Enlarge / Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI Chief Scientist, speaks at Tel Aviv University on June 5, 2023. (credit: JACK GUEZ via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a new AI startup cofounded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in funding. The 3-month-old company plans to focus on developing what it calls "safe" AI systems that surpass human capabilities.

The fundraising effort shows that even amid growing skepticism around massive investments in AI tech that so far have failed to be profitable, some backers are still willing to place large bets on high-profile talent in foundational AI research. Venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel participated in the SSI funding round.

SSI aims to use the new funds for computing power and attracting talent. With only 10 employees at the moment, the company intends to build a larger team of researchers across locations in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Reuters reported.

Enlarge / ASIC evaluators found AI summaries were often "wordy and pointless—just repeating what was in the submission." (credit: Getty Images)

As large language models have continued to rise in prominence, many users and companies have focused on their useful ability to quickly summarize lengthy documents for easier human consumption. When Australia's Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) looked into this potential use case, though, it found that the summaries it was able to get from the Llama2-70B model were judged as significantly worse than those provided by humans.

ASIC's proof-of-concept study (PDF)—which was run in January and February, written up in March, and published in response to a Senate inquiry in May—has a number of limitations that make it hard to generalize about the summarizing capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs in the present day. Still, the government study shows many of the potential pitfalls large organizations should consider before simply inserting LLM outputs into existing workflows.

Keeping score

For its study, ASIC teamed up with Amazon Web Services to evaluate LLMs' ability to summarize "a sample of public submissions made to an external Parliamentary Joint Committee inquiry, looking into audit and consultancy firms." For ASIC's purposes, a good summary of one of these submissions would highlight any mention of ASIC, any recommendations for avoiding conflicts of interest, and any calls for more regulation, all with references to page numbers and "brief context" for explanation.

Enlarge / A US child infected with measles during a 2024 outbreak. The child’s cheek shows the characteristic rash associated with this viral infection. (credit: CDC)

With one of the highest vaccine exemption rates in the country, Oregon is experiencing its largest measles outbreak in decades. This year's count is now higher than anything seen since 2000, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the highly contagious virus eliminated from the US.

Since the start of the year, Oregon has tallied 31 cases of measles, all in unvaccinated people. The cases have been accumulating in sustained waves of transmission since mid-June.

Last month, when the outbreak tally was still in the 20s, health officials noted that it was nearing a state record set in 2019. There were 28 cases that year, which were linked to a large outbreak across the border in Washington state. But, with that record now surpassed, the state is in pre-elimination territory.

Enlarge (credit: tunart | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal after book publishers successfully sued to block the Open Libraries Project from lending digital scans of books for free online.

Judges for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected the Internet Archive (IA) argument that its controlled digital lending—which allows only one person to borrow each scanned e-book at a time—was a transformative fair use that worked like a traditional library and did not violate copyright law.

As Judge Beth Robinson wrote in the decision, because the IA's digital copies of books did not "provide criticism, commentary, or information about the originals" or alter the original books to add "something new," the court concluded that the IA's use of publishers' books was not transformative, hobbling the organization's fair use defense.

Enlarge (credit: Jorg Greuel via Getty Images)

Over the weekend, the nonprofit National Novel Writing Month organization (NaNoWriMo) published an FAQ outlining its position on AI, calling categorical rejection of AI writing technology "classist" and "ableist." The statement caused a backlash online, prompted four members of the organization's board to step down, and prompted a sponsor to withdraw its support.

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," wrote NaNoWriMo, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

NaNoWriMo, known for its annual challenge where participants write a 50,000-word manuscript in November, argued in its post that condemning AI would ignore issues of class and ability, suggesting the technology could benefit those who might otherwise need to hire human writing assistants or have differing cognitive abilities.

Enlarge / Martin Shkreli—he's back, and he's still got copies of that Wu-Tang Clan album. (credit: Getty | Eduardo Munoz Alvarez )

The members of PleasrDAO are, well, pretty displeased with Martin Shkreli.

The "digital autonomous organization" spent $4.75 million to buy the fabled Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which had only been produced as a single copy. The album had once belonged to Shkreli, who purchased it directly from Wu-Tang Clan for $2 million in 2015. But after Shkreli became the "pharma bro" poster boy for price gouging in the drug sector, he ended up in severe legal trouble and served a seven-year prison sentence for securities fraud.

He also had to pay a $7.4 million penalty in that case, and the government seized and then sold Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to help pay the bill.