IN THE NEWS THIS WEEK

[Quantum Technology] Orange marshals French industry to fortify EuroQCI against quantum creeps. Orange is to lead an army of computing startups, academia and business institutions to fortify the European comms infrastructure (EuroQCI) against the worst aspects of the quantum computing era. Luminaries including Airbus, CNRS, Cryptonext Security, Orange, Telecom Paris, Thales, Thales Alenia Space, Veriqloud and Welinq will help to develop new quantum computing security options. Academic and civil servants at Sorbonne Université, Direction Générale de l’Aviation Civile and Université Côte d’Azur will advise on securing communications and data for critical infrastructures and government institutions.

[AI] Record label Universal urges Spotify and Apple Music to stop copycats scraping song data. In a letter to streamers including Spotify and Apple Music, the record label Universal Music Group expressed fears that AI labs would scrape millions of tracks to use as training data for their models and copycat versions of pop stars. The letter, first reported by the Financial Times, comes after a similar move from the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry’s trade body, last October. Writing to the US trade representative, the RIAA said that AI-based technology was able “to be very similar to or almost as good as reference tracks by selected, well known sound recording artists”. A song that uses artificial intelligence to clone the voices of Drake and The Weeknd has already been pulled from Spotify and Apple.

[Blockchain] Societe General launches a euro stablecoin on Ethereum. Societe Generale has launched the EUR CoinVertible, a digital asset that purports to maintain a stable value. EUR CoinVertible is deployed in Euro denomination on the Ethereum public blockchain (ticker code: EURCV).This pioneering project complements SG-FORGE’s business offer to institutional clients seeking to benefit from innovative settlement and cash management solutions. It is designed to bridge the gap between traditional capital markets and the digital assets ecosystem.

[Industrial Metaverse] Is the Industrial Metaverse taking hold? A GTC keynote demo presented by Accenture showed how the integration of NVIDIA Omniverse with Microsoft Teams could be used to enable real-time 3D collaboration. Running on Omniverse Cloud and leveraging a Teams Meeting featuring Live Share, the Accenture demo showcased how the integration can shorten the time between decision-making, action, and feedback. In the demonstration, participants in a Teams meeting had an Omniverse application added to the meeting. At that point, everyone had a shared view of a segment of an assembly line that included industrial robots. Within that environment, a participant could move a robot to a new location along the line, add another robot to the operation, and more. As each change or addition was made, everyone in the Teams meeting saw the impact that change would have on the real system.

[General technology] Is ChatGPT domination hitting Stack Overflow? According to traffic stats published by the web analytics company, visits to Stack Overflow, which provides techies with an open platform to discuss and vote on common coding challenges, have been declining steadily, while ChatGPT has witnessed exponential growth over the past few months. As per the year-on-year analysis, the total traffic to stackoverflow.com, which was created 14 years ago by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, has been falling by an average of 6% every month since January 2022. In March, it was down by nearly 14% YoY to 258 million. By contrast, ChatGPT, which launched in November 2022, has skyrocketed. It attracted 1.6 billion visits in March and another 920.7 million in the first half of April.

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OTHER NEWS AND TOP READS

• ​GPT-4 will hunt for trends in medical records thanks to Microsoft and Epic - Microsoft
• ​Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals - The NY Times
• ​Government of Canada Announces Grant Recipients in Support of Canada’s National Quantum Strategy - The Quantum Insider
• ​EU launches project to bring quantum startups from lab to market - The Next Web
• ​Europe’s MiCA crypto regulations get final approval - Bloomberg
• ​BIS, Bank of England complete blockchain DVP settlement test using RTGS - Ledger Insights
• ​Webinar: What’s Next for Digital Twins & The Future of the Industrial Metaverse - Oil & Gas iQ
• ​Meta Removes the Metaverse from Its Advertiser Pitch Deck - Business Insider
• ​South Korea to Invest $15 Billion in New EV Battery Technology - Reuters
• ​Hive Systems releases its Systems Password Table - Hive Systems

FEATURED

‘OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it.’

By: Melissa Heikkilä

“OpenAI has just over a week to comply with European data protection laws following a temporary ban in Italy and a slew of investigations in other EU countries. If it fails, it could face hefty fines, be forced to delete data, or even be banned.

But experts have told MIT Technology Review that it will be next to impossible for OpenAI to comply with the rules. That’s because of the way data used to train its AI models has been collected: by hoovering up content off the internet.

In AI development, the dominant paradigm is that the more training data, the better. OpenAI’s GPT-2 model had a data set consisting of 40 gigabytes of text. GPT-3, which ChatGPT is based on, was trained on 570 GB of data. OpenAI has not shared how big the data set for its latest model, GPT-4, is.

But that hunger for larger models is now coming back to bite the company. In the past few weeks, several Western data protection authorities have started investigations into how OpenAI collects and processes the data powering ChatGPT. They believe it has scraped people’s personal data, such as names or email addresses, and used it without their consent.

The stakes could not be higher for OpenAI. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation is the world’s strictest data protection regime, and it has been copied widely around the world. Regulators everywhere from Brazil to California will be paying close attention to what happens next, and the outcome could fundamentally change the way AI companies go about collecting data.

In addition to being more transparent about its data practices, OpenAI will have to show it is using one of two possible legal ways to collect training data for its algorithms: consent or ‘legitimate interest.’ ”

Read the full article from MIT Technology Review here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/19/1071789/openais-hunger-for-data-is-coming-back-to-bite-it/​

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A Competitive Edge: Joining Technology Standard Organizations as a Mid-Sized Business

In today's fast-paced, technology-driven world, businesses must constantly innovate and adapt to stay ahead of the competition. One way to do this is by joining a technology standard organization such as Oasis Open, IEEE, W3C, and others. These organizations develop and promote open standards for the global information society, providing businesses with numerous benefits that can help future-proof their technology and help ensure industry success.

Joining one of them as a member can unlock numerous benefits for businesses, from access to cutting-edge research and development to new opportunities for partnership, collaboration and innovation.

​Learn how joining technology standard organizations can benefit mid-sized tech companies. From networking opportunities to gaining competitive advantage.​

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