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Authors sue Microsoft, OpenAI for copyright infringement

San Altman-run OpenAI and Microsoft have been hit by another class-action lawsuit by book authors, who alleged that the company “simply stole” their copyrighted works to help “build a billion-dollar artificial intelligence system”.

The lawsuit was filed in the Manhattan federal court late on Friday by non-fiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage, reports NBC. Basbanes and Gage seek to represent a class of writers “whose copyrighted work has been systematically pilfered by” Microsoft and OpenAI.

“They’re no different than any other thief,” the lawsuit alleged, adding that it will include all people in the US “who are authors or legal beneficial owners” of copyrights for works that have or are being used by the defendants to “train their large language models”.

The lawsuit seeks damages of up to $150,000 for each work that the defendants infringed, the report mentioned.

The lawsuit alleged that OpenAI’s system relies on being trained by ingesting “massive amounts of written material,” which includes books written by Basbanes and Gage. Microsoft or OpenAI were yet to comment on the new lawsuit.

In September last year, the Authors’ Guild and 17 well-known authors like Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult filed a lawsuit in the Southern district of New York against OpenAI.

According to the complaint, OpenAI “copied plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration” and fed the copyrighted materials into large language models.

In the same month, authors Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman alleged in a lawsuit that OpenAI benefits and profits from the “unauthorised and illegal use” of their copyrighted content.

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Microsoft launches robust AI ‘small language model’ for researchers

Phi-2 is an ideal playground for researchers, including for exploration around mechanistic interpretability, safety improvements, or fine-tuning experimentation on a variety of tasks…reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft has released its newest compact “small language model” titled Phi-2 that continues to perform at par or better than certain larger open-source Llama 2 models with less than 13 billion parameters.

Over the past few months, the Machine Learning Foundations team at Microsoft Research has released a suite of small language models (SLMs) called “Phi” that achieve remarkable performance on a variety of benchmarks.

The first model, the 1.3 billion parameter Phi-1 achieved state-of-the-art performance on Python coding among existing SLMs (specifically on the HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks).

“We are now releasing Phi-2, a 2.7 billion-parameter language model that demonstrates outstanding reasoning and language understanding capabilities, showcasing state-of-the-art performance among base language models with less than 13 billion parameters,” the company said in an update.

Phi-2 is an ideal playground for researchers, including for exploration around mechanistic interpretability, safety improvements, or fine-tuning experimentation on a variety of tasks.

“We have made Phi-2 available in the Azure AI Studio model catalog to foster research and development on language models,” said Microsoft.

The massive increase in the size of language models to hundreds of billions of parameters has unlocked a host of emerging capabilities that have redefined the landscape of natural language processing.

However, a question remains whether such emergent abilities can be achieved at a smaller scale using strategic choices for training, e.g., data selection.

“Our line of work with the Phi models aims to answer this question by training SLMs that achieve performance on par with models of much higher scale (yet still far from the frontier models),” said Microsoft.

The company has also performed extensive testing on commonly used prompts from the research community.

“We observed a behaviour in accordance with the expectation we had given the benchmark results,” said the tech giant.

ALSO READ-Microsoft to invest $3.2 bn in UK to drive future AI growth

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Microsoft-OpenAI Partnership Faces Scrutiny

There have recently been a number of developments in the governance of OpenAI, some of which involved Microsoft…reports Asian Lite News

The UK’s competition regulator will look into the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, including recent developments, to understand the impact the merger could have on competition in the UK.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is examining whether Microsoft’s association with OpenAI could affect the artificial intelligence (AI) market.

“The Invitation to Comment (ITC) is the first part of the CMA’s information gathering process and comes in advance of any launch of a formal phase 1 investigation,” the market watchdog said in a statement.

There have recently been a number of developments in the governance of OpenAI, some of which involved Microsoft.

In light of these developments, the CMA is now issuing an ITC to determine whether the Microsoft /OpenAI partnership, including recent developments, has resulted in a relevant merger situation and, if so, the potential impact on competition.

Last month, OpenAI board sacked CEO Sam Altman in a dramatic move, Later, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella offered him a job to lead its advanced AI research.

Finally, OpenAI reinstated Altman at the helm, with an entirely new board, thus ending an intense drama.

There are speculations on why Altman was fired in the first place, but nothing concrete has come out as the new board is reviewing the whole saga.

According to the CMA, the speed at which AI is scaling across use cases and markets is unrivalled in economic history, while advances in powerful foundation models (FMs) mean that this is a pivotal moment in the development of this transformative technology.

“Critical among these is the need for sustained competition between AI developers which will help to deliver innovation, growth and responsible practices across the sector, as well as the need for open and effective competition in the deployment of FMs across a range of downstream activities,” said the CMA.

The CMA will review whether the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership has resulted in an acquisition of control — that is, where it results in one party having material influence, de facto control or more than 50 per cent of the voting rights over another entity — or change in the nature of control by one entity over another.

“The invitation to comment is the first part of the CMA’s information gathering process and comes in advance of launching any phase 1 investigation, which would only happen once the CMA has received the information it needs from the partnership parties,” said Sorcha O’Carroll, Senior Director for Mergers at the CMA.

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Microsoft to invest $3.2 bn in UK to drive future AI growth

Since then, the UK regulator waved through a restructured version of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, putting Britain back in Microsoft’s favour…reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft’s plan to pump 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) into Britain over the next three years, its single largest investment in the country to date, will underpin future growth in artificial intelligence (AI), the UK government said.

Britain, where the economy is forecast to be sluggish in the coming years, is pushing for private investment to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth industries like AI.

The funding, first announced at a summit hosted by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday, will more than double Microsoft’s datacentre footprint in Britain, providing the infrastructure crucial for new AI models to work.

“Today’s announcement is a turning point for the future of AI infrastructure and development in the UK,” Sunak said in a statement on Thursday.

Microsoft’s plan comes despite comments by its president Brad Smith in April that a decision by the country’s antitrust regulator that went against the US company put the tech industry’s confidence in Britain at risk.

Since then, the UK regulator waved through a restructured version of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, putting Britain back in Microsoft’s favour.

“Microsoft is committed as a company to ensuring that the UK as a country has world-leading AI infrastructure,” Smith said in the statement released as he hosted finance minister Jeremy Hunt at a datacentre being constructed in north London.

As part of the deal announced on Thursday, Microsoft will bring more than 20,000 of the most advanced Graphics Processing Units to Britain, tech which is key to machine learning and developing AI, the government statement said.

The investment includes a training plan to help ensure Britons have the skills they need to build and work with AI, it added.

ALSO READ-Microsoft on OpenAI Board, Altman Takes Charge

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Microsoft on OpenAI Board, Altman Takes Charge

OpenAI’s new board consists of chair Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo, the only remaining holdout from the previous board….reports Asian Lite News

Sam Altman has officially returned to OpenAI as CEO after an intense drama earlier this month, with Microsoft getting a non-voting observer seat on the company’s board.

OpenAI’s new board consists of chair Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo, the only remaining holdout from the previous board.

Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, with a 49 percent stake in the for-profit entity that the nonprofit board controls, reports The Verge.

In a memo to employees, Altman said that he harbours “zero ill will” towards Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist who was behind Altman’s ouster.

“While Ilya will no longer serve on the board, we hope to continue our working relationship and are discussing how he can continue his work at OpenAI,” Altman said in the memo.

“The fact that we did not lose a single customer will drive us to work even harder for you,” he told employees.

He said that OpenAI will advance research plan and further invest in its full-stack safety efforts.

“Our research roadmap is clear; this was a wonderfully focusing time. I share the excitement you all feel; we will turn this crisis into an opportunity! I’ll work with Mira (Murati) on this,” Altman said.

OpenAI board chair Taylor told employees that they are thrilled that “Sam, Mira and OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman are back together leading the company and driving it forward”.

“We will build a qualified, diverse board of exceptional individuals whose collective experience represents the breadth of OpenAI’s mission – from technology to safety to policy. We are pleased that this Board will include a non-voting observer for Microsoft,” he added.

Altman was earlier fired as CEO of OpenAI, the developer of AI chatbot ChatGPT, and the earlier board had said it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

Later, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella announced to hire Altman and Brockman to help the company pursue its advanced AI dreams with a new vertical.

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Nadella Welcomes Altman and Brockman to Microsoft

On Friday, Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, the organization responsible for ChatGPT, made a sudden and unexpected departure…reports Asian Lite News

In a statement on Monday, Microsoft Corporation’s Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, announced that Sam Altman, recently removed as OpenAI CEO, along with Greg Brockman and their team, will be joining Microsoft to spearhead a new research team focused on advanced AI..

“We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners,” Nadella posted on his X timeline.

“We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them,” Nadella tweeted.

Shear has reportedly been appointed as OpenAI’s interim CEO.

“We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”

Cloud will be foundational to scaling India’s digital journey: Satya Nadella

On Friday, in a surprising move, Altman the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, left the artificial intelligence company and resigned from its board with immediate effect. This unexpected departure sent shock waves through the technology industry.

The company had in a blog post on Friday announced that OpenAI’s board no longer has confidence in Altman’s ability to lead the organisation.

The blog post also announced that Greg Brockman, another co-founder of OpenAI, would step down as the chair of the company’s board but remain with the organisation.

The post said that Altman’s departure came after “a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, major tech companies have strived to compete with OpenAI, and world leaders have sought Altman’s insights and investments.

Originally established as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI aimed to prevent advanced AI from falling into the hands of monopolistic corporations. However, after receiving a significant investment from Microsoft in 2019, the company transitioned to a for-profit structure. (ANI)

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ALSO READ: ‘If Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI board will be gutted’

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Nadella Highlights AI in Transforming UAE Economy

Microsoft has had a presence in the UAE for more than 30 years and chose the country as the location for its first data centres in the Middle East….reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella visited the UAE today to experience first-hand how the latest advancements in cloud and AI are supporting UAE organisations across every industry. While speaking at the Microsoft ‘AI, a New Era’ event, Nadella met with local business leaders, government officials and developers and emphasized the role of AI in unlocking new opportunities to accelerate the UAE’s digital economy and transforming the lives of its people.

“This new age of AI will drive innovation and has the potential to expand opportunity and growth around the world – including in the UAE,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “It’s inspiring to see so many developers and businesses in the Emirates already applying AI to address business and societal challenges.”

Microsoft has had a presence in the UAE for more than 30 years and chose the country as the location for its first data centres in the Middle East. Microsoft’s cloud regions are considered a key driver behind the country’s digital transformation, serving as foundations for the deployment of modern technologies, including AI. A PwC report has predicted a US$320 billion AI industry in the Middle East by 2030 and singled out the UAE as likely to have the largest percentage share for AI in its economy out of any nation in the region: close to 14% of 2030 GDP.

During his keynote, Nadella announced the upcoming availability of Azure OpenAI Service from the company’s UAE cloud datacentres. The service, which will be available later this month, provides access to a suite of powerful AI models, including GPT-4, Codex, and DALL-E 2, which can be used to develop innovative AI applications such as virtual assistants, content generation, code generation, image editing tools, and more.

He highlighted some of the ways UAE organisations are leading AI transformation and innovation in key industries:

• The UAE Ministry of Education is partnering with local start-up ASI, founded by 20-year-old Quddus Pativada, to develop a personalised AI tutor which will act as an Arabic and English study companion for UAE students to help them improve their learning beyond the classroom. The tutor will be rolled out across the UAE’s schools. The partnership aligns with the ministry’s drive to incorporate AI into the educational system, announced during the World Government Summit (WGS) 2023.

• The Department of Health in Abu Dhabi is developing a unified, digital experience for patients, which will allow them to provide holistic, on demand healthcare services in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. An AI powered patient assistant, running on Azure, will provide instant access to unified medical records and make searching for a doctor and scheduling appointments effortless.

• G42 released a Large Language Arabic Model, Jais, which will be available through Azure Services and will boost the ability to create original Arabic content for close to 100 million underserviced Arabic language internet users.

• DeepOpinion, co-founded by Dr. Ahmed Al-Ali, is embedding AI models in existing automation workflows running on Microsoft Azure and integrating with Microsoft Power Platform, allowing organisations to reduce repetitive tasks and reduce workplace accidents caused by human error.

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Siemens, Microsoft Collaborate on AI

Siemens and partners launch AI-driven Industrial Copilot for enhanced human-machine collaboration in manufacturing.”…reports Asian Lite News

Industrial manufacturing major Siemens and tech giant Microsoft on Tuesday joined hands to bring the benefits of generative AI to industries worldwide.

Working together, the companies are introducing Siemens Industrial Copilot, an AI-powered jointly developed assistant aimed at improving human-machine collaboration in manufacturing.

“We’re building on our longstanding collaboration with Siemens and bringing together AI advances across the Microsoft Cloud with Siemens’ industrial domain expertise to empower both frontline and knowledge workers with new, AI-powered tools, starting with Siemens Industrial Copilot,” Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft, said in a statement.

Siemens Industrial Copilot will allow users to rapidly generate, optimise and debug complex automation code, and significantly shorten simulation times, reducing a task that previously took weeks to minutes.

“This has the potential to revolutionise the way companies design, develop, manufacture, and operate. Making human-machine collaboration more widely available allows engineers to accelerate code development, increase innovation and tackle skilled labour shortages,” said Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens AG.

Moreover, the companies foresee AI copilots assisting professionals in various industries, including manufacturing, infrastructure, transportation, and healthcare. Numerous copilots are already planned in the manufacturing sectors, such as automotive, consumer package goods and machine building.

Leading automotive supplier, Schaeffler AG, is an early adopter of Siemens Industrial Copilot, the company said.

In addition, the company mentioned that the Siemens Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams will be generally available in December 2023 and accelerate innovation across the product lifecycle.

This new app uses the latest advances in generative AI to connect functions across the product design and manufacturing lifecycle, such as frontline workers to engineering teams.

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Pichai testifies in US anti-trust trial; takes a dig at Microsoft

Google reportedly paid Apple more than $10 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices and software…reports Asian Lite News

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, on Monday, testified in the US District Court for the District of Columbia in the antitrust trial against the company.

The company is accused by the US government of illegally paying huge sums of money to smartphone makers like Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T and others to make Google the default search engine on their devices to dominate the market. If the government wins the case against Google, the company may have to do away with some of the business practices that helped it to assert dominance in the market.

Pichai, who has been called as a star witness for Google, opened his testimony, speaking about his journey from Chennai to becoming the CEO of Google in 2015, reports CNN.

According to media reports, the Google CEO, during his testimony, said in the initial years the browser market was stagnated as Microsoft was “not that incented to improve the browser,” Internet Explorer. This was before Google launched its Chrome browser.

He said Chrome had a minimalist design and had more room for search results and Google believed that these features would increase the usage of its search platform.

Google’s attorney John Schmidtlein presented before the court an internal e-mail of the company from 2010 that showed that people who changed from Internet Explorer to Chrome performed 48 per cent more searches. “The correlation was pretty clear to see,” Pichai said.

Google reportedly paid Apple more than $10 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices and software.

The Google CEO said as the company renegotiated its deal with Apple, in 2016 and in 2021. Google moved to restrict how Apple could treat search questions users entered on its devices. “We wanted to make sure that as we contemplate a longer-term deal that the notion of default is implemented in a similar way” Pichai said.

He described Google’s deals as standard promotional agreements.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in his testimony against Google in the trial earlier this month, had warned that there would be a nightmarish scenario for the internet if Google is allowed to have its uncontested dominance in online search market. He also argued that generative AI will help Google consolidate its power and give it an unassailable advantage. “This is going to become even harder to compete in the AI age with someone who has that core… advantage,” Nadella had said.

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UAE, Microsoft Team Up for Healthcare AI

The collaboration will also explore the deployment of an employee experience platform that can gather real-time insights to enable smarter working, enhanced performance, and an improved workplace culture at the Department of Health (DoH)….reports Asian Lite News

On the sidelines of GITEX Global Week 2023, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi (DoH), the regulator of the healthcare sector in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, signed an agreement with Microsoft, to advance the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the healthcare sector. Through the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the two entities will seek to explore the potential of leveraging leading AI platforms for innovation in healthcare, including to improve patient outcomes, increase efficiencies and enhance health research and services.

The MoU was signed by H.E. Dr. Ahmed AlKhazraji, Executive Director, Strategy and Policy at Department of Health – Abu Dhabi (DoH) and Naim Yazbeck, General Manager for Microsoft UAE.

As part of the agreement, the two parties will create a joint working group to facilitate collaboration and communication on this project. The group will study the development and deployment of AI technologies, sharing best practices and lessons while also identifying challenges and barriers that could arise from their use. The aim is to establish a long-term collaboration for the use of AI solutions to advance DoH capabilities, improve patient and clinician experiences and elevate the sectors’ outcomes.

HE Dr. Ahmed AlKhazraji, Executive Director, Strategy and Policy at the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi (DoH), said: “Under the directives of our wise leadership, the Department of Health (DoH) is pioneering the use of advanced technologies and digital solutions within healthcare in order to enhance patient outcomes, and thus ensure the highest quality of life in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. AI is at the heart of healthcare innovation, and DoH is therefore collaborating with an industry leader like Microsoft to study its potential for benefit across the healthcare industry, and to set the stage for a future driven by innovation. Reinforcing the Emirate’s positioning as a leading destination for innovation in healthcare, the Department’s goal remains to establish Abu Dhabi as a forerunner in healthcare quality and services, and to advance vital research within the sector for the benefit of the entire community.”

The collaboration will also explore the deployment of an employee experience platform that can gather real-time insights to enable smarter working, enhanced performance, and an improved workplace culture at the Department of Health (DoH).

Naim Yazbeck, General Manager for Microsoft UAE, said that Microsoft is proud to serve as a longstanding partner on the UAE’s digital transformation journey. “The UAE government very early identified digital transformation as being key to accelerating the growth of the healthcare sector and enhancing the quality of healthcare services for patients in the region. Our collaboration with the DoH supports the UAE’s vision of leveraging the latest technologies such as generative AI to tackle key challenges, drive innovation, and enhance productivity across critical sectors. We look forward to working with the DoH to unlock the potential of this transformative technology in setting new standards for healthcare excellence in Abu Dhabi and around the world.”

The agreement is expected to present multiple opportunities for cross-industry learning, including in terms of healthcare knowledge for generative AI technologies. In turn, AI has the capacity to support decision-making in the healthcare sector by identifying areas of concern and predicting the impact of new regulations and policies. The DoH remains committed to safeguarding data integrity and privacy as it looks into integrating the most advanced solutions towards improving health services in Abu Dhabi.

The Department of Health – Abu Dhabi (DoH) is inviting guests to visit its stand and view the latest healthcare technologies and innovations of Abu Dhabi’s healthcare sector. DoH is participating under the unified umbrella of the Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (ADDA), located in Sheikh Saeed Hall, Hall 19/B20 from 16 October 2023 to 20 October 2023.

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