Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman get paid, Elon Musk feuds, and Google benches Gemini: AI news roundup
Plus, Google benches its AI Gemini from answering election questions, and so many secrets spilled
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It’s a good time to invest in AI — or just be an AI executive who invested in Reddit before it IPOs. Just ask Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman.
It’s not a good time to share your secrets with AI chatbots.
Check out the slideshow above for those and more highlights from this week in AI news.
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Jeff Bezos’ investment in an AI search-engine startup aiming to take on Google is expected to double after just a few months. Perplexity AI, which calls itself “an alternative to traditional search engines,” is finalizing a new funding round that would see its valuation double to about $1 billion, just two months after its latest funding deal.
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Sam Altman’s status as Reddit’s third-largest shareholder is poised to pay off big time when the social media site makes goes public later this month. Reddit and its shareholders are looking to sell almost $748 million worth of stock in its IPO, which could lead to a valuation of $6.5 billion.
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After suing his former company OpenAI, Elon Musk said his new AI company xAI will open-source its ChatGPT rival Grok. Musk made the announcement in a brief one-sentence post on social media. “This week @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk wrote on X.
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Google said it has restricted the types of election-related questions the company’s Gemini chatbot will answer for users in the U.S. and India. The restrictions are part of a number of steps the company has taken to safeguard its services from misinformation as millions of Indian citizens are set to vote in a general election this spring.
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Walmart is getting into artificial intelligence. Well, it’s at least planning to sell the software tied to it. The software, which the the big box retailer said it’s been building and testing in-house for the past two and a half years, will reduce the time it takes the companies it partners with to deliver its goods.
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As it runs to keep up in the race to develop advanced AI chips, Samsung Electronics is reportedly turning to the chipmaking technology championed by its rival. Samsung is reversing course on its current chipmaking tech to adopt that used by competitor SK Hynix.
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While AI can drive productivity in the workplace, it can also pose a threat to companies fending off cyber attackers. Like business teams, cyber attackers are using large language models (LLMs) to become more productive, said Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity, and management at Microsoft. That “productivity” includes doing reconnaissance on people and companies to find vulnerabilities, as well as learning how to code.
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As AI continues its ascent to world domination — albeit with some high-profile Chatbot stumbles along the way — it hasn’t had the best reputation for being secure. It has even been caught in the middle of the U.S. trade war with China.