The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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| After hobbling the news business by grabbing most of the advertising revenue and normalizing the giving away of content for free, Big Tech is using original articles created by journalists at surviving outlets to train its AI models, without giving credit to their work or providing any kind of compensation.
Big Tech companies are, in fact, hoovering up the content not only of newspapers and magazines but artists, authors and musicians, ballooning their own valuations while threatening the livelihoods of content creators. Copyright lawsuits filed against GenAI companies abound, alleging that the way they operate amounts to theft.
Bill Gross, one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific entrepreneurs, believes there is a better way than lawsuits to combat the problem: using tech of his own invention.
Generative AI cannot thrive on a foundation of stolen or uncredited content—it’s neither sustainable nor just, says Gross, CEO of ProRata.ai, a new company that uses tech to enable generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platforms to attribute and compensate content owners.
“This may finally be the time to create the perfect information marketplace,” he says.
For starters Gross is launching a GenAI search engine called Gist.ai that only consults the archives of participating publishers. Some 400 publishers have signed on so far, including The Atlantic, Time Magazine, Fortune, The Guardian and Skynews, contributing some 50 million documents. So have book authors such as Adam Grant and Walter Isaacson and Universal Music as the same technology can be used to attribute credit to images, music and movies. Expect other types of content providers to follow.
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- I N T E R V I E W O F T H E W E E K - |
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Who: Greg Lavender is Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and General Manager of the Office of the CTO at Intel Corporation. As CTO, he is responsible for advancing Intel’s future technical innovation through his leadership of Intel Labs and Information Technology. Lavender oversees Intel’s Information Security and Product Security portfolios, as well as ongoing investments in security research. His responsibilities also include enabling Intel’s software strategy across artificial intelligence, confidential computing, and the growing need for open accelerated computing to support Intel’s range of business and hardware offerings.
Topic: Confidential computing and privacy preserving data sharing.
Quote: "Companies need to keep up with the rate of innovation happening in the tech stack. The technology has been developed (and proven) to help you share data securely. With AI accelerating at such a rapid pace alongside ongoing security threats, I strongly encourage all organizations to leverage these technical advancements, which are already available in the market, in order to keep their data and business safe and secure."
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- S T A R T U P O F T H E W E E K - |
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| How many startups can say their ranking on the Apple app store sparked a global sell-off of tech stocks, wiping out a trillion dollars of value?
Meet Chinese startup DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup founded by hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng that has demonstrated AI reasoning models that appear to be on par with OpenAI and Anthropic, at significantly lower cost. That feat catapulted the Chinese company’s chatbot ahead of U.S. rival ChatGPT in downloads from Apple's App Store on January 27, causing shock waves in Silicon Valley and sparking a global sell-off of tech stocks, with Nasdaq, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and S&P500 futures all failing. Nvidia stock plunged 17% that day, wiping out nearly $600 billion in value — a record loss for a U.S. company.
Constrained by lack of access to highest-end AI chips from Nvidia by U.S. export restrictions, DeepSeek has taken a different approach than its U.S. competitors. It said training one of its latest models cost $5.6 million, compared with the $100 million to $1 billion range cited last year by Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI company Anthropic. According to the technical paper it published on January 27, DeepSeek said it used a cluster of just under 2,050 graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia for training — much less than the tens of thousands of chips U.S. firms are using to train similarly-sized models.
While industry experts were impressed by DeepSeek’s results, Suranga Chandratillake, a general partner at venture firm Balderton Capital, cautioned against overreacting to this latest twist in the global AI race.
Still, less than two weeks away from the February 10 Global AI Action Summit in Paris DeepSeek’s approach to training is being seen as a sign that U.S. AI dominance is no longer a given.
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- N U M B E R O F T H E W E E K - |
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| Percentage of 35,000 employees in 27 countries surveyed by Adecco Group in its new report "Working Through Change: Adapting To An AI-Driven World Of Work" who said AI has forced them to consider a change of profession, almost double the number of people (11%) who expected such a change in 2023. Last year, only 8% of workers were worried about AI having a negative impact on their jobs, while this year 13% reported having lost their job because of it, according to the report.
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The International AI Safety Report 2025.summarizes the state of the science on AI capabilities and risks, and how to mitigate those risks.
The U.S. Copyright Office’s latest report Copyrightability, provides critical insight into how AI-generated works fit—or don’t fit—within existing copyright law.
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The Innovator's Editor-in-Chief Will Be Moderating At The Following Events:
XYZ, February 13-14, Paris, France Sparks Innovation Summit, March 28, Tel Aviv, Israel |
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