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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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is considering naming an AI czar in the White House to coordinate federal policy and governmental use of the emerging technology,Trump transition sources told Axios November 27.
The news comes as ChatGPT celebrates its second birthday and concern grows globally about AI’s capacity to cause societal harm..
Axios said the appointment of an AI czar in the White House is likely, but not certain. Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and leading voice in AI. told the Wall Street Journal this week that a more concrete form of federal government oversight of AI is necessary in the U.S.
The U.S. is not alone in considering new oversight measures. Australia is in the process of developing guardrails for high-risk uses of AI and this week passed legislation banning children under 16 from using social media.
Meanwhile, concerns were raised this week that Microsoft is using customer data from its Microsoft 365 applications, including Word and Excel, to train artificial intelligence models, without permission. Microsoft denies it is doing so.
Other big U.S. tech companies are also being accused of violating users' privacy. In a November 27 story The Guardian reported that tech companies Amazon, Google and Meta were criticized this week in an Australian Senate select committee inquiry for being especially vague over how they used Australian data to train their powerful artificial intelligence products.
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| News broke on November 28 that the U.S. government is considering additional curbs on the sale of semiconductor equipment and AI memory chips to China, escalating tensions between the two superpowers. It is a sign of the times. Governments have begun to view AI compute infrastructures, including advanced AI chips, as a geostrategic resource.
With good reason: in a recent podcast OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called compute “the currency of the future” and says he believes “it’ll be maybe the most precious commodity in the world.”
Countries that can “manufacture intelligence” at scale will be at the forefront of harnessing the benefits of finding solutions to key challenges, from green transition to digital biology, says a recently released report by the Tony Blair Institute For Global Change (TBI). It argues that compute is not just a source of scientific and economic progress, but the new benchmark of global power economically and geopolitically.
“Just as governments needed to enable infrastructure such as roads, railways and telecommunication networks for business thrive, investing in shared and public compute has become equally important,” Jakob Mökander, TBI’s Director of Science & Technology Policy, said in an interview with The Innovator.
Compute is, in fact, slated to become “the foundation of next-generation economic growth and influence, shaping economic developments, as well as the future of sovereign power and international influence,” says the TBI report. It notes that compute infrastructure – and the difference in its availability from country to country – risks becoming the basis of a new digital divide. |
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Who: Andreea Danielescu is the Director of the Future Technologies R&D group at Accenture Labs. Her group focuses on new emerging technologies that blend the physical and digital,including biotechnology, smart materials, energy harvesting and storage and neuromorphic computing. Her specific areas of expertise also include conversational and gestural interfaces, wearable technologies, and AI and tech ethics. Prior to Accenture she worked as an engineer and researcher on conversational interfaces at both Facebook and Intel. Danielescu, who holds over 10 patents, was a speaker at the November 20-22 XPANSE conference in Abu Dhabi.
Topic: Emerging technology trends and how to prepare for the future.
Quote: "To prepare for the future you need dedicated resources. It can be challenging to justify but you need to properly resource a future-facing division and hire the right people. An interdisciplinary team is critical to this. R&D requires much longer cycles, on the order of three-to-five years minimum to explore a new area and start to develop applications and methods to scale the technology." |
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| French computer vision company XXII has developed a patented SaaS platform that uses AI to speed up analysis and decision making by extracting real time data from video imagery. It is targeting the retail, logistics and transport and security sectors. Customers include Affelou, Decathlon, Aeroport de Paris, and police departments and interior ministries in several European countries, including France.
Strategic investors in XXII include CMA CGM, a French shipping and logistics company which serves 420 of the world’s 521 commercial ports and operates more than 250 shipping lines, SNCF, France’s state-owned railway and Colas, a subsidiary of the Bouygues Group that focuses on transportation infrastructure.
XXII is a member of the EIC Scaling Club, a European Innovation Council-funded, curated community of 120+ promising European deep tech scale-ups.
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Amount of debt and equity raised by Northvolt, a Swedish battery developer and manufacturer specializing in lithium-ion technology for electric vehicles, before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 21, dashing Europe's hopes of building a new industry to compete with China. Founded in 2015 by two former Tesla executives, it commissioned its first manufacturing plant in Sweden in 2021 and announced plans for five others in Europe and North America.
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