In a clear win for the AI industry, the California Public Utilities Commission granted Waymo and Cruise permission to charge for self-driving taxis in San Francisco with virtually no restrictions. Previous conditions had largely required paid rides to have a safety driver present, although empty and unpaid driverless vehicles have become common in the city. Local residents are not universally pleased.
The companies building generative AI tools are treading a narrow bridge between describing the risks of their technology and avoiding government regulations that would hurt their business. The path got a little harder this week when news quality rating organization NewsGuard reported that Open AI’s ChatGPT-4 and Google Bard are generating as many false narratives today as they were when NewsGuard checked in March and April.
The wild success of retail media networks has spawned a need for tools to manage them effectively. IPG Mediabrands’ media agency network UM has introduced jauntily-named Shoptimizer, a budgeting and optimization tool for the purpose. The key feature is a dashboard comparing performance of different retail networks and offering AI-powered budget allocation recommendations.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.