Hello, fellow humans! You are reading our limited series of Saturday Daily Briefs. Although focused on AI, it is compiled, written and edited by real people.
Have some questions about AI that you’d like answered? Or just some AI hallucinations you’d like to share? Email us anytime. Enjoy it!
Here’s what you need to know
The UK’s highest court has said AI systems cannot be the inventor behind a patent. Even if robots make something new, they do not have the same rights as people under current legislation.
ByteDance is relying on OpenAI to train its own competing big language model, according to The Verge. The TikTok parent relied on OpenAI every part of the processeven if it is against OpenAI’s terms of service.
A large dataset used to build AI image generators contains depictions of child sexual abuse. At least 1,000 cases some of the explicit content was found by the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Anthropic is set to raise $750 million in an upcoming funding round. The AI company behind Amazon $4 billion dollars is get more investor interest from a group led by Menlo Ventures.
At least for now, people will still have to analyze Securities and Exchange Commission filings. When the assignment is to read it and answer questions about the content, even the best AI models weren’t great.
Meta’s supervisory board blames AI for moderation issues
Meta’s supervisory board said artificial intelligence tools just won’t cut it when it comes to moderating content related to the Israel-Hamas war.
On December 7, the board opened an expedited review of two videos that Meta had removed for violating both its violence and incitement and its dangerous organizations and individuals rules, but reinstated them soon after. One was a video of hostages being kidnapped of Israel by Hamas, and one has the aftermath of the bombing of Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital.
The board blamed AI tools for misjudging the posts, as both the initial removal decision and the rejection of the user’s appeal were made automatically based on a classifier score, without any human review. As Quartz’s Ananya Bhattacharya explains, Meta needs more human oversight in content moderation decisions—especially non-English language posts.
Citable: The open source debate
“We need more companies and organizations to share their models and datasets publicly and in open source so that everyone can understand and build AI themselves.” —Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue in a message to Quartz
Delangue doesn’t like the tendency of big tech companies to hold on to machine learning codes like business patents. Instead, he’s working to build a world where every developer or startup can freely access artificial intelligence models—and to effectively help AI go open source.
One big number: 200,000
Number of images in a dataset used to train femtech company Sonio’s AI software, which reads ultrasound to look for abnormalities
Cécile Brosset Dubois, the founder and CEO of Sonio, is betting that artificial intelligence can help hospitals and individual clinicians make more sophisticated assessments. As she told QuartzAI-powered ultrasounds can speed up the pace at which doctors diagnose rare pathologies, along with reducing errors in their readings.
Other AI reads
🧠 The year in workplace innovation
🏦 Will Bunq’s Ali Niknam bring his AI-powered bank to the US?
🥽 Meet the software developers who touch VR
🤯 Pakistan stuns as jailed ex-PM Khan’s party uses AI to repeat his voice for speech
Ask an AI
The holidays are here, and this year Mariah Carey, the long-disputed Queen of Christmas, was briefly toppled by one Brenda Lee, a septuagenarian whose classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” shot to number one on the Billboard Hot was driven. 100 thanks to a social media campaign, shiny new video, and the power of streaming. But Carey herself was only on the throne thanks to many of these same factors – the younger generation may not even be aware that the singer never intended to become some kind of holiday icon, and was in fact one of the most successful pop stars from the 1990s. before “All I Want for Christmas” there was even a snowflake’s gleam in her eye.
In a recent episode of the Quartz Obsession podcast, guest The AV Club’s Drew Gillis chats with host Thomas Germain about how the Christmas comeback – and resulting duel – of Carey and Lee would never have been possible without streaming.
That’s why we asked for another major disruptive technological advance to weigh in. Bard, ChatGPT and Grok were all asked how Mariah Carey became the Queen of Christmas. All three immediately pointed out the song that gave her the nickname and the album it came from (Merry Christmas)but everyone called the song an instant hit.
This is not really true. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was never released as a single, and only gained popularity years after the 1994 album’s release (and certainly didn’t hit the charts much later). Overall, all three corrected what was by no means a smooth sled ride to the top—in other words, what became the typical, “almost right, but just wrong enough to fail” AI version of the truth.
Then, because it’s festive, we asked them all to write their own number-one chart-topping holiday hits, and ranked the results accordingly (we’ll include a few quotes so you get the idea).
👎Grok: “And when the clock strikes midnight, and the new year begins / We’ll know that our hearts are filled with the warmth of family”
👎👎Bard: “Grandma’s pies, twinkling eyes, mittened hands reaching for the sky / Snowflakes falling, snowmen high, laughter echoing through the hall”
👎👎👎ChatGPT: “Fireplace crackling, cozy and bright, / Families gather, hearts unite. / Stories told of yesteryear, / Echoes of love, joy and cheer.”
Each AI depicted sentimental scenes to get together with family and make memories on cold nights. It’s a very nice thought, but no.
Holiday hits are almost always about having fun, being in or out of love and/or dancing. Imagine any of these put to a tempo beat. Mariah would walk right off the stage.
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