Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home from Monday, August 5th, 2024, I'm Brian McCullough today. Why is OpenAI sitting on technology that could detect AI cheating? Why is Bitcoin so correlated to the stock market? Why is Elon restarting his lawsuit against OpenAI? Why are the Chinese launching a Starlink competitor and are the go-go days for music streaming over? I miss today in the world of tech. You know what would probably be useful?
Some sort of watermarking system or some other method to detect text written by AI. It would be even better if that method had a 99.9% reliability rate in terms of detecting AI text. And you know who apparently has exactly this? OpenAI. So why haven't we seen it? Quoting the journal.
The project has been mired in internal debate at OpenAI for roughly two years and has been ready to be released for about a year according to people familiar with the matter and internal documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal. It's just a matter of pressing a button, one of the people said. In trying to decide what to do, OpenAI employees have wavered between the startup's stated commitment to transparency and their desire to attract and retain users.
In survey, the company conducted of loyal chat GPT users found nearly a third would be turned off by the anti-sheeting technology. In OpenAI spokeswoman said the company is concerned the tool could disproportionately affect groups such as non-native English speakers. The text watermarking method we're developing is technically promising but has important risks we're weighing while we research alternatives.
She said, we believe the deliberate approach we've taken is necessary given the complexities involved and it's likely impact on the broader ecosystem beyond OpenAI. Employees who support the tools release, including those who helped develop it, have said internally those arguments pale compared with the good such technology could do.
A recent survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a technology policy nonprofit, found 59% of middle and high school teachers were sure some students had used AI to help with schoolwork, up 17 points from the prior school year. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and chief technology officer Miram Marathi have been involved in discussions about the anti-sheeting tool. Altman has encouraged the project but hasn't pushed for it to be released.
Some people familiar with the matter said chat GPT is powered by an AI system that predicts what word or word fragment known as a token should come next in a sentence. The anti-sheeting tool under discussion at OpenAI would slightly change how the tokens are selected. Those changes would leave a pattern called a watermark. The watermarks would be unnoticeable to the human eye but could be found with OpenAI's detection technology.
The detector provides a score of how likely the entire document or a portion of it was written by chat GPT. The watermarks are 99.9% effective when enough new text is created by chat GPT according to the internal documents. It is more likely that the son evaporates tomorrow than this term paper wasn't watermarked said John Thickston, a Stanford researcher who is part of a team that has developed a similar watermarking method for AI text. Still, staffers have raised concerns.
The watermarks could be erased through simple techniques like having Google translate the text into another language and then back or having chat GPT add emojis to the text and then manually deleting them and OpenAI employee familiar with the matter said. There is broad agreement within the company that determining who can use this detector would be a challenge. If too few people have it, the tool wouldn't be useful.
If too many get access, bad actors might decipher the company's watermarking technique. OpenAI employees have discussed providing the detector directly to educators or to outside companies that help schools identify AI written papers and plagiarize work. Google has developed a watermarking tool that can detect text generated by its Gemini AI called SynthID. It is in beta testing and isn't widely available.
OpenAI has a tool to determine whether an image was created using its text image generator Dolly 3 that was released for testing this past spring. The company has given priority to audio and visual watermarking over text because the harms are more significant, particularly in a busy election year in the US, the employee familiar with the matter said.
The global stock markets are down this morning, which is of course a bit beyond my Ken and who knows by the time you hear this, maybe everything will be back in the green. But I did want to note again that Bitcoin is now basically a proxy for the overall stock market at this point, especially the more aggressive parts of the market. At the time of this writing, Bitcoin has gone below $51,000 at coin its lowest level since February and down 18% since August 3rd. Ether is down 15% or so.
Quoting CNBC. Until last Wednesday, everybody was thinking that inflation was going down gradually and the economy was relatively strong, so the Fed would start cutting rates with successful soft landing of the economy. You has a Gawa, crypto market analyst at Japanese Bitcoin exchange, BitPank said. However, July's US manufacturing PMI and jobs report came in way weaker than the market expected, and now investors are worrying about the possibility of recession and dumping risk assets.
On top of economic and geopolitical concerns, crypto investors have been contending with sell pressure from Mt. Gox distributions and decreasing odds of a second Donald Trump presidency in the US, polls on polymarket and Ethereum based prediction market platform. Show the gap between Trump and Kamala Harris has narrowed significantly since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21st. Bitcoin is still holding on to a year-to-date gain of 20% end quote.
Elon Musk has revived his open AI lawsuit, filing a complaint in California, alleging that open AI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, breached open AI's founding contract. Quoting the Times. Mr. Musk withdrew his original suit seven weeks ago without an explanation one day before a judge was set to rule on whether it should be dismissed.
After joining with Mr. Musk to create open AI in 2015 and pledging to carefully develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, the suit claims, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman abandoned this mission by entering a multi-billion dollar partnership with Microsoft. Mr. Musk was, quote, betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices, the suit said. The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions, end quote. Open AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a blog post responding to Mr. Musk's first suit against open AI, Mr. Altman and others at the company said that they intended to ask that its claims be dismissed and that the company aimed to serve the public good by building artificial general intelligence or AGI, a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The mission of open AI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits, they said.
When Mr. Musk founded open AI with Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and several young AI researchers, he envisioned the research lab as a necessary counterweight to AI work being done by Google. He believed that Google and its co-founder Larry Page were not sufficiently concerned with AGI's dangers. Mr. Musk parted ways with open AI in 2018 after a power struggle with drawing his financial support, forced to find other sources of funding.
Mr. Altman transformed open AI into a for-profit company and eventually raised $13 billion for Microsoft. Also, I'll take this opportunity to quickly make note of the fact that Elon also said Nura Link has implanted its device in a second trial patient who had a spinal cord injury and 400 of the implants, 1024 electrodes, are working. This year, Dell Technologies back to school event is delivering impressive tech with an inspiring purpose.
Learn how Dell is helping computer aid whose work is helping equip solar community hubs with tech and AI literacy skills to empower remote, displaced or disconnected communities around the world. Help Dell make a difference and shop AI-ready PCs powered by Snapdragon X Series processors at Dell.com slash deals. That's Dell.com slash deals. Summer might be coming to an end, but you can bring back that perfect feeling of summer relaxation anytime with THC products from Mood.
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That's hellomod.com code ride for 20% off your order and free gummies. Someone Elon related news, according to Chinese state media, a state owned company launched its first batch of internet satellites to rival Starlink, part of plans for more than 15,000 low earth orbit satellites. The competition to occupy earth's lower orbits also has military implications with the potential to affect the balance of power between worrying countries.
The launch led by Shanghai Spacecom satellite technology or SSST took place at Taiyuan satellite launch center, one of China's main satellite and missile launch centers located in northern provinces of the country, Chinese securities journal reported. The launch is part of SSST's 1000 sales constellation plan, also known as the G60 Starlink plan, which began last year and aims to deploy more than 15,000 low earth orbit satellites.
LEO satellites usually operate at altitudes of 300 kilometers to 2,000 kilometers from the earth's surface and have the advantage of being cheaper and providing more efficient transmission than satellites at higher orbits. Starlink operated by billionaire Elon Musk has tens of thousands of users in the United States so far and plans to add tens of thousands more satellites to its system, the largest of its kind.
Chinese researchers in the People's Liberation Army have over the past two years studied the deployment of Starlink in the war in Ukraine and repeatedly warned about the risks it poses to China should the company find itself in a military conflict with the United States. In January, an op-ed published in a PLA mouthpiece described the deployment of Starlink as a quote, serious threat to the security of space assets of various countries.
SST's 1000 sales constellation is one of three 10,000 Star constellation plans China is hoping will allow it to close the gap with SpaceX. SST's plan is to launch 108 satellites this year, 648 satellites by the end of 2025 provide a global network coverage by 2027 and get to 15,000 satellites deployed before 2030. Heck, even this is an Elon adjacent story because he has a startup with a similar name, though different spelling.
AI chip startup GROC raised a $640 million series D led by BlackRock at a $2.8 billion valuation up from $1 billion after raising $300 million in 2021 and the startup is adding an Intel executive SCOO. The startup designs, semiconductors and software to optimize the performance of AI tasks aiming to help alleviate the huge bottleneck of demand for AI computing power.
It was valued at $2.8 billion in the deal which was led by BlackRock funds and included backing from the investment arms of Cisco systems and Samsung electronics. The series D-Round almost triples the Mountain View California based company's valuation from $1 billion in a funding round in 2021. BlackRock is entering the market for new semiconductors that run AI software competing against incumbents such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Leader Invidia.
This funding accelerates our vision of delivering instant AI inference compute to the world, Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ross said in a statement. Former Intel Executive Stewart Pan is joining GROC to serve as its chief operating officer the company said. Today interesting news letter from Lucas Shaw this weekend in Bloomberg. Lucas asserts that music streaming has exited its high growth era.
As big streaming services are picking up fewer new subscribers causing revenue shortfalls for music labels. Quote. Shares of the most powerful music company in the world tanked on July 25 after its executives were honest about their revenue shortfall. Subscription revenue saw a deceleration in growth. Several music chief financial officer Boyd Muir told analysts a day earlier.
Large partners who have been less successful in driving global adoption have seen a slowdown in new subscriber additions. Translation. Streaming is slowing down. Apple and Amazon in particular aren't signing up a lot of new customers. This really isn't news. The industry has known streaming was slowing down for at least a year. But saying it out loud still spooked Wall Street. Researchers have said the music streaming boom is over and tried to sell their stock at the top of the market.
It was reminiscent of 2015 when Walt Disney CEO Bob Eiger acknowledged his cable networks were suffering from cord cutting. Wall Street already knew streaming was stealing customers from cable but most executives had played down the risk. When Eiger said as much on an earnings call it spooked investors and Disney shares tanked. Disney also dragged other companies down with it. The good news for the music industry is it isn't staring at cord cutting 2.0.
Streaming, the record industry's most lucrative business isn't shrinking. It's still growing thanks largely to Spotify, YouTube and local players. The bad news for record labels is that their business is no longer growing as quickly. Streaming has exited a high growth era and settled into a slower growth era. Music companies are limited in their power to address the streaming slowdown on their side.
So while labels believe this is just a temporary setback they have cut staff and reorganize to juice their numbers in the short term. Every music company is exploring ways to make money outside of streaming. They see how much money artists are making from tours, merchandise and special edition vinyl and they want some. But they don't have as much control over artist's businesses beyond the music. Labels don't get a substantial piece of touring sales and merchandise is a low margin business.
Movies and plays are nice one-off projects but they primarily exist to boost listenership of catalog. Warner Music is developing a superfan app. That's a tall mountain to climb. The most obvious solution is that labels need a new way to exploit what they do own. The songs in concert with existing partners. They are good at this. Streaming services, social media networks, fitness companies and video game publishers are paying them billions of dollars for access to their catalogs.
Meir's boss, Lucien Grange has already pushed streaming platforms to crack down on fraud and raise prices. Grange can't force these companies to act however. Amazon, Apple, YouTube and Spotify will raise prices at their own pace. Spotify in particular has demonstrated pricing power. New pricing plans will generate additional revenue though potentially in ways that are not as lucrative for all musicians.
A major label could, in theory, yank its music from a major streaming service to force the issue but is any label ready to forego billions of dollars in revenue. Universal already tried going to war with TikTok, a company that makes very little money from and lost. Yet for all the historical animosity between tech companies and record labels, the interest of major streaming services and major music companies are at least partially aligned.
Resources like Spotify and Amazon Music want to increase their customer base and the amount of money they make per user. If they succeed, it will benefit record labels. We very much see it as a symbiotic partnership analyst at JP Morgan Chase and Company wrote this past week. Whether these companies will succeed in accelerating growth is less clear. Spotify is developing a premium tier but the Swedish company and record labels haven't agreed on the best features.
Someone's Spotify to sell limited edition vinyl or early access to tickets. Others want fans to pay more for early releases of new music. Apple and Amazon are more focused on other initiatives than innovating in music streaming while serious XM holdings is having a tough time right now. Having identified the problem, everyone just needs to agree on a solution. Oh man, I got a wicked summer cold all of the sudden.
Not COVID, tested multiple times for that, no just a run of the mill summer cold, which really sucks. It's weird to have sweat dripping off your face at the same time. Your nose is dripping. Annoying. Talk to you tomorrow.