“The line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ has become increasingly blurred”.

“Authentic”, word of the year chosen by Merriam-Webster Inc., highlights how misinformation in social media and the rise of AI have made it harder to assess what’s real and what’s fake — Bloomberg.

"The rapid adoption of AI could reduce wages, but so far is creating, not destroying jobs, especially for the young and highly-skilled, research published by the European Central Bank" — Reuters

Europe agrees landmark AI regulation deal

After more than 37 hours of negotiations this week Europe has reached a provisional deal on European Union rules governing the use of artificial intelligence, making it the first major world power to enact laws on the matter.

The deal requires AI systems to comply with transparency obligations, conduct model evaluations, and assess and mitigate systemic risks. Governments can only use real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces in certain circumstances, and the use of cognitive behavioural manipulation, facial scrapping, social scoring, and biometric categorisation systems is banned.

Consumers will have the right to launch complaints and receive meaningful explanations, and fines for violations will range from 7.5 million to 35 million euros.

The legislation is expected to enter into force early next year once both sides formally ratify it.

OpenAI Unveils App Store for Custom Chatbots

OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was opening an app store for people to share customized versions of its popular chatbot, ChatGPT.

The GPT Store, as it’s called, lives in a new tab in the ChatGPT client on the web, and features a range of GPTs developed both by OpenAI’s partners and the wider dev community. GPT users can browse popular and trending GPTs on the community leaderboard, which is organized into categories like lifestyle, writing, research, programming and education.

Building GPTs doesn’t require coding experience, and GPTs can be as simple or complex as a developer wishes. Devs can simply type the capabilities they want their GPT to offer in plain language and OpenAI’s GPT-building tool, GPT Builder, will attempt to make an AI-powered chatbot to perform those.

Source: TechCrunch

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Voice AI startup ElevenLabs gains unicorn status

ElevenLabs has developed AI models and tools for creating AI-generated voices with different languages, accents and emotions. On Monday it raised $80 million in Series B funding from investors led by venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz along with entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, with participation from Sequoia Capital among others.

That marks a jump from the valuation in its previous funding around in 2023, showed data from PitchBook, reflecting expectations for a surge in adoption of AI voice generation by firms as varied as games giants and movie studios.

Source: Reuters

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Apple Overhauls App Store in Europe

An EU law forced Apple to loosen its grip on the App Store.

Apple on Thursday announced major changes to the App Store and other services for consumers in Europe. Users of iPhones and iPads in the 27-nation bloc will for the first time be able to use alternative app stores to download games, productivity tools and other apps. Despite of this, Apple can moderate and choose which stores are allowed to compete with their App Store.

Banks and shopping services can offer their own payment methods inside their apps. People who buy new iPhones in the future will also see a new menu for downloading alternative browsers to Apple’s Safari, such as Chrome and Firefox.

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Venture capital veteran Chris Dixon (a16z) feels the only way to cut a clear path is to focus on blockchain technology and startups building in the industry:

“Crypto and blockchains are in the news a lot, but a lot of it is around speculation and prices. I feel that there’s another side of the story. It’s the side of the story that I live in, that the entrepreneurs we work with live in, which is what I would call the productive side of blockchains.”

Source: TechCrunch

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Meta Calls for Industry Effort to Label AI-Generated Content

Meta said it would promote technological standards that companies across the industry could use to recognize markers in photo, video and audio material that would signal that the content was generated using artificial intelligence.

The standards could allow social media companies to quickly identify content generated with A.I. that has been posted to their platforms and allow them to add a label to that material. If adopted widely, the standards could help identify A.I.-generated content from companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and others that offer tools that allow people to quickly and easily create artificial posts.

“While this is not a perfect answer, we did not want to let perfect be the enemy of the good,”

— Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, said in an interview.

Source: NYT

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OpenAI hit the $2 billion mark in December.

OpenAI believes it can double that figure in 2025, based on strong interest from business customers wanting to use its technology to deploy generative AI tools in the workplace.

Source: Financial Times

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