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Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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Creatives and the news media escalated their battles with tech companies this week over the use of copyrighted content to build and operate AI systems.
At press time 20,000 creatives, including some famous people in the fields of literature, music, film, theater and television, had signed a statement that expresses growing concerns over the unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models.
“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data, Ed Newton-Rex, a British composer and a former head of audio at tech firm Stability AI, told The Guardian. “They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free.”
The news media is making a similar argument. Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit in the southern district of New York against Perplexity AI on October 21, claiming the artificial intelligence startup engages in a “massive amount of illegal copying” of their copyrighted work without compensation.
Read on to get the key takeaways from this story and learn about this week's other important technology news impacting business. |
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| Earlier this month OpenAI made headlines when it introduced "Swarm" an experimental framework designed to coordinate networks of AI agents. Though not an official product, Swarm provides developers with a blueprint for creating AI systems capable of autonomous collaboration on complex tasks.
What most people don’t realize is that teams of AI agents already have the ability to take over entire departments, replacing – and outpacing -white collar workers, says Simon Torrance, the London-based founder and CEO of an advisory firm called 'AI Risk' - a research, strategy and innovation network focused on developing and deploying AI effectively and safely.
Torrance cites the following example: A year ago the entire operations team of a small European insurance brokerage left the company after being poached by a competitor. The CEO asked a friend, a successful insurtech entrepreneur and computer scientist who had just sold his predictive analytics business for advice. The friend- who prefers to remain anonymous for now - had some spare time to help and decided to try something radically new: re-designing the whole operations function using AI alone, with tools that already existed and were readily available.
The friend analyzed all their job tasks and workflows and, within three months, created a new ‘team’ comprised exclusively of AI agents that took on the roles of a commercial manager, an actuarial and underwriting function, an accountant, customer care managers and IT staff for the insurance brokerage. The Agentic AI outperformed its claims ratio objective by a factor of two, says Torrance.
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Who: Dr. Chris Luebkeman, is the Leader of the Strategic Foresight Hub in the Office of the President at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) The recently established Hub engages with a broad range of stakeholders on future focused drivers of change. Luebkeman is also a member of the nominating committee for the prestigious Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, the external advisory board of the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, on the Brain Trust of the Climate Music Project and co-founder and CEO of [y]our2040.
Topic: How to think about the future
Quote: "I like to describe the goal of a foresight exercise being like saltwater taffy. It is rigid and hard at the outset, but once you start bending it, there is no going back to the original form. There has been a permanent deformation or mindset shift. The neurons in our brains are like that. You start bending them by thinking about future possibilities in an organized way. You become sensitized to certain signals or potentialities. You still have your daily business and P&L to deal with, but eventually as your sub-conscious keeps chewing on what you have learned, you often gain deeper insights and start to see signals which lead to better decision making."
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| AI is poised to be a game changer in quality control, which is still done manually in some factories. AI-powered image recognition can be used to detect product defects automatically. In addition, AI’s analytical capabilities can be leveraged to identify patterns in production data and incident reports to uncover improvement areas. But many manufacturers have yet to reap the benefits of AI.
Zetamotion, a UK-based manufacturing startup, aims to change that dynamic. It has developed an AI platform that is designed to make the deployment of automated inspection in factories fast and easy. Boeing and the United Arab Emirates’ Tawazun Council, an independent government entity that works closely with the Ministry of Defense and security agencies in the UAE, are investors. Customers include glass, composite materials, metal, aerospace and defense sector manufacturers.
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Amount the top U.S. consumer finance watchdog said it is fining Goldman Sachs and Apple for “illegally sidestepping” their obligations to customers of their shared credit card business. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is banning Goldman Sachs from offering a new consumer credit card unless it can demonstrate that it can actually follow the law,” said CFPB director Rohit Chopra. The CFPB alleges that Apple failed to send thousands of transactions that were disputed by card customers to Goldman and that Goldman had not followed federal requirements for investigating disputes that were forwarded. The agency also said that the two companies misled customers about interest-free payment plans for Apple products. The CFPB has been pushing to extend its oversight of Big Tech’s expansion into financial services, reports the Financial Times, as more and more consumers link their bank accounts to digital wallet services.
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