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This week, the TechCrunch crew (together with yours actually) is at TC’s annual Disrupt convention in San Francisco. We’ve received a packed lineup of audio system from the AI trade, academia, and coverage, so in lieu of my traditional op-ed I assumed I’d preview among the nice content material headed your method.
My colleague Devin Coldewey will probably be interviewing Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas onstage. The AI-powered search engine is using excessive, lately hitting 100 million queries served per week — but it surely’s additionally being sued by News Corp’s Dow Jones over what the writer describes as a “content kleptocracy.”
Kirsten Korosec, TC’s transportation editor, will chat with Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson in a hearth. Levinson, who has been within the thick of autonomous automotive know-how for a decade, is now getting ready the Amazon-owned robotaxi firm for its subsequent large journey — and we’ll be reporting on it.
We’ll even have a panel on how AI Is flooding the online with disinformation — that includes Meta Oversight Board member Pamela San Martin, Center for Countering Digital Hate CEO Imran Ahmed, and UC Berkeley CITRIS Policy Lab founder Brandie Nonnecke. The trio will talk about how, as generative AI instruments turn into extra extensively obtainable, they’re being abused by an array of actors, together with state actors, to create deepfakes and sow disinformation.
And we’ll hear from Cara CEO Jingna Zhang, AI Now Institute co-executive director Sarah Myers West, and ElevenLabs’ Aleksandra Pedraszewska on AI’s authorized and moral minefields. AI’s meteoric rise has created new moral dilemmas and exacerbated outdated ones, whereas lawsuits drop left and proper. This threatens each new and established AI firms, and the creators and staff whose labor feeds the fashions. The panel will deal with all of this — and extra.
That’s only a sampling of what’s on deck this week. Expect appearances from AI consultants like U.S. AI Safety Institute director Elizabeth Kelly, California senator Scott Wiener, Berkeley AI coverage hub co-director Jessica Newman, Luma AI CEO Amit Jain, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman, and Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava.
News
Apple Intelligence launches: Through a free software program replace, iPhone, iPad, and Mac customers can entry the primary set of Apple’s AI-powered Apple Intelligence capabilities.
Bret Taylor’s startup raises new cash: Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, has raised $175 million in a funding spherical that values the startup at $4.5 billion.
Google expands AI Overviews: Google Search’s AI Overviews, which show a snapshot of knowledge on the high of the outcomes web page, are starting to roll out in additional than 100 international locations and territories.
Generative AI and e-waste: The immense and rapidly advancing computing necessities of AI fashions may result in the trade discarding the e-waste equal of greater than 10 billion iPhones per 12 months by 2030, researchers undertaking.
Open supply, now outlined: The Open Source Initiative, a long-running establishment aiming to outline and “steward” all issues open supply, this week launched model 1.zero of its definition of open supply AI.
Meta releases its personal podcast generator: Meta has launched an “open” implementation of the viral generate-a-podcast characteristic in Google’s NotebookLM.
Hallucinated transcriptions: OpenAI’s Whisper transcription software has hallucination points, researchers say. Whisper has reportedly launched all the things from racial commentary to imagined remedies into transcripts.
Research paper of the week
Google says it taught a mannequin to transform images of handwriting into “digital ink.”
The mannequin, InkSight, was skilled to acknowledge written phrases on a web page and output strokes that roughly resemble handwriting. The purpose, the Google researchers behind the undertaking say, was to “seize the…
