Lifeboat Foundation

The Struengmann brothers’ agreement Monday to lead the purchase of a hand-sanitizer maker owned by EQT AB alongside other investors marks at least the sixth major deal involving the billionaire twins and the Swedish private equity firm within the past decade, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The deal for EQT’s Schuelke & Mayr GmbH values the Norderstedt, Germany-based company at about €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion), people with knowledge of the matter have said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information. Financial details weren’t disclosed. The sale is expected to close in the final quarter of 2023, according to a news release Monday.

A representative for the Struengmanns didn’t respond to a request for comment. The 73-year-old brothers are together worth about $24 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Form Energy, led by a former Tesla executive and backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, sees the cheap metal as a solution to banking surplus green power.

The need for transparency around AI-generated content is clear, but the value of measures like watermarks is not.

A few miles away, White House aides and reporters scrambled to figure out whether a viral online image of the exploding building was in fact real.

It wasn’t. It was AI-generated. Yet government officials, journalists, and tech companies were unable to take action before the image had real impact. It not only caused confusion but led to a dip in financial markets.

Continue reading “Why watermarking AI-generated content won’t guarantee trust online” »

Summary.

What will artificial intelligence do to industries and jobs? For a preview, look to the finance industry which has been incorporating data and algorithms for a long time, and which is always a canary in the coal mine for new technology. The experience of finance suggests that AI will transform some industries (sometimes very quickly) and that it will especially benefit larger players. But it may not leave the overall system better off.

Page-utils class= article-utils—vertical hide-for-print data-js-target= page-utils data-id= tag: blogs.harvardbusiness.org, 2007/03/31:999.361588 data-title= What the Finance Industry Tells Us About the Future of AI data-url=/2023/08/what-the-finance-industry-tells-us-about-the-future-of-ai data-topic= Business and society data-authors= Mihir A. Desai data-content-type= Digital Article data-content-image=/resources/images/article_assets/2023/08/Aug23_09_5277464-383x215.jpg data-summary=

Continue reading “What the Finance Industry Tells Us About the Future of AI” »

Hypnotized LLMs can help leak confidential financial information, generate malicious code and even cross red lights.

Tech pundits worldwide have been fluctuating between marking artificial intelligence as the end of all of humanity and calling it the most significant thing humans have ever touched since the internet.

We are in a phase where we are unsure what the AI Pandora’s box will reveal. Are we heading for doomsday or utopia?

Zach Kirkhorn’s replacement, Delhi-trained accountant Vaibhav Taneja, has kept a low profile since joining Tesla in 2016—a very low profile.

When an artist – whether they are a painter, writer, photographer, poet, etc. – creates a piece of work, they automatically own the copyright to it. This means they get to choose how that work of art can be used and, of course, get paid for it. But what happens when a piece of art is created by a computer?

This is a problem that we’ve only had to deal with in the last year – since Generative AI took the world by storm. Tools like ChatGPT can write stories, songs or plays, while Stable Diffusion or DALL-E 2 can produce images of anything we can describe to them.

But should the credit (and royalties) go to the person who used the tool to create the art or to the company that built the AI tool?… More.

Continue reading “Is Generative AI Stealing From Artists?” »

The regulatory chairman told Dealbook that people piling into the most dominant AI models will raise risks for a crash.

Another day, another step closer to the normalization of build-your-own AI chatbot partners.

Per Decrypt, top-shelf Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz last week took to the developer site GitHub to lay out detailed instructions on how to build an AI companion bot from scratch. The VC outfit has a lot of money in various AI ventures, the billion-dollar AI companion startup Character. AI included; now, it seems that the folks at the firm are so enthusiastic about companion bots that they’re encouraging curious developers out there to start DIYing versions for themselves — and among several other potential use cases, it feels notable that romantic partnership was listed as use case number one.

“There are many possible use cases for these companions — romantic (AI girlfriends / boyfriends), friendship, entertainment, coaching, etc,” reads the description, noting elsewhere that the “project is purely intended to be a developer tutorial and starter stack for those curious on how chatbots are built.”