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| Welcome to the latest AI newsletter! Here are today's top stories: - Lawmakers and tech industry leaders endorsed the idea of AI regulation during a Capitol Hill forum.
- A California bill would let actors challenge AI cloning of their voice, face, and body.
- EY, the consulting giant, allocated $1.4B to develop its AI platform.
If you find this newsletter useful, please consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues. Thank you! Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | Tech leaders and lawmakers gathered on Capitol Hill today to discuss AI regulation, with consensus on the need for rules but differing opinions on the approach. The closed-door forum, hosted by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, drew a number of tech leaders, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Musk stressed the need for a U.S. "referee" to ensure AI safety, likening it to sports. More: - The forum took place in the historic Kennedy Caucus Room, known for its role in Senate investigations related to the Titanic and Watergate.
- Over 60 senators joined the discussion, with all acknowledging the general need for government regulation of AI but unsure how long it would take or what it would involve.
- However, some lawmakers were concerned about the closed-door nature of the meeting, which differed from prior public hearings with tech executives.
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren expressed frustration, noting that individual senators couldn't ask questions during the morning session, which Schumer moderated.
Response: - Schumer said AI legislation should ideally take months, not weeks or years.
- "If you go too fast, you can ruin things," Schumer said, adding that the European Union went "too fast."
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has cautioned about AI risks, praised Congress for its attention and commitment, saying, "I think they want to do the right thing."
- When asked if Americans should trust tech companies for their safety, Palantir CEO Alex Karp replied, "Yes. Because we're good at it."
- Musk suggested an AI regulatory agency similar to the FTC or FAA. "It was a very civilized discussion among some of the smartest people in the world," he said.
- Apple CEO Tim Cook, who was at Capitol Hill but not a forum attendee, said he thinks the technology is "a huge opportunity."
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| 2 | | California Assemblymember Ash Kalra is expected to introduce a bill today allowing actors to challenge vague contracts allowing AI cloning of their voice, face, and body. Assembly Bill 459 comes amid the Hollywood workers' strike seeking higher pay and greater protection from AI technology. Most Americans generally don't support the use of AI in TV or filmmaking. 
Details: The new bill from California's Kalra, D-San José, would allow actors and voice artists to exit contracts allowing AI use of their likeness or voice, provided they lacked union or legal representation at the time. Vague contract provisions regarding AI-generated replicas would be deemed "unconscionable" and not enforceable in California. Quotable: SAG-AFTRA, the union for actors, voice-over artists, and entertainment workers, supports the legislation. "The speed with which these technologies have been adopted means the impact is not something that could happen one day in the future, but it is happening right now as studios seek to replace real people with digital scans," Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's national executive director and chief negotiator, said in a statement. What the numbers show: According to a recent SurveyMonkey poll, most Americans do not favor AI use in TV and film. Out of six use cases for AI in filmmaking, none garnered over 50% support from the 3,000+ people surveyed. Creating a digital twin of an actor for movies was the least supported, with 76% strongly or somewhat opposed and only 19% in favor. Q: How do you feel about the increasing use of AI in TV and filmmaking? Are you excited about the possibilities, or do you have concerns? Join the conversation here. | | | |
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| 3 | | EY, the consulting giant, allocated $1.4B to develop its EY.ai platform, featuring AI-embedded versions of its products like EY Fabric, focused on data management. The professional-services company developed a large-language model called EY.ai EYQ and plans to train its 400,000-person workforce in the technology. More: - EY's new large language model is trained on public internet data but won't use customer prompts for further training.
- Moving forward, the aim is to train the model using EY's proprietary data library.
- The firm intends to create specialized language models, such as one for tax data.
Zoom out: | | | |
| 4 | | Amazon is launching a generative AI tool for sellers that generates product listing content based on a few words or sentences. The tool, called Generative Listing Content, can provide a title, product description, bullet points, and other content. More: - This feature, unveiled at the Amazon Accelerate conference, aims to improve and speed up the seller experience on Amazon's third-party marketplace.
- Powered by a large language model, the tool was tested by sellers in recent months.
- Most of them use the generated content without revisions, according to Amazon.
- The company previously launched AI-generated summaries of reviews, which produce one-paragraph recaps of what people like and dislike about a product with clickable keywords.
Zoom out: - Competing platforms like eBay and Shopify have also introduced generative AI tools for product listings and content creation.
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| 5 | | Alibaba is opening its AI model, Tongyi Qianwen, to the public after gaining Chinese regulatory approval. A Chinese website for the model describes it as a productivity assistant and idea generator that responds to user commands using a large language model. More: - In April, Alibaba began allowing corporate customers to test out the ChatGPT-style AI chatbot.
- Alibaba has also released its own AI image generator to customers for beta testing.
- In an internal message to employees on Tuesday, new Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu emphasized that AI would be at the core of Alibaba Group's future strategy.
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| 6 | | 🍋 FRESH FUNDING 🍋 - British driverless vehicle startup Conigital raised £500M ($626M) in Series A+ funding.
- San Francisco-based AI startup Imbue cemented its unicorn valuation with a $200M Series B funding round from Astera Institute, Nvidia, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, and Notion co-founder Simon Last.
- AI data center chip maker Enfabrica secured $125M in Series B funding led by Atreides Management, with additional support from IAG Capital Partners, Liberty Global Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Infinitum Partners, and Alumni Ventures.
- Conversational AI platform Druid secured $30M in Series B funding led by TQ Ventures. Smedvig Capital, GapMinder, Hoxton Ventures, and Karma Ventures participated in the funding round.
- AI-powered insurance claims platform Clara Analytics raised $24M in Series C funding. Spring Lake Equity Partners led the funding round with additional support from Aspen Capital Group, Oak HC/FT, and QBE Ventures.
For the latest on AI startup funding and more in the VC community, subscribe to our Inside Venture Capital newsletter. | | | |
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- The freelance job market is experiencing a surge in AI-related opportunities, with generative AI job postings rising nearly 250% on Indeed from July 2021 to July 2023.
- Adobe has officially launched its Firefly generative AI model across Adobe Creative Cloud, making features like Illustrator's vector recoloring and Photoshop's Generative Fill tools available to most users.
- Stability AI announced the public debut of Stable Audio, a tool capable of producing short commercial music clips using latent diffusion techniques.
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Term of the Day Keyword stuffing: Keyword stuffing involves the inclusion of keywords into a website’s content unnaturally or repetitively to manipulate search engine algorithms. Question of the Week Do you share details about your salary with your coworkers? Join the conversation |
INSIDE AI LEADERBOARD (7 DAYS) |
 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is the writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters, with a career spanning journalism and editing since 2007. She has written for publications including The Arizona Republic, USA Today, and others, and authored a book on the solar industry in 2016. Reach out to her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Aaron Crutchfield | |
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