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Courtesy of Midjourney

Chinese national charged with stealing Google’s trade secrets

Image courtesy of Midjourney

Linwei Ding, a Chinese national residing in California, was arrested and indicted last Wednesday for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence-related trade secrets from Google and transferring them to his Chinese companies. Ding, who worked for Google, allegedly took more than 500 confidential files from his employer and used them in his work with two companies in China — one he founded, the other that recruited him and told investors he was the chief technology officer.

Neither Ding nor his lawyer have commented publicly on the case.

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The Google AI logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Gemini in the background.

Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Reuters

Hard Numbers: Bye-bye Bard, Arm’s up, Robots took my job, Super Bowl ad blitz

20: Google is switching things up. Its AI chatbot, Bard, is being replaced by Gemini. Like ChatGPT, there’s a $20-a-month premium version of the service, called Gemini Advanced. Google said the chatbot is a “new experience far more capable at reasoning, following instructions, coding, and creative collaboration” than anything on the market.
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Ian Bremmer: On AI regulation, governments must step up to protect our social fabric
AI might succeed where social media failed but... | Ian Bremmer | Global Stage

Ian Bremmer: On AI regulation, governments must step up to protect our social fabric

Seven leading AI companies, including Google, Meta and Microsoft, committed to managing risks posed by the technology, after holding discussions with the US government last May—a landmark move that Ian Bremmer sees as a win.

Speaking in a GZERO Global Stage discussion from the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media President Ian Bremmer calls tech firms' ongoing conversations with regulators on AI guardrails a "win" but points out that a big challenge with regulation will be that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy, as AI impacts different sectors differently. For example, ensuring AI can’t be used to make a weapon is important, “but I want to test these things on societies and on children before we roll them out,” he says.

“We would've benefited from that with social media,” he added.

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Midjourney artificial intelligence on a computer screen.

IMAGO/Action Pictures via Reuters Connect

Hard Numbers: Stolen art, mathletes, DeepMind defection, Antitrust tussle, Labor shortages

16,000: A list of 16,000 names of artists that Midjourney allegedly trained its image generation model on has spread on the internet after leaking from an online court filing. The list purports to show that Midjourney trained its model on the works of artists like Frida Kahlo and Damien Hirst. The list is an exhibit from an ongoing class-action lawsuit against the AI company and was accidentally posted online before being removed.
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Elon Musk is seen displayed on a mobile device with the Twitter and X logos in the illustration.

Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto

Hard Numbers: xAI's Musk money, Investing in Replicate, Undressing AI, AFL-CIO-Google?, NVIDIA’s big gamble

$1 billion: In a bid to compete with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, Elon Musk is trying to raise $1 billion in equity investment – he’s already raised $135 million from investors – for his AI company, xAI. While the world’s richest man has tweeted that the company “is not raising money right now,” a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission says otherwise.
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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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Meta and Facebook logos shown in an illustration.

REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/

New rules for political ads

Meta announced last week that it will require disclosures for any political ads made using generative AI, and that applies to political advertisers around the world — not just in the US. The company also said it wouldn’t lend its own AI software to those marketing a litany of ads concerning politics, social issues, health, housing, or financial services.
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