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President-elect Donald Trump
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President-elect Donald Trump is considering appoint an “AI czar” leading artificial intelligence policy efforts, as well as government use of the technology, Axios reports. The official probably won’t Elon Musk, Trump advisor and Tesla CEOwho has become an influential figure on Trump’s transition team, but Musk will also likely play a major role in shaping AI policy.
The potential hire comes as Trump courts Silicon Valley, with some venture capitalists and founders increasingly becoming his supporters. He would also have named a “cryptography czar” according to Bloombergalthough AI and crypto work could be consolidated into a single emerging technology position, Axios said.
Now let’s move on to the headlines.
LEADING PERFORMANCE
Anthropic this week revealed a new standard for connection From AI systems to data sources. Called the Model Context Protocolthe idea is to help pioneer models access more siled information, like business tools and internal application development environments. THE the standard is open sourceso it can be used not only with Anthropic’s models like Claude, but also with models from other AI developers.
BIG GAMES
Uber enters a new market: train artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reports. The ride-hailing company has a new division, called Scaled Solutions, which provides contractors to customers for data labeling and annotation work used to develop AI models. The company this month began recruiting contractors in India, the United States, Canada, Poland and Nicaragua. Uber joins a growing market that includes competitors like Scale AI, valued at $14 billion.
AI DEALS OF THE WEEK
Amazon East pour another 4 billion dollars In Anthropic. Massive deal brings e-commerce giant’s investment in Anthropic to 8 billion dollars in totalafter Amazon pumped billions into the startup last year. As part of the deal, Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud provider, will become Anthropic’s primary cloud for training its AI. Anthropic will also use Amazon’s in-house AI chips, Trainium and inferenceto train and deploy its models.
/dev/agentsa company developing an operating system for AI agents, launched Tuesday with $56 million in seed fundingco-directed by Index Ventures And CapitalGthe growth fund of Alphabet, parent company of Google. The startup’s founding team is made up of former Google and Stripe executives who helped build Google’s Android platform, including David Singletonformer CTO of Stripe, and Hugo Barraformer VP of Product Management at Google. Angel investors also include Scale AI CEO b, co-founder of OpenAI. Andrey Karpathy And Sarah Guofounder of venture capital firm Conviction. The startup is valued at $500 million, according to Bloomberg.
DEEP DIVE
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
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Why the DOJ is trying to restrict Google’s AI future
Late Wednesday, US Department of Justice tabled radical proposals to remedy Google’s historic antitrust casewhere a federal judge ruled earlier this year that it had an illegal monopoly in the online search market. Among the headline demands: forcing Google to sell its popular Chrome browser, banning multibillion-dollar distribution deals like the one Google has with Apple, or potentially banning Google from requiring Android phone makers to include Google apps on their devices.
But beyond these headline-grabbing requirements, the government also included provisions that could hamper Google’s future in the future. competitive race to control the future of AI. The DOJ proposed that Google sell all its stakes in AI companies with technology that could compete in search and divest them within six months of the court’s final ruling. The agency also recommended prohibiting any new acquisitions, joint ventures or partnerships with competing AI companies in research.
Notably, if the judge in the case agrees, it could involve forcing Google to sell its investment in Anthropicthe company founded by OpenAI defectors in 2021 and which could be valued at up to $40 billion. Last year, Google said it invest 2 billion dollars in Anthropic, following a $4 billion deal Amazon announced with the company months before. On Wednesday, British regulators cleared Google’s investment, saying they would not conduct a full-scale investigation to review the deal after an initial investigation.
Anthropic is the creator of Claude, a language model capable of generating answers to questions, similar to Google’s Gemini modelwhich was integrated into Google’s search engine earlier this year. Although the startup does not present Claude as a search product, these types of chatbots are widely considered a threat to Google Search. Other startups, like Perplexity, backed by Nvidia and Jeff Bezosare more outspoken about competition with Google. “It’s a good morning to be Perplexity,” one prominent AI investor told Forbes. It’s also worth noting that the DOJ’s proposal would remove Perplexity from Google’s list of potential acquisition targets. (Disclosure: Forbes threatened legal action against Perplexity for plagiarizing our content.)
The filing also proposes that Google give all publishers and content creators – including those at Google-owned YouTube – a an easy way to unsubscribe to have their content used to train or tune Google’s AI models or other AI products, and agree not to retaliate against those who choose to do so.
Read the full story at Forbes.
AI INDEX
700,000
The number of homes that could be powered each year by a data center campus with a peak demand of one gigawatt.or a billion watts – the type of data centers that underpin the world’s use of AI. According to a report by CNBCenergy consumed by AI systems could use more electricity than entire cities. In addition to the energy drain, finding enough land to house the sprawling complexes is also becoming a challenge. For example, Tract, a developer that secures land for infrastructure projects, said it has gathered over 23,000 acres of land for the development of data centers in the United States
QUIZ
This country is launching a $240 million plan to invest in the development of AI and defense.
- Poland
- Singapore
- India
- Mexico
Check if you have it RIGHT.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
How to fight the phone scammers prey on innocent victims? The answer could be Daisy, the AI granny. Daisy is a chatbot unveiled this month by the British telephone company O2, THE New York Times reportswho deploys the bot to waste scammers’ time by saying winding stories that lead nowhereeven providing fake personal and account information. The idea is to use the prejudices of scammers, who often target older people, against them and keep them on the phone for hours – time that cannot be spent with real people.