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This Week's Top AI & Tech News and Trends
Through July, 21 2024
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The Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. By Project Adam
Hello AI Citizens,
This week in The AI Citizen:
Microsoft Update Chaos Exposes Critical Security Flaws
Tiny Solar-Powered Drones Could Stay in the Air Forever
Copyright Claim Fails in GitHub Case
Researchers Propose New Method to Detect AI Hallucinations
Elon Musk's xAI Activates World's Most Powerful AI Training Cluster
AI Models Face Growing Data Blockages from Web Sources
Also, check out this week’s top AI tools, AI 2071 episode, featured programs, and more!
Let's dive in!
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The global outage left screens blank in New York's Times Square on Friday. (Kena Betancur/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Microsoft Update Chaos Exposes Critical Security Flaws
Microsoft's latest update has unintentionally wreaked havoc, leading to significant system performance issues and security vulnerabilities. CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity firm, identified the flaws and raised concerns about the increased risk of cyber attacks. This incident has sparked a wave of conspiracy theories, from intentional sabotage to corporate espionage, as users grapple with the fallout and await a resolution. Source: Washington Post
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CoulombFly is a prototype miniature solar-powered drone. Wei Shen, Jinzhe Peng and Mingjing Qi
Tiny Solar-Powered Drones Could Stay in the Air Forever
A groundbreaking 4-gram drone, powered by a unique electrostatic motor and tiny solar panels, has become the smallest solar-powered aerial vehicle to fly. Created by researchers at Beihang University, this hummingbird-sized drone, named CoulombFly, achieved a one-hour flight using natural sunlight. Its innovative design scales up the voltage to between 6000 and 9000 volts, significantly reducing energy loss and heat production. Future iterations are expected to fly indefinitely by harnessing solar energy during the day and radio signals at night, offering promising solutions for communications, surveillance, and search-and-rescue operations. Source: New Scientist
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Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images
Copyright Claim Fails in GitHub Case
A U.S. federal judge dismissed key claims in a class-action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI, marking a significant decision in the realm of generative AI. The lawsuit, filed by programmer Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, alleged that GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex infringed on developers' copyrights by generating unauthorized copies of open-source code. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs failed to provide concrete evidence of substantial code copying and dismissed the copyright claim with prejudice. However, the case continues with a breach-of-contract claim and a revised unjust-enrichment claim. This decision could have broad implications for the use of AI in software development. Source: The Verge
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Credit: The Batch
Researchers Propose New Method to Detect AI Hallucinations
Researchers from the University of Oxford have developed a method to identify hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). By analyzing the entropy in the distribution of generated meanings rather than word sequences, they propose a more accurate detection of hallucinated outputs. Testing on various models, their method achieved higher classification performance compared to baseline methods. This approach could enhance the reliability of AI in critical applications like medicine and law, where hallucinations can lead to serious errors, and improve overall trust and adoption of generative AI technologies. Source: Nature.
Elon Musk's xAI Activates World's Most Powerful AI Training Cluster
Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, launched its Memphis Supercluster, the world's most powerful AI training cluster, at 4:20 am. This supercluster, described as the "Gigafactory of Compute," features 100,000 liquid-cooled Nvidia H100 GPUs, consuming up to 150 megawatts of electricity and one million gallons of water daily for cooling. The Memphis Supercluster is set to vastly outperform current top supercomputers like Frontier and Aurora, potentially enabling faster AI model training. Musk anticipates that by December 2024, xAI's Grok 3 will be the most powerful AI, even before Grok 2's release next month. This development underscores the trend of increasingly frequent and advanced AI model releases. Source: Venture Beat
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The visualization provided by the Data Provenance Initiative shows that many content providers have switched to blocking access to their content for AI companies in the second half of 2023, either through robots.txt files, clauses in website terms of use, or both. | Image: Data Provenance Initiative
AI Models Face Growing Data Blockages from Web Sources
A study by the Data Provenance Initiative reveals a sharp increase in web-based training data blockages for AI models, with blocked tokens rising from 1% to 5-7% in a year. News websites, forums, and social media platforms are leading the restrictions, with blocked tokens on news sites jumping from 3% to 45%. This trend threatens to compromise AI training quality, pushing models to rely on lower-quality, biased, and outdated data. Consequently, training AI systems could become more difficult and costly, while high-quality content providers may explore new revenue opportunities through licensing agreements with AI companies. Source: The Decoder
Do you find these insights valuable? Are there other topics you think we should cover? Share your thoughts with us.
Email us at [email protected].
This Week's AI Tool Highlights
Vozo - Re-dub and rewrite viral videos with your voice using simple prompts.
Luma Dream Machine - Create infinite loop videos for easy AI GIF creation.
DigitalFirst.AI - Tailored marketing strategies and tactics for businesses.
Airy - An AI reflection journal that analyzes your mood.
Gobi - Offers personalized, real-time wellness exercises and practices.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/2d27c49e-391e-46bc-a790-86609013e730/Screenshot_2024-07-15_at_3.06.30_PM.png?t=1721045218)
Episode #2 - Cyber Escape
In 2066, a retired banker, addicted to a hyper-realistic virtual world, meets a tragic end when a natural disaster severs his connection, leaving his fate unknown.
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Gif by xponentialdesign on Giph
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