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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.FILE PHOTO: Vasiliki Kostoula, a Greek breast cancer patient, listens to her doctor after a radiological medical examination in an Athens hospital October 29, 2008.
Hard Numbers: Tax hacks, Breast cancer, Google dinged, AI job risk
294,138: The Internal Revenue Service received 294,138 complaints of identity theft in 2023 and flagged more than 1 million tax returns as potentially fraudulent. AI is set to supercharge tax fraud this season, letting malicious actors more easily impersonate people and obtain sensitive information needed to file fake tax returns in their name.
250 million: The French competition authority fined Google €250 million ($270 million) for failing to notify news publishers in the country that it was training its large language models on their articles. Google has already been forced to pay publishers in Australia and Canada to license their content, and the thorny question of AI training ushers in a whole new squabble for the internet giant.
10: According to a new US government estimate, 10 percent of workers are at high risk of being displaced by artificial intelligence. The findings, from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, show that the highest-risk individuals also are the ones with lowest levels of education and income—a reality that could further disadvantage many struggling Americans.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.
Bill Hannas, the lead at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former expert at the CIA, said it’s both a case of an individual allegedly enriching himself by stealing valuable trade secrets and a threat to US national security.
“Known cases of outright theft, where China is the beneficiary, number in the hundreds,” Hannas said. But there have been tens of thousands of cases overall in which US technology ended up in China through unknown or obscured means, he added.
Eurasia Group’s Director of Geo-technology Xiaomeng Lu says it’s still unclear if there’s any direct involvement from the Chinese government in Ding’s case.
“Maybe the FBI has more information about the case that they haven’t revealed,” Lu said, “but what I have seen in media reports doesn’t explicitly suggest the stolen information has serious national security implications – chip and software design information reads more like trade secrets than national security secrets.”
The United States tries to restrict China’s access to valuable technology that would aid its efforts to develop sophisticated AI models and computing capabilities. Washington strengthened export controls over semiconductor technology earlier this year to cut off China from the kinds of high-powered chips necessary to run AI models.
“Export controls encourage China to find other ways to get what they need,” Hannas said. “Chips are an area where China is said to lag by comparison, but the other big deficit, acknowledged by top Chinese scientists themselves, is AI algorithms.” It’s more difficult to clamp down on scientific progress than specific materials, and this kind of corporate espionage is one way of gaining parity with the US.
Ultimately, Washington is concerned that China will one day outpace the American military with AI-powered autonomous weaponry. “The theft of innovative technology and trade secrets from American companies can cost jobs and have devastating economic and national security consequences,” FBI director Christopher Wraywrote in a press release.
The Justice and Commerce departments’ Disruptive Technology Strike Force, established last year, has focused on using export controls to cut off foreign adversaries including Iran and Russia, in addition to China. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco wrote that, as part of these efforts, the Justice Department will “relentlessly pursue and hold accountable those who would siphon disruptive technologies – especially AI – for unlawful export.”
A corporate espionage case targeting Google may be a ways away from delivering on that concern, but the government’s aggressive response signals a willingness to closely monitor any AI technology leaving the country — especially through illicit means.
If convicted, Ding will face up to 10 years in prison for each count.
The Google AI logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Gemini in the background.
Hard Numbers: Bye-bye Bard, Arm’s up, Robots took my job, Super Bowl ad blitz
60: The British chip designer Arm Holdings is experiencing a market surge. The company’s stock saw a 60% increase after positive financial results and a rosy outlook. The company, which licenses its chip designs, attributes increased demand to the AI boom.
4,600: Artificial intelligence has already led to 4,600 layoffs in the US, according to the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And that’s a conservative estimate. Unlike with robotics breakthroughs of yore, this wave of artificial intelligence seems laser-focused on displacing white-collar workers.
7 million: AI made its way into some of this year’s Super Bowl ads — 30-second commercials that sold for about $7 million. Etsy debuted its AI shopping assistant, Microsoft boasted its Copilot AI business tool, and Google highlighted how its Pixel 8 phone uses the technology to help blind people take photos.
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.
The conversation was part of the Global Stage series, produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft. These discussions convene heads of state, business leaders, technology experts from around the world for critical debate about the geopolitical and technology trends shaping our world.
Watch the full conversation here: How is the world tackling AI, Davos' hottest topic?
- The geopolitics of AI ›
- Stop AI disinformation with laws & lawyers: Ian Bremmer & Maria Ressa ›
- Ian Bremmer: How AI may destroy democracy ›
- Podcast: Artificial intelligence new rules: Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman explain the AI power paradox ›
- EU AI regulation efforts hit a snag ›
- AI and Canada's proposed Online Harms Act - GZERO Media ›
Midjourney artificial intelligence on a computer screen.
Hard Numbers: Stolen art, mathletes, DeepMind defection, Antitrust tussle, Labor shortages
25: A math-focused AI system is almost at the level of our species’ most advanced teenage mathletes. The model called AlphaGeometry reportedly scored a 25 out of 30 on the International Mathematical Olympiad, the premier high school math competition. The average gold medalist in the competition has scored a 25.9.
220 million: A pair of Google DeepMind engineers are reportedly ready to leave the company, in talks to raise $220 million to build a new large language model. The company, which would be based in France, is tentatively called Holistic.
2: The US government's effort to investigate Microsoft’s $13 billion investment in OpenAI is on hold. The problem: Two different agencies can’t decide on who should take the lead. This is the problem that’s arisen between the country’s two antitrust authorities, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. Neither party seems ready to relinquish the job to the other.
11 million: Japan is estimated to face a labor shortage of 11 million people by 2040 as its aging population peaks and exits the workforce. While AI and robots may displace human labor in some economies, they might also help others — such as Japan — avert crises in industries such as construction and retail.Elon Musk is seen displayed on a mobile device with the Twitter and X logos in the illustration.
Hard Numbers: xAI's Musk money, Investing in Replicate, Undressing AI, AFL-CIO-Google?, NVIDIA’s big gamble
$40 million: AI startup Replicate raised $40 million last week from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz. The company maintains an extensive library of 25,000 open-source models on its platform, all of which are available for developers to tinker with, including Meta’s large language model LLaMA and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 2.0. These open models serve as a counter to proprietary — or closed-source — models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
24 million: AI has been a major tool for computer-generated nonconsensual pornography — a problem that disproportionately affects women. In September alone, 24 million people visited websites that gave them the ability to “undress” — or “nudify” — people in photographs using machine-learning technology.
12.5 million: Google just announced a partnership with the AFL-CIO, one of the most influential US labor unions representing 12.5 million workers. The goal of the partnership is to start an “open dialogue” about how AI might impact the workforce. Microsoft also committed to providing AI training for AFL-CIO members and agreed to include AI-related language in a union contract covering hundreds of workers at ZeniMax, a video game studio it owns. The language dictates that Microsoft is meant to use AI only to “treat all people fairly.”
35: NVIDIA invested in 35 firms this year as the race for AI dominance heated up, making it the most active large-scale investor in the space. That coincided with a year of staggering growth for the US chipmaker, which saw its stock rise 225% and its market capitalization exceed $1 trillion.