The week in AI: US State Department issues warning on EU's AI Act

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Welcome to The Dispatch! We are the newsletter that keeps you informed about AI. Each Thursday, we aggregate the major developments in artificial intelligence; we pass along the news, useful resources, tools or services, and exciting projects in open source. Even if you aren’t an engineer, we’ll keep you in touch with what’s going on in AI.

Adobe also introduced the first generative AI model for vector graphics in Illustrator, allowing users to create editable vectors from text prompts. The new ‘Firefly Design’ model in Adobe Express can generate social media templates and designs for users as well.

The US State Department has issued a warning to the EU about some of the shortcomings of the sweeping EU AI Act. Brussels has gained a reputation for creating excessive red tape in the technology sector, and the US is concerned that under the proposed Act innovation could be stifled even further. The EU is already lagging behind major AI players like the US, China, India and the UK in terms of AI investment, development, adoption and infrastructure.

The final version of the EU AI Act is still being agreed upon, but is expected to go into effect by 2025.

The demand for AI chips is so much greater than current supply levels that both Microsoft and OpenAI have joined the growing list of tech giants looking into (or in some cases already) developing their own. While Nvidia’s graphics processing units are currently the dominant AI chip, GPU’s are not particularly efficient at handling AI processes; subsequently, a slew of xPU’s are being developed by tech companies to increase the efficiency and availability of chips to power artificial intelligence:

• Google’s TPU’s

• Amazon’s Inferentia/Trainium

• Intel’s NPU’s and VPU’s

• Graphcore’s IPU’s

To name just a few. And developing the chips is only a part of the equation - almost all of the advanced AI chips are manufactured by just a few companies: TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (South Korea), and GlobalFoundries (US) account for 80-90% of total advanced chip production. Currently, a chip packaging shortage is the main supply bottleneck for the most advanced AI chips.

This isn’t a new issue - CNN had a feature on bias/stereotypes in AI image generators (including Midjourney) well over a year ago. The fact that this offensive issue hasn’t been resolved yet is beyond the pale. Midjourney is currently the most popular text-to-image service, with millions of users worldwide and extensive resources. It’s well past time for these services to take responsibility for their image outputs rather than passing them off as neutral computer-generated content.

The massive surprise attack launched by Hamas militants in Gaza on Israel over the weekend represents a major intelligence failure, as Israel's sophisticated surveillance and AI systems failed to provide advanced warning. Questions abound regarding Hamas’ concealed preparations and why warning signs were missed - and Israel had just been touting the effectiveness of their advanced systems to NATO’s military chair less than two weeks ago. It’s a sobering reality check for a country whose Defense Ministry has touted itself as an emerging AI superpower.

More in AI this week:

• High schools in Denmark are embracing ChatGPT as a teaching tool rather than shunning it

• AI correctly predicts earthquakes in China a week in advance during trial

• AI industry could use as much energy as the Netherlands

• This blisteringly hot AI-powered grill cooks food ‘up to 10x faster’

• Viral 'AI yearbook' trend allows people to create nostalgic high-school photos from any era

• AI’s $200B question

• How Disney packed big emotion into a little robot

• Microsoft announces new AI tools to help doctors deliver better care

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That’s it for AI this week. We’ll see you next Thursday!