some organizations are backing personhood status "for non-human entities" in an effort to restrict access to some natural resources.
- The possibility of granting some rights to AI systems has become a controversial issue. For example, a U.S. federal judge ruled last year that AI systems can't be named as inventors on patents because they are not people and sophisticated enough.
- For now, an individual is defined, both in the dictionary and legally, as a natural person, District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled at the time.
- However, if and when AI is considered sophisticated enough to be an inventor, it will be up to Congress to change the law, she noted.
DESERET NEWS 
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 Autonomous vehicle company Cruise said it will expand its self-driving delivery pilot with Walmart to more stores in Arizona and eventually, the rest of the U.S. The program, which pairs backup drivers with Cruise’s electric self-driving Chevy Bolts to deliver goods, first launched at a Walmart store near Scottsdale, Ariz. last year. More: - Now, Cruise’s Carter Stern said the pilot could expand to up to eight Walmart stores this year starting in Arizona.
- The program will eventually be "exported to the rest of the country,” Stern said.
- For now, the Walmart pilot remains the sole source of revenue for General Motors–backed Cruise, which is using AI/ML to scale its service.
- On Feb. 1, the company announced it had raised $1.35B from SoftBank and opened ride-hailing to the public in San Francisco.
- Cruise opened a public sign-up list for self-driving, which initially would be at no cost for the passengers. It is awaiting approval by the California Public Utilities Commission for the ability to charge for rides.
- Cruise expects to have a fleet of 1 million vehicles by 2030
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The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) chose software provider Arthur as the latest tech company to provide AI services under a $249M blanket purchase agreement. Arthur's platform monitors and measures machine learning models to optimize their accuracy, explainability, and fairness. More: - Arthur is among a growing list of companies that offer services for auditing ML models for issues.
- The company last closed a $15M Series A funding round in late 2020.
- As noted by Protocol, the JAIC also recently chose DataRobot as an AI partner under the five-year blanket purchase agreement.
- The DoD will use the AI cloud platform and services provider's technology to help detect and prevent bias in its ML models.
- No-code computer vision company CrowdAI, AI data infrastructure provider Scale AI, and AI tech provider Veritone are also a part of the agreement.
- The Pentagon established the JAIC in 2018 to scale AI across the department.
PROTOCOL
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 Data, AI model risks, and how to govern them are the key issues for the use of AI in financial services, according to a yearlong investigation led by the Bank of England and the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority. In 2020, the agencies created the AI Public-Private Forum, which just released its report exploring barriers to AI adoption in the finance industry. More: - The forum, comprised of experts from financial services, tech, and other areas, operated for a year.
- Their resulting report finds that governance, including new policies, is key to the adoption of safe AI in financial services.
- So-called "efficient" regulation could help address issues in data and models but will be difficult to achieve. For example, bias in datasets can get "baked into" models.
- The report warns against poor governance, which can actually raise the risks and challenges for the financial system and its consumers.
- The researchers propose that regulators clarify high-risk AI use-cases in financial services as well as existing rules, but those rules should not be "overly prescriptive."
- They proposed regular meetings and continued engagement with stakeholders
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The metaverse, often described as the "next internet," will be built on AI, AR decentralization, and real-time activity. There is a lot of hype around the metaverse, but there are unaddressed legal challenges surrounding this concept, which could give rise to "avatar lawyers" in the coming years. More: - The metaverse will come with a list of legal implications in the coming years. For example, bad actors in the virtual worlds can get involved with cyberstalking, cyberbullying, extortion, kidnapping, revenge porn, child pornography, and even simulated terrorist activities.
- Avatar lawyers are separate from digital twins that will be purely AI-driven digital lawyers in the virtual worlds.
- Intellectual property is an upcoming challenge as issues surrounding patent protection, privacy, and ownership will add to the complexity of legal battles.
- Security, privacy, and compliance in the metaverse will be a major change from Web 2.0 and earlier, with all the machine-generated content.
- Antitrust includes the involvement of large companies with extended corporation practices. Examples include Meta or Microsoft's metaverse, which could lead to some type of collaboration between these companies, leading to antitrust concerns.
A version of this story first appeared in Inside XR, our newsletter covering the present and future of immersive technology.
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Recent M&A: - Microsoft is in talks to acquire cybersecurity research and incident response company Mandiant, a provider of intelligent automated defense.
- Teledermatology provider OnlineDoctor acquired A.S.S.I.S.T, a startup developing AI-enabled diagnoses for skin conditions.
- Agilent Technologies acquired AI technology from software developer Virtual Control.
- Radiology software firm Sirona Medical purchased the AI capabilities of Nines, a developer of FDA-approved analysis and triage algorithms.
- Streaming platform Spotify announced the acquisition of analytics platform Chartable and ad-measurement service Podsights.
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- Workflow automation platform Bardeen.ai emerged from stealth with $3.5M in seed funding; it also announced the launch of its no-code productivity platform.
- Autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI is hiring for its new engineering and development office in Los Angeles as well as other locations.
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 |  | Beth is an Inside Analyst and a former public policy/investigative reporter. She has covered AI, VR, technology, and e-commerce for Inside. When she's not busy writing, she's hiking in Arizona's desert, playing pickleball, or trying out new Mexican food recipes. |   | | Editor | Eduardo Garcia is a writer and editor based in New York. He is writing an illustrated book about climate change that will be published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Scientific American, and others. In one of his previous lives, Eduardo worked as a Reuters correspondent in Latin America for nearly a decade. | |
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