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Perplexity logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024.
Search engines sing the AI blues
News companies have been split in dealing with AI. Some, like the New York Times, are suing AI firms over copyright violations, while others, like the Wall Street Journal, are striking deals. But most of the attention has been on OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and the biggest name in the space. This week, consternation brewed over how Perplexity, a so-called AI search engine, is using news articles without permission.
The company recently debuted a feature called Perplexity Pages, which gives news about a specific topic. But Forbes reported that the results are almost carbon-copied from journalistic outlets with limited attribution. The outlets aren’t named but linked in “small, easy-to-miss logos” in the article.
One deeply reported piece by Forbes about Google co-founder Eric Schmidt’s stealth drone project was aggregated with limited attribution and got nearly 18,000 views on Perplexity’s site. The same thing happened with a piece on TikTok and hacking.
“This is investigative reporting, sourced painstakingly from whistleblowing company insiders,” Forbes reporter Emily Baker-Whitewrote on X. “AI can't do that kind of work, and if we want people who do, this can't be allowed to happen.”
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivasresponded to Forbes saying that the product still has “rough edges” and said it’ll be improved.
Meanwhile, a Wired reporter found that Google’s AI Overviews drew heavily from his original reporting with minimal changes. No one has yet filed suit, but if they do, a court could decide whether this is a copyright violation or protected under the principle of fair use.FILE PHOTO: Smoke and steam billows from the coal-fired power plant owned by Indonesia Power, next to an area for Java 9 and 10 Coal-Fired Steam Power Plant Project in Suralaya, Banten province, Indonesia, July 11, 2020.
Hard Numbers: It’s electric, OpenAI’s billions, AI-related legislation, Fred Trump ‘returns,’ Multiplication problems
1,300: Training a large language model is estimated to use about 1,300 megawatt hours of electricity. It’s about the same consumption of 130 US homes for one year. But that’s for the last generation of LLMs, like OpenAI’s GPT-3. The potential electricity usage for GPT-4, the current model, and beyond could be much, much greater.
80 billion: OpenAI struck a deal that would value the ChatGPT maker at $80 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable private companies. It’s not a traditional fundraising round but a tender offer that allows employees to cash out their much sought-after shares in the company.
50: US states are clamoring to pass legislation to curb the worst effects of AI. By one measure, there are about 50 new AI-related bills introduced to state legislatures each week. New York leads the charge with about 65 outstanding bills, including a new one recently proposed by Gov. Kathy Hochul to criminalize deceptive AI.
1999: Fred Trump, the father of former President Donald Trump, died in 1999. But now, the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump political action committee, has used AI to reanimate the elder Trump for a new ad in which he appears to call his son a “disgrace.”
44: The education company Khan Academy made a ChatGPT-based tutoring bot called Khanmigo. The problem? It’s terrible at math, unable to calculate 343 minus 17. The chatbot is being piloted by 65,000 students in 44 school districts. One Yale professor who studies AI put it bluntly: “Asking ChatGPT to do math is sort of like asking a goldfish to ride a bicycle.”