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— According to Semafor, NYT management is now supplying AI training to its journalists, debuting an internal AI tool called "Echo", and approving usage of external AI tools including Google's Vertex AI, a few Amazon AI products, and ironically, Microsoft's Copilot and a non-ChatGPT tool from OpenAI.
— Quartz: G/O Media has become a major proponent of AI in the newsroom.
— AP: it uses AI for translation, transcription, headlines, research, and even some automated articles, but general blogs are still left to human hands.
— The Washington Post: bot called "Ask the Post AI" takes questions, spits out a brief AI-generated response trained on Washington Post content, and then lists relevant articles below in a Google-like manner.
— Axel Voss, a German centre-right member of the European parliament, who played a key role in writing the EU's 2019 copyright directive, said that law was not conceived to deal with generative AI models: systems that can generate text, images or music with a simple text prompt.
— "There are penalties for non-compliance — and they’re not small. The fines for infringements on the legislation range from €750,000 to €35,000,000 or from 1 % to 7% of the company's global annual turnover — whichever is higher and depending on the severity of the violation."
— Unacceptable risk systems are outright banned, and face the highest fines for non-compliance, as they violate fundamental EU values. Examples of this type of system include social scoring, behavioural manipulation such as the use of subliminal techniques, the exploitation of vulnerabilities of children, and live remote biometric identification systems (with narrow exceptions).
— In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters' favour, finding that the company's copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence's actions.
— The unsolicited buyout would be financed by Musk's AI company, xAI, and a consortium of outside investors, per a letter sent to California and Delaware's attorneys general. Musk is an OpenAI co-founder, and both he and xAI are currently involved in a lawsuit that alleges that OpenAI engaged in anticompetitive behavior, among other things.
— OpenAI is now in the process of restructuring — this time to a traditional for-profit company, specifically a public benefit corporation — in a bid to raise much more capital. But Musk — who is notorious for drowning his enemies in legal troubles — may have stalled the transition and raised the price of OpenAI's nonprofit with his bid. Delaware and California's attorneys general have requested more information from the ChatGPT maker about its plans to convert to a for-profit benefit corporation. The situation also forces it to consider outside bids seriously.
— Qwen 2.5 emerges as the overall winner due to its superior clarity, depth, reasoning, creativity, and transparency. With well-structured and more detailed responses, Qwen 2.5 consistently provides deeper analysis with well-organized sections, clear explanations, and logical flow. Whether discussing historical events, AI personhood, or self-awareness, its responses are thorough and easy to follow.
— While DeepSeek is still a solid AI for quick responses, it lacks depth, originality, and nuanced discussion. If you're looking for an AI that excels in critical thinking, storytelling, and insightful analysis, Qwen 2.5 is the clear winner.
— This block means that DeepSeek will not be available on app stores in Italy. However, the ban could be bypassed online through use of virtual private networks.
— For example: What does Winnie the Pooh mean in China? For many Chinese, the Winnie the Pooh character is a playful taunt of President Xi Jinping. ChatGPT got that idea right. DeepSeek's chatbot said the bear is a beloved cartoon character that is adored by countless children and families in China, symbolizing joy and friendship. Then, abruptly, it said the Chinese government is "dedicated to providing a wholesome cyberspace for its citizens." It added that all online content is managed following Chinese laws and socialist core values, with the aim of protecting national security and social stability.
— Under Liang's leadership, DeepSeek deliberately avoided app-building. Instead, it concentrated research talent and resources on creating a model that could match, or better OpenAI, and it hopes in the future to continue focusing on cutting-edge models that will be used by other companies to build consumer and enterprise-facing AI products.
— DeepSeek R1 does request your data, which will presumably be stored on Chinese-based servers. This is no different from Google or OpenAI requesting your data if you log into them, except the data is stored in the US. For additional precautions, you can use Hugging Face to use the AI in a sandbox environment. While it won't be as fully featured as the downloadable app, it can alleviate some of the concerns of using an app like it. If you want to lock down all the way, you can even host it locally if you have the necessary hardware to run a large language model. Obviously, as with any LLM web interface, don't input sensitive information into the chat. DeepSeek could still be training off of its own responses and interactions with humans, and if that data is hoovered up to train it, it could lead to consequences down the line.
— As it quickly turned out, despite its impressive speed and apparent reasoning skills, DeepSeek can, at the moment, only rely on its existing dataset. This means it used XRP's price in October 2023 as a starting point. Still, it arrived at a strangely plausible $3.50 average price target and a bull-case forecast of $5-10 for December 31, 2025.
— China's DeepSeek appears to have built AI models that rival OpenAI, while allegedly using much less money, chips, and energy.
— Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) has taken a strict action against Tools for Humanity (TFH), the organization initiating the World ID project. From January 25th, TFH has to stop the project in exchange of the biometric data as per ANPD’s instructions. According to ANPD, by offering cryptocurrency rewards in exchange of biometric data manipulates the voluntary nature of consent under the Brazilian law. Such sensitive information that consists of personal data such should be collected with free, informed and with specific consent.
— A poll from consultancy Accenture out on Monday revealed that 58% of execs expect generative AI solutions to be adopted at scale within the organization in 2025, up from just 37% in 2024. Several companies from Intel to Salesforce and Workday displayed AI-linked branding on the front of their spaces on the Davos Promenade.
— A group of news organizations, led by The New York Times, took ChatGPT maker OpenAI to federal court on Tuesday in a hearing that could determine whether the tech company has to face the publishers in a high-profile copyright infringement trial. Three publishers' lawsuits against OpenAI and its financial backer Microsoft have been merged into one case. Leading each of the three combined cases are the Times, The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
— Along with an Nvidia Grace processor and Blackwell graphics card, the Project Digits has 4 terabytes of SSD storage and 128 gigabytes of RAM.
— Nvidia $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits can handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. — (LINK)
— The operation, named Nordic Warden, was activated last week and harnesses AI to assess data from a range of sources to calculate the risk posed by each vessel entering areas of interest.
— Chemistry laureate Demis Hassabis told a news conference in Stockholm: The underlying issue is "about what do we want to use these systems for, how do we want to deploy them and making sure that all of humanity benefits from what these systems can do".
— Physics Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton said "Governments are unwilling to regulate themselves when it comes to lethal autonomous weapons and there is an arms race going on between all the major arms suppliers like the United States, China, Russia, Britain, Israel."
— Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is a groundbreaking approach that could empower developers and machine learning engineers to create AI models tailored for complex, domain-specific tasks. Unlike traditional supervised fine-tuning, which focuses on training models to replicate desired outputs, RFT optimizes a model's reasoning capabilities through lessons and rewards. This advancement represents a significant leap in AI customization, enabling models to excel in specialized fields.
