With a fast-growing base of digital consumers and merchants, acceleration in e-commerce, and food delivery, the Philippines’ current internet economy has been recorded as the nation with the highest internet economy growth, with a rate of 93%, according to the latest collaborative research from Google, Temasek, Bain & Company. This has previously been predicted to grow from US$9b in 2020 to US$17b this year.
After Canada, now Australia has found that controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, broke national privacy laws when it covertly collected citizens’ facial biometrics and incorporated them into its AI-powered identity matching service — which it sells to law enforcement agencies and others.
AI-powered customer data platform Blueshift has expanded into Asia Pacific with Sumit Ramchandani at the helm as MD, months after it raised US$30 million in Series C funding in February this year. Ramchandani was previously CEO of AirAsia Media Group.
Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike. Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else. Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed. It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.