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Two hands touching each other in front of a pink background.
Hard Numbers: Startups are up, Google gas, Brazil dings Meta, Slow and steady
27.1 billion: From April to June, investors poured $27.1 billion into US-based artificial intelligence startups, according to PitchBook. That’s nearly half of the $56 billion that all American startups raised during that time. Startup investment is up 57% year over year — something for which the AI industry can claim lots of credit.
48: Google’s greenhouse gas emissions are up a whopping 48% since 2019, thanks in no small part to its investments in AI. In the tech giant’s annual environmental report, it chalked up the increase to “increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.” It previously set a goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2030 and now says that’s “extremely ambitious” given the state of the industry. Many AI firms are struggling to meet voluntary emissions goals due to the massive energy demands of training and running models.
9,000: The Brazilian government on Tuesday ordered Meta to stop training its AI models on citizens’ data. The penalty? A fine of 50,000 Reals (about $9,000). The government gave Meta five days to amend its privacy policy and data practices, citing the “fundamental rights” of Brazilians.
75: Bipartisan consensus is hard to come by these days. But in a recent survey of US voters, conducted by the AI Policy Institute, 75% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans said it’s preferable that AI development is slow and steady as opposed to the US racing ahead to gain a strategic advantage over China and other foreign adversaries.
Smartphone with Google search
Google Search is making things up
Google has defended its new feature, saying that these strange answers are isolated incidents. “The vast majority of AI overviews provide high-quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web,” the tech giant told the BBC. The Verge reported that Google is manually removing embarrassing search results after users post what they find on social media.
This is Google’s second major faux pas in its quest to bring AI to the masses. In February, after it released its Gemini AI system, its image generator kept over-indexing for diverse images of individuals — even when doing so was wildly inappropriate. It spit out Black and Asian Nazi soldiers and Native Americans dressed in Viking garb.
The fact that Google is willing to introduce AI into its cash cow of a search engine signals it is serious about integrating the technology into everything it does. It’s even decided to introduce advertising into these AI Overviews. But the company is quickly finding out that when AI systems hallucinate, not only can that spread misinformation — but it can also make your product a public laughingstock.
A smartphone is displaying GPT-4o with the OpenAI logo visible in the background in this photo illustration, taken in Brussels, Belgium, on May 13, 2024.
Google and OpenAI’s competition heats up
Both Google and OpenAI held big AI-focused events last week to remind the world why they should each be leaders in artificial intelligence.
Google’s announcement was wide-ranging. At its I/O developer conference, the company basically said that it’ll infuse AI into all of its products — yes, even its namesake search engine. If you’ve Googled anything lately, you might have noticed that Gemini, Google’s large language model, has started popping up and suggesting the answers to your questions. Google smells the threat of competition not only from ChatGPT and other chatbots that can serve as your personal assistant but also from AI-powered search engines like Perplexity, which we tested in February. It also announced Veo, a generative video model like OpenAI’s Sora, and Project Astra, a voice-assisted agent.
Meanwhile, OpenAI had a much more focused announcement. The ChatGPT maker said it’s rolling out a new version of its large language model, GPT-4o, and powering its ChatGPT app with it. The new model will act more like a voice-powered assistant than a chatbot — perhaps obviating the need for Alexa or Siri in the process if it’s successful. That said, how often are you using Alexa and Siri these days?
The future of AI, the company thinks, is multimodal—meaning models can process text, images, video, and sound quickly and seamlessly and spit out answers back at the users.
Most importantly, OpenAI said that this new ChatGPT app (on smartphones and desktops) will be free of charge — meaning millions of people who aren’t used to paying for ChatGPT’s premium service will now have access to its top model — though rate limits will apply. Maybe OpenAI realizes it needs to hook users on its products before the AI hype wave recedes — or Google leapfrogs into the consumer niche.
American Airlines planes parked at the terminal gates at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.
Hard Numbers: Deplaning quicker, AI is working at work, Searching for answers, Microsoft chooses France
17: Since implementing an AI-powered system that directs airplanes to the nearest gate with the shortest taxiing time in 2021, American Airlines says it saves 17 hours a day in taxi time and 1.4 million gallons of jet fuel each year. The Smart Gating system started at Dallas Ft. Worth and is now in place at six major airports.
75: According to a new study from Microsoft, 75% of so-called knowledge workers are using generative AI at work, a figure that’s nearly doubled in six months. The study is from a major technology company that has billions invested in the success of generative AI tools and sells its services directly to companies. But this data still suggests that employees worldwide are gaining some comfort with, and finding use for, AI tools at the office.
67: Google is adding AI-generated search results summarizing answers to users’ queries. That’s a potentially troubling development for some publishers that could lose up to 67% of their traffic, according to an estimate from the advertising company Raptive. The firm predicted that these changes could lead to $2 billion in losses to online creators who depend on Google to send them search traffic.
4.3 billion: On Monday, Microsoft pledged $4.3 billion to build cloud and AI infrastructure in France, an announcement that comes two months after it invested $16 million in the French AI startup Mistral. Microsoft president Brad Smith made the announcement at French President Emmanuel Macron’s “Choose France” event, intended to attract foreign investment in the country.This artist s conception symbolically represents complex organic molecules, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, seen in the early universe. These large molecules, comprised of carbon and hydrogen, are considered among the building blocks of life.
AI is helping scientists model molecules
Google updated one of its most potent artificial intelligence applications, an AI model called AlphaFold — and the latest version can model “all of life’s molecules,” the company said last week. Yeah, all of them.
While the previous version of the model could simply predict the structures of proteins, Alpha Fold 3 can actually model DNA and RNA, plus small molecules called ligands. Google’s DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs divisions, which worked on AlphaFold, said the new model is a 50% improvement over the last one.
“It tells us a lot more about how the machines of the cell interact,” John Jumper, a Google DeepMind researcher, told The New York Times. “It tells us how this should work and what happens when we get sick.”
With this technology, researchers can leap ahead in the fundamental techniques they use to model biological systems, test and develop new drugs, and build new materials. Google is letting researchers around the world use the model through a website called AlphaFold Server for any non-commercial research. Here’s hoping we can report on the first lifesaving drugs developed through AI soon.
FILE PHOTO: A flare burns excess natural gas in the Permian Basin in Loving County, Texas, U.S. November 23, 2019. Picture taken November 23, 2019.
Hard Numbers: Unnatural gas needs, Google’s data centers, Homeland Security’s new board, Japan’s new LLM
8.5 billion: Rising energy usage from AI data centers could lead to additional demand for natural gas of up to 8.5 billion cubic feet per day, according to an investment bank estimate. Generative AI requires high energy and water demands to power and cool expansive data centers, which climate advocates have warned could exacerbate climate change.
32 billion: Google is pouring $3 billion into data center projects to power its AI system. That budget includes $2 billion for a new data center in Fort Wayne, Ind., and $1 billion to expand three existing ones in Virginia. In earnings reports this week, Google, Meta, and Microsoft disclosed that they had spent $32 billion on data centers and related capital expenditures in the first quarter alone.
22: The US Department of Homeland Security announced a new Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board with 22 members including the CEOs of Alphabet (Sundar Pichai), Anthropic (Dario Amodei), OpenAI (Sam Altman), Microsoft (Satya Nadella), and Nvidia (Jensen Huang). The goal: to advise Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on “safe and secure development and deployment of AI technology in our nation’s critical infrastructure.”
960 million: SoftBank, the Japanese technology conglomerate, plans to pour $960 million to upgrade its computing facilities in the next two years in order to boost its AI capabilities. The company’s broad ambitions include funding and developing a large language model that’s “world-class” and geared specifically toward the Japanese language.Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies and developer of AlphaGO, attends the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, Britain, November 2, 2023.
Hard Numbers: Google’s spending spree, Going corporate, Let’s see a movie, Court-ordered AI ban, Energy demands
100 billion: AI is a priority for many of Silicon Valley’s top companies — and it’s a costly one. Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis said that the tech giant plans to spend more than $100 billion developing artificial intelligence. That’s the same amount that rival Microsoft is expected to spend in building an AI-powered supercomputer, nicknamed Stargate.
72.5: The free market is dominating the AI game: Of the foundation models released between 2019 and 2023, 72.5% of them originated from private industry, according to a new Staford report. 108 models were released by companies, as opposed to 28 from academia, nine from an industry-academia collaboration, and four from government. None at all were released through a collaboration between government and industry.
5: The A24 film Civil War has garnered considerable controversy for its content, but its promotion is under scrutiny as well. Five posters for the film were created using artificial intelligence and depict scenes that never occur in the narrative. That’s kicked off a debate about the ethics of using AI in film marketing as well as questions of whether this is false advertising for the movie itself.
1,000: A sex offender in the UK who was found to have created 1,000 indecent images of children was banned from using any “AI creating tools” for five years by a British court. It’s not clear if he was actually using AI to create the illegal images in question, or if the order is peremptory, but it could serve as a model for future punishment in UK cases in the future. Meanwhile, on April 23, a group of AI companies including Google, Meta, and OpenAI, pledged to better prevent their tools from creating sexualized images of children and other exploitative material.
4.5: Salesforce is calling on AI companies to disclose the energy efficiency and carbon footprint of their models, and asking legislators to pass new laws aimed at demanding transparency and reducing the total energy consumption of AI. Salesforce’s best estimates put the total power generation demands of global data centers at 1.5% but warn that that figure could increase to 4.5% in the coming years absent intervention.Google's Gemini home page displayed on a smartphone in a photo illustration.
Hard Numbers: Pay for Google?, Indonesian investment, Amazon walks out on AI, Scraping YouTube
175 billion: Google said it made $175 billion in revenue from its search engine and related advertising last year, but is it ready to risk the golden goose? The company is reportedly considering charging for premium features on its search engine, including AI-assisted search (its traditional search engine would remain free). We’ve previously tested Perplexity, one of the companies trying to uproot Google’s search dominance with artificial intelligence, and you can read our review here.
200 million: The chipmaker Nvidia is teaming up with Indonesian telecom company Indosat to build a $200 million data center for artificial intelligence in the city of Surakarta, according to Indonesia’s communications minister. This news comes weeks after AI played a central role in the country’s presidential election, and it represents a major investment from one of the world’s richest tech companies in a key emerging market as Indonesia seeks to modernize its economy.
1,000: Amazon’s Just Walk Out in-store AI system for cashier-less grocery store checkout relied heavily on more than 1,000 contractors in India manually checking that the checkout transactions were accurate. Now, Amazon has announced it’s ditching the technology, which was being used in 60 Amazon-branded grocery stores and two Whole Foods stores.
1 million: One OpenAI team reportedly transcribed more than 1 million hours of YouTube videos to train its GPT-4 large language model. The company built a speech recognition tool called Whisper to handle the massive load, a move that may have violated YouTube's terms of use. YouTube parent company Google is a major rival to OpenAI in developing generative AI. Google hasn’t filed suit yet, but legal action could eventually come.