A sobering new report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) projects long-term cost to businesses upwards of $1 trillion, if the US doesn’t pass a national privacy law. This would, in large part, be due to the need to manage a host of duplicative and nuanced state laws. The ITIF also estimated cost to small business would be tens of billions.
Google announced last week that, in commemoration of Data Privacy Day (Jan 28), it was expanding its differential privacy library to the Python programming language. Differential privacy helps address the problem of encrypting AI training data by adding noise into the data set and making it harder to isolate and extract the original data from the system.
The EU Parliament voted to strengthen the Digital Services Act (DSA) which bans online ads that contain sensitive political, sexual, illegal or misleading content. This along with their Digital Marketing Act (DMA), which sets criteria for identifying and regulating Big Tech “gatekeepers,” is part of an overall effort to reign in abuse. The law must still be approved by the Council of the EU, which may be more business-friendly.
“Ask Meta AI anything” is what you now see instead of the traditional search bar across Meta apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta AI will still perform the basic search function but will also answer questions and chat with you. It should hardly be a surprise when a tech company launches a genAI solution these days but this is a bold challenge to Google and Open.ai (it’s also available as a standalone tool at Meta.ai).