Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #30

Anthropic faces lawsuit in California, Hong Kong issues GenAI guidelines for banks, Peru uses AI to predict weather cataclysms, and much more.

Hello and welcome to issue #30 of the AI Bulletin! We hope you enjoy this week’s selection of the latest and most exciting news in machine learning and data science, presented from the newest to the oldest.

Please note that this is our last bulletin this month. We’ll return in mid-September, after a short break, with a monthly recap. Don’t forget to leave us a like to support our work. Have a pleasant weekend!

North America

• OpenAI announces a new SearchGPT deal with Condé Nast, granting the tech company permission to display content from multiple publishers, including The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, among others.

• An NYC-based construction startup, led by a female founder who began her career as a carpenter in Austria, raises $20 million in Series A funding for its AI-powered project management platform.

• A group of authors files a lawsuit against Anthropic in a California court, alleging the company used pirated books to train its AI model, Claude.

Asia

• In Beijing, China, the 2024 World Robot Conference, dominated by local tech and AI companies, is currently in full swing, with the event set to conclude on Sunday.

• In South Korea, a new AI app called X Caliber, developed by SK Telecom, is helping pet owners quickly and accurately detect animal health issues by analyzing X-ray images.

• An Israeli company, D-ID, unveils AI Video Translate, a turnkey translation solution featuring full voice cloning and lip-sync capabilities: here’s their short video presentation. 

• The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the region’s de facto central bank, releases a set of guiding principles for banks regarding the use of GenAI in customer-facing applications.

Europe

• In London, Google DeepMind employees are urging the company to drop all military contracts, citing how failing to do so would “go against [the lab’s] mission statement and stated AI principles.”

• German researchers from the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics publish a seminal paper in Science Robotics on the sense of touch in AI robots: here’s a short review by MIT Technology Review.

• A newly released international study, led by Dr. Kristiina Tammimies from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, proposes a machine learning model that can help identify autism in toddlers. 

Latin America 

• In Peru, the Central Informativa initiative, coordinated by the nonprofit organization Hombro a Hombro (Shoulder to Shoulder), is utilizing AI to process climate data and inform the public about impending weather disasters.

Africa

• Dr. Gray Manicom’s team from the Policy Innovation Lab at Stellenbosch University, South Africa’s oldest institution of higher learning, compiles a searchable catalog of AI tools used by EU governments, aimed at boosting AI adoption in the nation’s public sector.

Australia

• The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) issues an official statement on Clearview AI, concluding that despite the unauthorized collection of facial images from Australian residents using computer vision, further action against the company is not warranted.