OpenAI CEO Sam Altman unveiled an optimistic manifesto on the future of AI, "The Intelligence Age," arguing that mind-blowing tools will unleash a "shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today."
"Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age," Altman writes. "From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will."
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on Monday said his company will provide some user data, including IP addresses and phone numbers, in response to valid legal requests.
Why it matters: The move marks a major departure from Telegram's long-held position of siding with user privacy and free speech above broader safety and security concerns from government or law enforcement officials.
CrowdStrike will face lawmakers for the first time this afternoon after its devastating global outage this summer bricked roughly 8.5 million Windows devices.
Why it matters: As of now, this is the only hearing on lawmakers' calendars looking into the global CrowdStrike issue that caused what's now considered the largest IT outage in history.
🗳️ U.S. intelligence officials have warned that Russia, Iran and China are each using AI tools in election disinformation campaigns targeting Vice President Kamala Harris. (Washington Post)
🚗 The Commerce Department is pushing to ban the sale and import of smart vehicles that use certain Chinese and Russian technology. (CNN)
📝 Austria, Estonia, Lithuania and the Netherlands have signed a U.S.-led agreement to impose domestic and international controls on certain spyware makers. (Nextgov)
@ Industry
🤖 Cloudflare has unveiled new tools that could help websites block AI chatbots from scraping their data. (Ars Technica)
Google is holding a "Gemini at Work" event Tuesday to convince businesses that its generative AI is better than offerings from Microsoft and OpenAI.
Why it matters: The largely virtual event comes amid a flurry of claims from tech providers and growing skepticism that genAI is ready for broad use beyond coding and customer support.
Health data startup Particle Health sued electronic health records giant Epic Systems for federal antitrust violations on Monday, charging it uses its control over troves of patient records to stifle competition.
Why it matters: About 36% of hospitals use Epic for their EHRs, and Particle estimates in its lawsuit that as many as 94% of American patients have at least one record stored in an Epic EHR.
To those who contend that large language models are dumb word-predicters — "stochastic parrots" — that don't actually understand questions or solve problems, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responds, in effect: So what?
The big picture: As the power of generative AI models continues to grow and the tech industry's bets on the technology pile up, a gulf remains between industry leaders like Altman — who believe AI will keep getting better as it matures — and critics who argue that the technology will never prove fully reliable.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed on Monday that the hardware project he is working on with former Apple design chief Jony Ive — rumored to be a new kind of AI-driven device — is not a phone.
What they're saying: "I don't think you should try to do a better phone," Altman said during an onstage interview with Axios' Ina Fried at an OpenAI event on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Amazon is striving to decarbonize parts of its business globally in an effort to progress its climate goals, chief sustainability officer Kara Hurst told Axios' Niala Boodhoo at Axios House Climate Week/UN General Assembly in New York City on Monday.
Why it matters: The company runs one of the biggest logistics and transportation networks in the world.