AI Update: A Steep Price for Patching Through Deepfake Robocalls

Welcome to the newest edition of FindBiometrics’ AI update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:

Companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party are using cloud services to access AI compute resources that are otherwise blocked through sanctions, which apply only to the export of products or software. A Reuters investigation found at least 11 Chinese companies have taken this approach, accessing cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services through intermediary companies.

Anthropic says proposed legislation to regulate AI development in California will probably do more good than harm. Senate Bill 1047 mandates safety testing, requires AI systems to have a kind of “kill switch”, and lets the state Attorney General sue developers that don’t comply. OpenAI is against it, and Google and Meta have concerns, too.

Lingo Telecom has agreed to pay a $1 million fine for failing to prevent the transmission of robocalls that featured a synthetic voice clone of President Joe Biden urging recipients not to vote in the upcoming election. Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal said the fine “sends a strong message that communications service providers are the first line of defense against these threats”.

AMD has sealed a $4.9 billion deal to acquire ZT Systems, which builds computing infrastructure for AI “hyperscalers” such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The move “brings a thousand world-class design engineers into our team, it allows us to develop silicon and systems in parallel and, most importantly, get the newest AI infrastructure up and running in data centres as fast as possible,” explained AMD CEO Lisa Su.

San Jose-based startup Recogni claims to have developed a novel computing method for AI inferencing that outperforms current methods when running large AI models and could help reduce costs. Co-founder and VP of AI Gilles Backhus called the “Pareto” system “a huge leap”. The company plans to make it more widely available in the coming months.

South Korean chipmakers Rebellions Inc. and Sapeon have agreed to merge. The latter is backed by the country’s biggest telecom, SK Telecom, and memory chipmaker SK Hynix. Rebellions has received over $225 million in funding, including from the Saudi kingdom’s Wa’ed Ventures. They’re teaming up to challenge bigger players like Nvidia.

McAfee has launched its own “Deepfake Detector”, designed to run in the background of a PC and flag any AI-generated images that the user might come across. For now, at least, it only works on a Lenovo PC with an NPU. McAfee plans to charge a subscription for it, priced at $9.99 per year.

The chatbot’s take: This week, we asked GPT-4o for a little AI computing explainer.

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August 23, 2024 – by Alex Perala