Last Week in AI #191: Argo self-driving shuts down, TSMC suspends work with Chinese chip startup, Shutterstock to sell AI-generated images, and more!

Ford, VW-backed Argo AI shuts down, TSMC suspending operations with Chinese chip company amid US curbs, Shutterstack partners with OpenAI to sell AI generated images

Top News

Ford, VW-backed Argo AI is shutting down

Despite billion-dollar investments, Argo AI is shutting down, with parts absorbed by its main backers Ford and VW. Some employees may receive offers from these two companies, and severance pay for those not offered jobs are generous. This comes after Ford’s 3rd-quarter earnings report, which said the company is shifting resources away from self-driving and more into driver-assist. The decision seems to mostly stem from Argo’s inability to attract new investors. Ford seems open to acquiring self-driving technologies down the road, but not developing them in-house.

Our take: This week sees another setback for the world of self-driving cars. On the technical side, Argo seemed like it was on the right track - it was running tests across multiple cities in the U.S. and had unveiled robotaxi plans earlier this year. Nonetheless, in the current economic environment, companies are finding it harder to justify expensive R&D efforts. FedEx and Amazon’s cancellation of curb-side delivery robots were done in similar veins. Coupled with Lyft co-founder saying self-driving cars won’t replace drivers for another decade, it’s hard not to see the rocky roads ahead for the industry.

TSMC Said to Suspend Work for Chinese Chip Startup Amid US Curbs

To comply with US regulations, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) has suspended production of advanced silicon for Chinese startup Biren Technology. While TSMC has not yet concluded whether Biren's products outperform NVIDIA's A100 chips (thus making them subject to restriction), the chipmaker has decided to stop supplies to the Chinese startup.

Our Take: This is a pretty interesting development since it might be difficult to fully verify when standards for the recent restrictions are met--TSMC is playing it safe here. I think this is going to be just the first of many stories we'll see about the effects of chip restrictions. A number of great pieces recently have commented on how the restrictions are intended to seriously strangle China's ability to produce top-of-the-line semiconductors in the short term. The question that remains, then, is what China can do with trailing edge chips and how long it will take for them to develop internal capacity to develop chips competitive with those they've been barred from.

Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI

Shutterstock has announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate DALL-E 2 directly into Shutterstock. The company is also launching a “Contributor Fund” where they will reimburse creators when the company sells their work to train the text-to-image AI model. In an earlier partnership with OpenAI in 2021, Shutterstock had sold images and their metadata to OpenAI to train their model.

Our Take: This is an interesting announcement; however questions still remain regarding the ethics around generative AI. It’s worth noting that Shutterstock is not allowing third-party uploads of AI-generated art - it’s only selling images generated in-house on its own website. This is aligned with other companies, like Getty Images, which also bans sale of third-party AI-generated art (although Getty Images doesn’t seem to have plans for generative AI integration at the moment). Shutterstock doesn’t see this reimbursement as a legal obligation, but rather a move to protect its reputation against public backslash. As such, the actual creator payouts may not be fair deals. Time will tell.

Other News

Research

People Can't Stop Feeding Their Selfies Into a Super Mean AI - "There's a hot new AI on the block, but instead of generating images, this one analyzes them and spits out crude roasts of anyone they depict."

Google & Stanford Team Applies Chain-of-Thought Prompting to Surpass Human Performance on Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks - "Today’s large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated game-changing performance across a wide range of tasks and domains, but they have their limits. "

Schmidt Futures Will Invest Additional $148 Million In Artificial Intelligence Research - "Schmidt Futures announced today that it was investing $148 million to fund the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship program."

New AI Model Can Predict Unplanned Hospitalization During Cancer Therapy - "New research shows that an AI model, which analyzes wearables data, could be used to predict the odds of an unplanned hospitalization among those undergoing cancer therapy."

Applications

Bumble Releases Open-Source Version of Private Detector A.I. Feature to Help Tech Community Combat Cyberflashing - "Private Detector™ works by automatically blurring a potential nude image shared within a chat on Bumble. "

Machine learning navigates vast materials space to discover new high-performance alloys - "An active learning algorithm has discovered high-entropy versions of Invar alloys – materials widely used for scientific instruments and industrial transportation of liquefied gases because of their tiny thermal expansion."

Machine learning enables an 'almost perfect' diagnosis of an elusive global killer - "Now, researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (CZ Biohub), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and UC San Francisco (UCSF) have developed a new diagnostic method that applies machine learning to advanced genomics data from both microbe and host—to identify and predict sepsis cases."

Dirty shrimp farms are punching a huge hole in the environment. A.I. could cut it in half - "“The software does all the heavy lifting,” Daniel Russek, CEO of Mexico City– and Indianapolis-based Atarraya, tells Fortune during a tour of the company’s newly launched U.S."

Business

Sony’s new A7R V camera uses a dedicated AI processor to identify and track subjects - "The latest full-frame camera from Sony keeps its predecessor’s 61-megapixel full-frame sensor but adds a new autofocus system with subject detection."

An AI Created 100,000 Full-Body Photos of People Who Don’t Exist - "Up until now, AI portraits of people who don’t exist have just been headshots. But now, a company has created 100,000 fake humans that have bodies too. "

Mobileye pops more than 37% in market debut after spinning out of Intel - "Mobileye shares closed up more than 37% in their stock market debut on Wednesday after the maker of technology for self-driving cars was spun out of Intel. "

Autonomous grocery tech firm Trigo gets $100M investment - "Technology The money will help the Israel-based computer-vision company expand its presence across the U.S. and Europe, the company said. "

Concerns

Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why. - "Texas-based RealPage’s YieldStar software helps landlords set prices for apartments across the U.S. With rents soaring, critics are concerned that the company’s proprietary algorithm is hurting competition."

Getty Images CEO says firms racing to sell AI art could be stepping into illegal territory - "Getty Images CEO Craig Peters has criticized companies “racing” to commercialize AI art generators, saying firms aren’t thinking through the potential legal and ethical hazards of the technology."

How Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt helped write AI laws in Washington without publicly disclosing investments in AI start-ups - "While there is no indication that Schmidt broke any ethics rules or did anything unlawful, government ethics advisors say his investments presented a huge conflict of interest."

Maybe you don’t mind if GitHub Copi­lot used your open-source code with­out ask­ing. - "But how will you feel if Copi­lot erases your open-source com­mu­nity?"

AI Digitally Restored a Lost Trio of Gustav Klimt Paintings. Not Everyone Is Happy About It. - "Emil Wallner of the Google Arts and Culture team (above) joined Dr. Franz Smola, a leading Klimt expert at the Belvedere Museum, to use AI in an effort to re-create the paintings' colors. The end result: recolorized paintings that Dr. Smola says are in line with Klimt's style and vision."

Analysis

The intertwined quest for understanding biological intelligence and creating artificial intelligence - "On intelligence: its creation and understanding"

AI Art Is Not “AI-Generated Art.” It Is Engineer-Generated Art - "The computers aren’t taking over the art world. The engineers are. Just the way engineers have taken over the music world with modern electronic music"

AI is disrupting long-held assumptions about universal grammar - "For years, many linguists have believed that learning a language is impossible without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models prove otherwise. "

Feature: How Do Game Developers And Artists Feel About The Rise Of AI Art? - "Should we all be worried, or is it just a fad?"

Expert Opinions

AI Risk is like Terminator; Stop Saying it's Not - "How is it possible that one of the most famous threats to humanity in all of fiction is also among the most neglected problems of our time?"

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