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Let’s get some non-American options
In a recent interview, European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said that Europeans should have AI tools that aren’t exclusively made by American companies.
“The choice should not be American or American,” Vestager told Politico. “Europe is open for business from everywhere. But I think it’s important that you have choice.”
Most of the largest AI firms are American. That includes Silicon Valley behemoths like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, but also startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, which make the chatbots Claude and ChatGPT, respectively.
That said, there is a tangible AI presence in Europe: Google’s DeepMind lab, once an independent British company, still largely operates in the UK. The French startup Mistral AI was recently valued at $2 billion, and the UK startup Stability AI, which makes the Stable Diffusion model, is worth $1 billion.
With so many major technology companies headquartered in the US, Europe has long struggled to both rein in overseas tech while boosting its own firms. AI presents a fresh opportunity to reassert its influence. European lawmakers and regulators, about to pass their first-mover AI legislation, simultaneously want to clamp down on the technology and enable its firms to compete on the world stage.
Hard Numbers: Profitable prompts, Happy birthday ChatGPT, AI goes superhuman, Office chatbots, Self-dealing at OpenAI, Saying Oui to Mistral
$200,000: Want an image of a dog? DALL-E could spit out any breed. Want an Australian shepherd with a blue merle coat and heterochromia in front of a backdrop of lush, green hills? Now you’re starting to write like a prompt engineer, and that could be lucrative. Companies are paying up to $200,000 for full-time AI “prompt engineering” roles, placing a premium on this newfangled skill. It's all about descriptive fine-tuning of language to get desired results.
1: Can you believe it’s only been one year since ChatGPT launched? It all started when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted, “today we launched ChatGPT. Try talking with it here.” Since then, the chatbot has claimed hundreds of millions of users.
56: Skynet, anyone? No thanks, say 56% of Americans, who are concerned with AI gaining “superhuman capabilities” and support policies to prevent it, according to a new poll by the AI Policy Institute.
$51 million: In 2019, OpenAI reportedly agreed to buy $51 million worth of chips from Rain, a “neuromorphic” chip-making startup, meant to mirror the activity of the human brain. Why is this making news now? According to Wired, OpenAI’s Sam Altman personally invested $1 million in the company.
$20: You work at a big company and need help sifting through sprawling databases for a single piece of information. Enter AI. Amazon’s new chatbot, called Q, costs $20 a month and aims to help with tasks like “summarizing strategy documents, filling out internal support tickets, and answering questions about company policy.” It’s Amazon’s answer to Microsoft’s work chatbot, Copilot, released in September.
$2 billion: French AI startup Mistral is about to close a new funding round that would value it at $2 billion. The new round, worth $487 million, includes investment from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, along with chipmaker NVIDIA and the business software firm Salesforce. Mistral, founded less than a year ago, boasts an open-source large language model that it hopes will rival OpenAI’s (ironically) closed-source model, GPT4. What’s the difference? Open-source LLMs publish their source code so it can be studied and third-party developers can build off of it.