Technology

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the two companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with its content as a result.

As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.” This “undermine[s] and damage[s]” the Times’ relationship with readers, the outlet alleges, while also depriving it of “subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.”

The complaint also argues that these AI models “threaten high-quality journalism” by hurting the ability of news outlets to protect and monetize content. “Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” the lawsuit states.

The full text of the lawsuit can be found here

A reckless Google search deindexing sweep targeting the word 'Artemis' lists dozens of completely innocent sites for DMCA takedowns.

I got interested in this question a few years ago, when I started writing about the “denominator problem”. A great deal of social media research focuses on finding unwanted behavior – mis/disinformation, hate speech – on platforms. This isn’t that hard to do: search for “white genocide” or “ivermectin” and count the results. Indeed, a lot of eye-catching research does just this – consider Avaaz’s August 2020 report about COVID misinformation. It reports 3.8 billion views of COVID misinfo in a year, which is a very big number. But it’s a numerator without a denominator – Facebook generates dozens or hundreds of views a day for each of its 3 billion users – 3.8 billion views is actually a very small number, contextualized with a denominator.

The paper this post describes can be found here
Abstract:

YouTube is one of the largest, most important communication platforms in the world, but while there is a great deal of research about the site, many of its fundamental characteristics remain unknown. To better understand YouTube as a whole, we created a random sample of videos using a new method. Through a description of the sample’s metadata, we provide answers to many essential questions about, for example, the distribution of views, comments, likes, subscribers, and categories. Our method also allows us to estimate the total number of publicly visible videos on YouTube and its growth over time. To learn more about video content, we hand-coded a subsample to answer questions like how many are primarily music, video games, or still images. Finally, we processed the videos’ audio using language detection software to determine the distribution of spoken languages. In providing basic information about YouTube as a whole, we not only learn more about an influential platform, but also provide baseline context against which samples in more focused studies can be compared.

Users say excessive ads, bots and misinformation have sucked the fun out of sharing publicly.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York’s attorney general filed suit Wednesday against SiriusXM, accusing the satellite radio and streaming service of making it intentionally difficult for its customers to cancel their subscriptions.

Attorney General Latitia James’ office said an investigation into complaints from customers found that SiriusXM forced subscribers to wait in an automated system before often lengthy interactions with agents who were trained in ways to avoid accepting a request to cancel service.

“Having to endure a lengthy and frustrating process to cancel a subscription is a stressful burden no one looks forward to, and when companies make it hard to cancel subscriptions, it’s illegal,” the attorney general said in a statement.

The company disputed the claims, arguing that many of the lengthy interaction times cited in the lawsuit were based on a 2020 inquiry and were caused in part by the effects of the pandemic on their operations. The company said many of its plans can be canceled with a simple click of a button online.

Attorney General Letitia James' Statement

Apple said sales of its Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches would be halted this week after it lost a case over whether the tech giant stole a patented blood oxygen feature from another company.

Adam Mosseri shared Threads roadmap for the near future. It's not entirely surprising, but looks like they're working towards "full" federation support with profile portability.

Adobe said it could face significant costs or penalties tied to a Federal Trade Commission probe into its disclosure and subscription cancellation practices.

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On Monday, Mistral AI announced a new AI language model called Mixtral 8x7B, a "mixture of experts" (MoE) model with open weights that reportedly truly matches OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in performance—an achievement that has been claimed by others in the past but is being taken seriously by AI heavyweights such as OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy and Jim Fan. That means we're closer to having a ChatGPT-3.5-level AI assistant that can run freely and locally on our devices, given the right implementation.

Mistral, based in Paris and founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, has seen a rapid rise in the AI space recently. It has been quickly raising venture capital to become a sort of French anti-OpenAI, championing smaller models with eye-catching performance. Most notably, Mistral's models run locally with open weights that can be downloaded and used with fewer restrictions than closed AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. (In this context "weights" are the computer files that represent a trained neural network.)

Mixtral 8x7B can process a 32K token context window and works in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English. It works much like ChatGPT in that it can assist with compositional tasks, analyze data, troubleshoot software, and write programs. Mistral claims that it outperforms Meta's much larger LLaMA 2 70B (70 billion parameter) large language model and that it matches or exceeds OpenAI's GPT-3.5 on certain benchmarks, as seen in the chart below.

The speed at which open-weights AI models have caught up with OpenAI's top offering a year ago has taken many by surprise. Pietro Schirano, the founder of EverArt, wrote on X, "Just incredible. I am running Mistral 8x7B instruct at 27 tokens per second, completely locally thanks to @LMStudioAI. A model that scores better than GPT-3.5, locally. Imagine where we will be 1 year from now."

LexicaArt founder Sharif Shameem tweeted, "The Mixtral MoE model genuinely feels like an inflection point — a true GPT-3.5 level model that can run at 30 tokens/sec on an M1. Imagine all the products now possible when inference is 100% free and your data stays on your device." To which Andrej Karpathy replied, "Agree. It feels like the capability / reasoning power has made major strides, lagging behind is more the UI/UX of the whole thing, maybe some tool use finetuning, maybe some RAG databases, etc."

Mixture of experts

So what does mixture of experts mean? As this excellent Hugging Face guide explains, it refers to a machine-learning model architecture where a gate network routes input data to different specialized neural network components, known as "experts," for processing. The advantage of this is that it enables more efficient and scalable model training and inference, as only a subset of experts are activated for each input, reducing the computational load compared to monolithic models with equivalent parameter counts.

In layperson's terms, a MoE is like having a team of specialized workers (the "experts") in a factory, where a smart system (the "gate network") decides which worker is best suited to handle each specific task. This setup makes the whole process more efficient and faster, as each task is done by an expert in that area, and not every worker needs to be involved in every task, unlike in a traditional factory where every worker might have to do a bit of everything.

OpenAI has been rumored to use a MoE system with GPT-4, accounting for some of its performance. In the case of Mixtral 8x7B, the name implies that the model is a mixture of eight 7 billion-parameter neural networks, but as Karpathy pointed out in a tweet, the name is slightly misleading because, "it is not all 7B params that are being 8x'd, only the FeedForward blocks in the Transformer are 8x'd, everything else stays the same. Hence also why total number of params is not 56B but only 46.7B."

Mixtral is not the first "open" mixture of experts model, but it is notable for its relatively small size in parameter count and performance. It's out now, available on Hugging Face and BitTorrent under the Apache 2.0 license. People have been running it locally using an app called LM Studio. Also, Mistral began offering beta access to an API for three levels of Mistral models on Monday.

In one of the coolest and more outrageous repair stories in quite some time, three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it.

After breaking trains simply because an independent repair shop had worked on them, NEWAG is now demanding that trains fixed by hackers be removed from service.

SAN FRANCISCO – Miklos Daniel Brody was sentenced to 24 months in prison today for a network intrusion and for making false statements to a government agency, announced United States Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey and United States Secret Service (USSS) Special Agent in Charge Shawn M. Bradstreet. The sentence was handed down by the Hon. William. H. Orrick, Senior United States District Judge.

Hey Reddit,

i recently noticed that there are way more scam ads on YouTube. And i am not talking about those ads of people selling you get rich quick courses, which i get to see way too often as well, i am talking about deep fake Elon Musk saying that he has built an AI powered trading bot that will allow you to make 1 million dollars in 6 months risk free and to be honest i can't tell that it is deep fake, it looks very real. Here is the link to the ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWGb0BLYBOs

https://preview.redd.it/z7zagtomju5c1.png?width=1942&format=png&auto=webp&s=5ed808fbf9800784a6bb1698fac2317d8e5f2a85

or here another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE77YkmsbDc&t=75s

​

I am from Austria so i get to see the German version of these scams as well. Like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iyuyx5thgI

or this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMRY5dxnZ4E

The first one i have seen so many times it gets ridiculous. Its about a famous German figure supposedly being sued by the central bank because he found an infinite money glitch.

​

And because these scam ads are getting so annoying i started reporting them every time i see one, because i do understand that there are probably millions of advertisers on YouTube and sometimes these scams don't get detected right away. So i also reported that Fake Elon Musk Ad, but the next day i get shown the exact same ad again, then i open my email inbox finding a YouTube email about my report stating "We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies". The same goes for all four ads listed above, all reported, all apparently not against policy.

So one of these two is true:

1 - Elon Musk has actually found a way to make everyone rich with ai.

2 - YouTube simply doesn't care about people getting scammed as long as they make money.

As much as i would like the first one to be true, these YouTube Ads are not cheap to run, with one of them running for more than a month with 364K views. So the fact that the scammers are able to afford these ads means that people keep falling for these scams, and YouTube doesn't seem to care at all.

And i don't want to use an adblocker because i want the people i watch to get paid for their work, but i don't want them to be paid with the money from the victims of these scams.

Is this a regional problem in Austria or do you see these scams too?

Google’s mobile app store maintains a monopoly in the market for distribution of programs and payments on its Android software, a federal jury in California decided, dealing a blow to the technology giant in a high-stakes antitrust battle with Epic Games Inc.

A source: https://www.tiktok.com/@crazyskater93/video/7309995816423361825

The Foundation supports challenges to laws in Texas and Florida that jeopardize Wikipedia's community-led governance model and the right to freedom of expression.

An amicus brief, also known as a “friend-of-the-court” brief, is a document filed by individuals or organizations who are not part of a lawsuit, but who have an interest in the outcome of the case and want to raise awareness about their concerns. The Wikimedia Foundation’s amicus brief calls upon the Supreme Court to strike down laws passed in 2021 by Texas and Florida state legislatures. Texas House Bill 20 and Florida Senate Bill 7072 prohibit website operators from banning users or removing speech and content based on the viewpoints and opinions of the users in question.

“These laws expose residents of Florida and Texas who edit Wikipedia to lawsuits by people who disagree with their work,” said Stephen LaPorte, General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. “For over twenty years, a community of volunteers from around the world have designed, debated, and deployed a range of content moderation policies to ensure the information on Wikipedia is reliable and neutral. We urge the Supreme Court to rule in favor of NetChoice to protect Wikipedia’s unique model of community-led governance, as well as the free expression rights of the encyclopedia’s dedicated editors.”

“The quality of Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia depends entirely on the ability of volunteers to develop and enforce nuanced rules for well-sourced, encyclopedic content,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “Without the discretion to make editorial decisions in line with established policies around verifiability and neutrality, Wikipedia would be overwhelmed with opinions, conspiracies, and irrelevant information that would jeopardize the project’s reason for existing.”

Intel accuses AMD of selling old chips as new.

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#tech

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Take-home assignments during the interview process are on the rise, irking candidates who say it feels like free work.

AMD today announced the Instinct MI300 range, a direct rival to Nvidia's H100 AI accelerators. TechFinitive reports direct from the launch

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Genetic testing company 23andMe revealed that its data breach was much worse than previously reported, hitting about half of its total customers.