Here are the top five headlines in AI news this week

We officially moved into Spooky Season this week, and between OpenAI’s $6.6 million funding round, Nvidia’s surprise LLM, and some privacy-invading Meta Smart Glasses, we’ve seen a scary amount of change in the AI ​​space. Here are the five most important announcements.

OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in its latest round of funding

Sam Altman’s charmed existence continues with this week’s news that OpenAI has secured $6.6 billion in additional investments in its latest round of funding. Existing investors such as Microsoft and Khosla Ventures were joined by newcomers SoftBank and Nvidia. The AI ​​company is currently valued at a whopping $157 billion, making it one of the richest private companies on Earth. And if OpenAI’s for-profit restructuring plan comes to fruition, that valuation would give Altman more than $150 billion in equity, elevating him to the top 10 richest people in the world. Following the funding news, OpenAI rolled out Canvas, a version of Anthropic’s Artifacts collaboration feature

Nvidia just released open-source LLM to compete with GPT-4

Nvidia is making the leap from AI hardware to software AI with this week’s release of LVNM 1.0, a truly open-source multilingual model that excels at handling a variety of vision and language tasks. The company claims that the new model family, led by the 72 billion-parameter LVNM-D-72B, can compete with GPT-4o. However, Nvidia is positioning LVNM not as a direct competitor to other pioneering LLM companies, but as a platform on which other developers can create their own chatbots and applications.

Google Gemini Live currently supports nearly four dozen languages

It seems that the ability to talk directly to a chatbot is a must-have new feature. This week, Google announced that it is expanding its Gemini Live service to enable communication in nearly forty languages ​​beyond English, starting with French, German, Portuguese, Hindi, and Spanish. Microsoft also revealed a similar Copilot feature called Copilot Voice, which the company says is “the most intuitive and natural way to brainstorm on the go.” They join ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode and Meta’s natural voice interactions, allowing users to talk on their phones, not just with them.

California’s governor vetoed an expansive AI security bill

All the wrangling over SB 1047, California’s Artificial Limit Models Safe Innovation Act, has gone to waste as Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the AI ​​Security Act this week. In a letter to lawmakers, he argued that the bill was myopically focused on the largest language models and that “smaller, specialized models may prove to be as or even more dangerous than the models targeted by SB 1047.”

Hackers turn Meta’s smart glasses into an automatic doxing machine

Two Harvard computer science students have managed to modify a pair of commercially available Meta smart glasses so that they can identify and screen anyone who enters their field of view, 404 Media reported this week. The glasses that were part of the I-XRAY experiment were designed to capture images of strangers on the street, run them through PimEyes image recognition software to identify the person, and then use this basic information to search for their personal information (i.e. phone number and home address) in commercial data brokerage sites.

“To use it, you just put on your glasses, and as you walk past people, the glasses will detect whether someone’s face is in the frame,” the pair explained in a video demonstration sent to X. “After a few seconds, their faces Personal data pops up on your phone ” The privacy implications of such a system are terrifying. The duo has no intention of releasing the source code, but now that they’ve shown it can be done, there’s little stopping others from reverse engineering it.