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- OpenAI strikes huge deal
Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
Your content may be feeding AI giants… With or without your consent.
Tumblr and WordPress pages are the latest training snack for hungry AI models, with bloggers left blindsided after a new deal with OpenAI and Midjourney. Let’s dig in…
In today’s AI rundown:
Tumblr and WordPress near AI deal with OpenAI
New tech can control a car with your eyes
Improve prompts with Copilot Notebook
Optimizing warehouse robots with traffic AI
6 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs
More AI & tech news
Read time: 4 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
AI DATA DEALS
Image source: 404 Media
The Rundown: Automattic, the parent company of Tumblr and WordPress, is reportedly nearing deals to provide AI training data from posts to OpenAI and Midjourney – sparking major backlash from users.
The details:
Automattic scraped Tumblr content from 2014-2023 for an initial data dump but also mistakenly included private posts.
The company is reportedly launching an opt-out tool, but it’s unclear if previously shared data will be retroactively removed.
The news follows similar deals from platforms like Reddit and Shutterstock, with AI giants amassing data to train powerful models.
Why it matters: Human-generated content is the new gold for AI model training, and users are quickly finding out that their data is a hot commodity. With angry consumers blindsided by their posts being used without consent and with a disregard for privacy, the backlash will only intensify.
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HONOR
Image source: Reuters
The Rundown: Huawei spin-off Honor demonstrated its AI-infused Magic 6 Pro smartphone, showing off the ability to control a car by just staring at the phone screen.
The details:
The Magic 6 Pro tracks your eyes to open apps from notifications.
The demo shows a user steering a car by staring at the smartphone’s on-screen commands.
The phone initially debuted in China but is now launching internationally at a $1,400 price point.
Honor also revealed a Chatbot based on Meta’s Llama-2 model, a video generator, new AI-powered MagicBook laptops, and other AI features.
Why it matters: Smartphone makers are racing to one-up each other with wild new AI infusions — and Honor’s eye-tracking feature is certainly a differentiator. While controlling a car with your eyes doesn’t seem very practical, the demo does succeed in hyping a pretty impressive piece of tech.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: Microsoft's Notebook (free) provides an easy-to-use interface for writing, learning, and modifying prompts to achieve better results.
Head over to Microsoft’s new Copilot Notebook.
You will discover an input and output interface, eliminating the need to start a new conversation for each prompt.
Enter your prompt in the panel on the left and press Shift+Enter to submit. Unlike Copilot, which has a 4k character limit, Notebook allows up to 18k characters.
Based on the results, you can modify and augment your initial prompt.
Notebook will keep previous versions of your prompt, making it easier to make changes and improve your prompt writing until satisfied.
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AI RESEARCH
Image source: MIT
The Rundown: MIT researchers just devised a new technique for streamlining the operations of robots in warehouses by applying AI learnings from navigating automobile traffic.
The details:
A deep learning model was used to identify optimal areas to reduce robot collisions in warehouses.
The model divided the robots into smaller groups of around 40 and determined which groups would provide the most impact if replanned.
The smaller group breakdown sped up planning 3.5x over traditional algorithms in simulated testing.
Why it matters: As warehouses scale up automation, AI coordination becomes critical to efficiently rout hundreds of robots. Techniques like this could smooth real-world rollouts and better inform other complex planning tasks.
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QUICK HITS
Section is holding a free Executive Briefing on AI event on March 19. Sign up to learn how executives should be thinking about AI, hosted by Section CEO Greg Shove. Enroll here.*
Apple is officially cancelling ‘Project Titan’, its decade-long autonomous driving EV effort – with employees shifting focus to the company’s generative AI division.
Google is reportedly paying publishers to test an unreleased AI tool that scrapes articles from other sites to craft new content, raising ethical concerns.
OpenAI accused the New York Times of ‘hacking’ ChatGPT to generate regurgitated content in a motion filed to dismiss the NYT’s claims.
Glean secured a new $200M Series D funding round for its AI-powered work assistant, pushing the startup’s valuation to $2.2B.
Pika Labs introduced a new lip sync feature to its AI video generator, allowing for realistic mouth movement and voice generation powered by ElevenLabs.
Klarna said its AI assistant handled two-thirds of the company’s customer service chats in the past month, equivalent to 700 employees — with high satisfaction and a 25% lower error rate than human workers.
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