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Canada's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland takes part in a press conference in Ottawa, Canada, on Jan. 29, 2024.

REUTERS/Blair Gable/File Photo

Canada’s threatened tax on tech giants risks trade war

Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland plans to unveil the federal budget on April 16, a release that will be keenly watched north and south of the border. Big Tech companies, in particular, will be looking for clues about when Canada will implement its long-promised digital services tax.

Justin Trudeau’s cash-strapped Liberal government hopes to raise up to $2.5 billion over five years by imposing a 3% tax on companies like Alphabet, Meta, Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb. First promised in the 2021 budget, the Trudeau government said it would implement the tax on Jan. 1, 2024, retroactive to 2022.

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Gemini AI controversy highlights AI racial bias challenge
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Gemini AI controversy highlights AI racial bias challenge

Marietje Schaake, International Policy Fellow, Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and former European Parliamentarian, co-hosts GZERO AI, our new weekly video series intended to help you keep up and make sense of the latest news on the AI revolution. In this episode, she questions whether big tech companies can be trusted to tackle racial bias in AI, especially in the wake of Google's Gemini software controversy. Importantly, should these companies be the ones designing and deciding what that representation looks like?

This was a week full of AI-related stories. Again, the one that stood out to me was Google's efforts to correct for bias and discrimination in its generative AI model and utterly failing. We saw Gemini, the name of the model, coming up with synthetically generated images of very ethnically diverse Nazis. And of all political ideologies, this white supremacist group, of course, had few, if any, people of color in them historically. And that's the same, unfortunately, as the movement continues to exist, albeit in smaller form today.

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Annie Gugliotta

Exclusive Poll: AI rules wanted, but can you trust the digital cops?

A new poll on AI raises one of the most critical questions of 2024: Do people want to regulate AI, and if so, who should do it?

For all the wars, elections, and crises going on, the most profound long-term transition going on right now is the light-speed development of AI and its voracious news capabilities. Nothing says a new technology has arrived more than when Open AI CEO Sam Altman claimed he needs to fabricate more semiconductor chips so urgently that … he requires $7 trillion.

Seven. Trillion. Dollars. A moment of perspective, please.

$7 trillion is more than three times the entire GDP of Canada and more than twice the GDP of France or the UK. So … it may be pocket change to the Silicon Valley technocrat class, but it’s a pretty big number to the rest of us.

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A Microsoft sign at the tech giant's offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris.

REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes

Governments sniff around Microsoft’s OpenAI deal

Are they playing fairly? That’s the question American and British antitrust regulators have about Microsoft’s $13 billion backing of OpenAI. The US Federal Trade Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority are gathering information about the nature of the deal between the two companies, but neither has yet launched a formal investigation.
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Courtesy of Midjourney

EU lawmakers make AI history

It took two years — long enough to earn a Master's degree — but Europe’s landmark AI Act is finally nearing completion. Debates raged last week, but EU lawmakers on Friday reached a provisional agreement on the scope of Europe’s effort to rein in artificial intelligence.

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Logos of mobile apps, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix displayed on a screen.

REUTERS/Regis Duvignau

Canada averts a Google news block, US bills in the works

Last week, the Trudeau government reached a deal with Google that will see the web giant pay roughly CA$100 million a year to support media outlets in Canada. The agreement is part of the Online News Act, a law that requires big tech outlets to compensate the journalism industry. It’s also an important moment in the ongoing, cross-border battle to regulate these companies.
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Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

REUTERS/Blair Gable

Google throws Trudeau a lifeline

Canada’s Online News Act, introduced last summer to force revenue-sharing on tech giants, backfired badly when Meta decided to block Canadian news outlets from their platforms rather than pay up.

Bill C-18 and the tech giants’ response to it spelled trouble for a media industry already in crisis – traffic and revenue plummeted. It was bad news for PM Justin Trudeau, whose revenue-sharing law was intended to improve things for media outlets, not make things worse, and it opened him to criticism that he was incompetently wrecking an industry he was trying to help.

But this week brought a turn in fortune. Canada reached a deal with Google that will see the tech giant compensate Canadian news outlets for linking to their stories. The deal, which requires Alphabet to pay between $100 million and $172 million a year, is a huge relief to Trudeau after months of withering criticism.

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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, California, on Nov. 16, 2023, just a day before being fired by his board of directors.

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Ask ChatGPT: What will Sam Altman achieve for Microsoft?

On Friday, the tech world was abuzz with the news that Sam Altman, the 38-year-old co-founder of OpenAI, had been pink-slipped by the firm’s board of directors after a hastily called Google Meet. OpenAI’s other co-founder, Greg Brockman, also decided to leave the company after the board demoted him in the same meeting. By late Sunday, they both had new jobs.


According to insiders, Altman had been moving “too fast” in the development of new AI technology. Board members were reportedly concerned about OpenAI’s recent developer conference and the announcement of a means for anyone to create their own versions of ChatGPT. Ilya Sutskever, a key researcher and board member who was also one of the co-founders of OpenAI, was reportedly concerned about the dangers posed by OpenAI’s technology and believed Altman was downplaying that risk. The board was also apparently uncomfortable with Altman’s attempt to raise $100 billion from investors in the Middle East and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to establish a new microchip development company.

Altman’s firing was only possible because of the unique corporate structure of OpenAI. Despite being a co-founder, Altman had no equity in the company. The company’s board controls OpenAI’s 501(c)(3) charity, OpenAI Inc., which was established via a charter to “ensure that safe artificial general intelligence is developed and benefits all of humanity.” That charter takes “precedence over any obligation to generate a profit.”

Altman did not take it lying down. On Saturday night, he tweeted “i love the openai team so much.” Hundreds of employees, including interim CEO Mira Murati and COO Brad Lightcap, liked or reposted the tweet within the hour. Over the weekend, investors also rallied behind Altman, including Thrive Capital, Tiger Global, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia Capital. A plan to sell as much as $1 billion in employee stock now hangs in the balance; Thrive Capital was set to lead that tender offer and to value OpenAI at $86bn.

Despite the pressure, OpenAI’s board chose not to reinstate Altman – they refused to meet his demands of there being a new board and governance structure – and announced Sunday evening that Emmett Shear, former chief executive of Twitch, will replace him as CEO. Shear faces a tough job, given that so many OpenAI staffers had threatened to quit unless Altman returned.

But some of them may have a landing pad: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted late Sunday on X that Altman, Brockman, and their team will be joining Microsoft to lead a “new advanced AI research team.”

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