The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will examine the rise of AI technology across all fronts, said FTC Chair Lina Khan, speaking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
In fact, it’s already seeing an uptick in consumer complaint cases in some areas, like voice cloning fraud, Khan said.
Asked what areas of AI the FTC was watching, Khan explained that it was everything.
Of course, policing AI comes with its challenges, despite the number of technologists the FTC has hired to help in this area.
Another area of focus for the FTC is the focus on what openness really means in the AI context, Khan explained.
When generative AI tools started making waves in late 2022 after the launch of ChatGPT, the finance industry was one of the first to recognize these tools’ potential for speeding up the data-gathering and research process.
MIT alumni Jacob Chanyeol Choi and Subeen Pang founded Linq after they won the Samsung Open Collaboration in 2023, an accelerator-like program hosted by Samsung Financial Network.
Choi told TechCrunch that win spurred him to build large language models (LLMs) for enterprises, particularly the financial sector.
“We knew the potential for a tool that could seamlessly integrate with a company’s data ecosystem, which led to the birth of Linq,” Choi said.
In addition to its B2B service for enterprise clients, the startup also plans to build B2C tools for AI equity research.
It’s something Apple is striving to answer with its own take on the category, Apple Intelligence, which was officially unveiled this week at WWDC 2024.
Apple Intelligence is a more bespoke approach to generative AI, built specifically with the company’s different operating systems at their foundation.
It’s a very Apple approach in the sense that it prioritizes a frictionless user experience above all.
The operating systems also feature a feedback mechanism into which users can report issues with the generative AI system.
This should function the same with all external models Apple partners with, including Google Gemini.
Not only is Apple rebranding AI to “Apple Intelligence” for its purposes, but it’s also integrating the new AI features in iOS 18 in a more practical way.
Image Credits: ApplePresented in this way, some of the new Apple Intelligence features don’t even feel like AI, they just feel like smarter tools.
If you want to make your writing more concise or summarize an email, Apple Intelligence can help.
Outside of a few features — like Genmoji, which is just silly — Apple Intelligence feels boring and practical.
Apple Intelligence will launch in beta this fall.
Jordan Meyer and Mathew Dryhurst founded Spawning AI to create tools that help artists exert more control over how their works are used online.
Meyer claims that, despite the fact that it’s substantially smaller than some other generative AI training data sets out there, Source.Plus’ data set is already “high-quality” enough to train a state-of-the-art image-generating model.
Generative AI models “learn” to produce their outputs (e.g., photorealistic art) by training on a vast quantity of relevant data — images, in that case.
Image Credits: Spawning“Source.Plus isn’t just a repository for training data; it’s an enrichment platform with tools to support the training pipeline,” he continued.
And, Meyer says, Spawning might build its own generative AI models using data from the Source.Plus datasets.
Google is finally making its Gemini Nano AI model available to Pixel 8 and 8a users after teasing it in March.
The June Pixel drop will allow users to access the model as a developer option.
Apart from that, the feature drop includes Display Port connectivity support for Pixel 8 and Pixel 8a, reverse phone number lookup for unknown numbers, fall and crash detection for Pixel Watch 2, and doorbell notifications on the Pixel tablet.
The update brings manual lens picking in the camera to the Pixel 6 Pro, 7 Pro, and Pixel Fold.
Pixel WatchThe newest Pixel drop brings car crash detection to the Pixel Watch 2.
Mistral AI has closed its much rumored Series B funding round with General Catalyst leading the round.
The company has secured €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt.
As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant in the artificial intelligence space.
It also has distribution partnerships with cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure — Microsoft is also a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.
According to the Financial Times, Mistral AI raised €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt (around $500 million and $140 million respectively).
Traffic is down, newsrooms are undergoing layoffs, and publishers fear that AI technologies will only make matters worse.
Entering the fray, news reader startup Particle is teaming up with publishers to seek out a new business model for the AI era, where AI summaries of news don’t have to mean lost revenues.
Now, the company is bringing its first publishing partners into the mix to help it guide its next steps.
As a start, Particle now subscribes to Reuters newswire to help it deliver information about current events in the news.
What Particle isn’t yet ready to reveal is its business model.
Apple announced a deal with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot experience, to a range of its devices.
Here’s a roundup of a few of the more noteworthy Apple AI announcements from WWDC 2024.
New SiriSiri got a makeover courtesy of Apple’s overarching generative AI push this year, called Apple Intelligence.
To take advantage of the new Siri, you’ll need an Apple device that supports Apple Intelligence — specifically the iPhone 15 Pro and devices with M1 or newer chips.
Apple Intelligence will have an understanding of who you’re chatting with, Apple says — so if you want to personalize the chat with a custom AI image, you can do so on the fly.
“Big tech companies have ‘mis-set’ expectations when it comes to AI,” Heltewig told TechCrunch.
According to one survey, over half of businesses have already invested in AI capabilities to support their customer service operations.
Per market research firm Markets and Markets, revenue in the market for call center AI alone is set to climb from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by year-end 2027.
And it’s scalable; Cognigy manages AI agents that can handle up to tens of thousands of customer conversations at once.
Image Credits: Cognigy“Cognigy provides a platform to build, operate and analyze AI agents for customer experiences in the contact center,” Heltewig said.
