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Yoshua Bengio, major tech leaders call for six-month pause on advanced AI development in open letter (BETAKIT)
“The speed at which (AI development) is moving is outpacing our ability to make sense of it, know what risks it poses, and our ability to mitigate those risks,” Future of Life Institute's Emilia Javorsky said at a press conference.
“Six months gives us the time to create governance around it and to understand it better. It buys us time for those conversations, risk analyses and risk mitigation efforts.”
The open letter to stop 'dangerous' AI race is a huge mess (VICE)
The letter immediately caused a furor as signatories walked back their positions, some notable signatories turned out to be fake, and many more AI researchers and experts vocally disagreed with the letter’s proposal and approach.
VICE explores what the "longtermist" Future of Life Institute is, and how some in the field think the open letter is both dramatic and nonsense.
Canadian government ups semiconductor focus, invests $36 million in Ranovus (BETAKIT)
Ottawa-based Ranovus has secured $36 million CAD through the Canadian federal government’s Strategic Innovation Fund. The funds will help support a $100 million project to advance domestic production and manufacturing of semiconductor products and services.
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Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT (POLITICO)
The national data protection authority said it will immediately block and investigate OpenAI, the U.S. company behind the popular artificial intelligence tool, from processing the data of Italian users. The order is temporary until the company respects the EU’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The authority said the company lacks a legal basis justifying “the mass collection and storage of personal data … to ‘train’ the algorithms” of ChatGPT.
Federal #Budget2023 includes cleantech commitments, little else for innovation (BETAKIT)
The Government of Canada's 2023 budget is out and it's heavy on cleantech and light on innovation.
Notable commitments include $500 million for cleantech investing through the Strategic Innovation Fund, and numerous new cleantech and clean energy investment-related tax credits totalling billions of dollars. Additionally, the feds are instituting guidelines on the disclosure of crypto assets for federally-regulated financial institutions and pension funds in the wake of high-profile failures like FTX.
The ChatGPT King isn’t worried, but he knows you might be
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sipped a sweet wine in lieu of dessert, he compared his company to the Manhattan Project, as if he were chatting about tomorrow’s weather forecast.
The New York Times follows Altman over the years and shows how he embodies both sides of the great AI debate, but hopes to balance the myriad of possibilites of artifical general intelligence.
Coveo taps former Lightspeed, D2L exec Brandon Nussey to replace retiring CFO Jean Lavigueur (BETAKIT)
Coveo's long-time CFO and corporate secretary Jean Lavigueur is retiring from his position, and will be succeeded by Brandon Nussey, who has served as a finance and operations executive for several public Canadian tech companies.
Nussey is joining Coveo following his departure from Lightspeed earlier this month, where he most recently served as its COO.
Alphabet’s Google and DeepMind pause Grudges, join forces to chase OpenAI (THE INFORMATION)
Software engineers at Google’s Brain AI group are working with employees at DeepMind, an AI lab that is a sibling company within Alphabet, to develop software to compete with OpenAI, according to two people with knowledge of the project. Known internally as Gemini, the joint effort began in recent weeks, after Google stumbled with Bard, its first attempt to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot.
Coveo CEO Louis Têtu wants to take risk out of generative AI (BETAKIT)
As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes commercialized, its potential for missteps also grows. Québec City-based Coveo wants to remove the possibility of poor information from the chat-based model of AI, and is integrating what it calls the best conversational technologies to create new solutions.
The company’s “AI‐powered relevance platform,” offers search, recommendation, and personalization solutions for commerce, service, website, and workplace applications using the indexed content from its clients.
AI image generator Midjourney stops free trials but says influx of new users to blame (THE VERGE)
Midjourney CEO and founder David Holz stated that the pause is “because of massive amounts of people making throwaway accounts to get free images” and taking down the site for paid users.
There was speculation the trial halting was due to AI-generated images of Donald Trump being arrested going viral and being mistaken as legitimate, but those images appear to come from the most recent version of Midjourney which can only be used by paid users.
RealSage secures $2.1 million CAD to help multi-family rental managers make better decisions with AI (BETAKIT)
Toronto-based proptech startup RealSage has closed $2.1 million CAD ($1.6 million USD) in pre-seed funding to fuel its North American expansion and product development plans.
RealSage’s software platform helps multi-family rental housing professionals manage and analyze their operations. Leveraging AI and predictive analytics, RealSage claims it can help clients improve tenant selection and unit pricing, and reduce vacancies, among other uses.
Ontario budget gains kudos for streamlining procurement, increasing access to skilled talent (BETAKIT)
The province committed to providing an additional $2 million for the Futurpreneur program, $224 million for a new capital stream of the Skills Development Fund to leverage private-sector expertise, and boost the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program with an additional $25 million over three years to attract more skilled workers.
Birdseye raises $500,000 to help Shopify businesses automate marketing strategies using AI(BETAKIT)
According to Birdseye, its platform goes beyond standard e-commerce analytics reporting, which typically lacks solutions for what to do with the collected data. Birdseye uses AI to automatically generate step-by-step marketing plans.
UBC, BC Cancer researchers develop AI model to predict cancer survival rates (BETAKIT)
Researchers from the University of British Columbia and BC Cancer have developed an AI model that makes predictions on cancer patient survival rates using oncologists' notes.
Using natural language processing, the researchers conducted a prognostic study of over 47,600 patients with cancer and predicted their survival rates over the course of six, 36 and 60 months.