Elon Musk says xAI will open-source Grok this week
Elon Musk says xAI will open-source Grok this week
How Microsoft’s Bing Helps Maintain Beijing’s Great Firewall
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Elon Musk says xAI will open-source Grok this week
How Microsoft’s Bing Helps Maintain Beijing’s Great Firewall
Google engineer AI trade secrets theft
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Elon Musk says xAI will open-source Grok this week
Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI will open-source Grok, its chatbot rivaling ChatGPT, this week, the entrepreneur said, days after suing OpenAI and complaining that the Microsoft-backed startup had deviated from its open-source roots.
xAI released Grok last year, arming it with features including access to “real-time” information and views undeterred by “politically correct” norms. The service is available to customers paying for X’s $16 monthly subscription.
Musk, who didn’t elaborate on what all aspects of Grok he planned to open-source, helped co-found OpenAI with Sam Altman nearly a decade ago as a counterweight to Google’s dominance in artificial intelligence. But OpenAI, which was required to also make its technology “freely available” to the public, has become closed-source and shifted focus to maximizing profits for Microsoft, Musk alleged in the lawsuit filed late last month. (Read OpenAI’s response here.)
“To this day, OpenAI’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawsuit alleged.
The lawsuit has ignited a debate among many technologists and investors about the merits of open-source AI. Vinod Khosla, whose firm is among the earliest backers of OpenAI, called Musk’s legal action a “massive distraction from the goals of getting to AGI and its benefits.”
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, accusing Khosla of “lobbying to ban open source” research in AI. “Every significant new technology that advances human well-being is greeted by a ginned-up moral panic,” said Andreessen, whose firm a16z has backed Mistral, whose chatbot is open-source. “This is just the latest.”…..
How Microsoft’s Bing Helps Maintain Beijing’s Great Firewall
In spring 2021, just before the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine in the US and Europe noticed something odd. Bing had stopped displaying famous photographs of Tank Man—the lone protester who blocked an armored column during the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. “There are no results for ‘tank man,’ ” announced the search engine in response to search queries. “Check your spelling or try different keywords.”
Asked about the issue at the time, a Microsoft Corp. spokesperson blamed “accidental human error.” According to three people familiar with the matter, the full explanation, which has never been publicly revealed before now, was that Microsoft accidentally applied the blacklist it uses for the Chinese version of Bing to the entire world, providing an unintended glimpse of how it works with Beijing to give Chinese users a sanitized view of the internet.
After making significant compromises on issues such as censorship to maintain access to China’s huge market, Google and Yahoo! stopped operating their own search engines there; Facebook, Snapchat and X (formerly Twitter) are unavailable. Microsoft, by contrast, has continued to run a local version of Bing since 2009 in compliance with Beijing’s censorship requirements. Co-founder Bill Gates has long advocated working closely with China to encourage innovation in health and science—and has dismissed concerns about censorship and the country’s influence on technology.
Even if China constitutes a small proportion of Microsoft’s revenue, Bing can point to real signs of progress there. It overtook Baidu Inc., the overall market leader, as the top desktop search engine during a five-month period in 2023 and again in January of this year, according to the data tracker StatCounter.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Microsoft employees provided for the first time an inside account of the technologically sophisticated censorship system the company has created in China, centered on an expanding blacklist of thousands of websites, words and phrases….
By Ryan Gallagher of Bloomberg
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Google engineer AI trade secrets theft
Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, was arrested in Newark, California, on charges of stealing artificial intelligence (AI) trade secrets from Google to benefit two China-based companies. Ding, a Chinese national, faces four counts of federal trade secret theft, with each count carrying a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
Hired by Google in 2019, Ding had access to confidential information about Google's supercomputing data centers. Between May 2022 and May 2023, he allegedly uploaded hundreds of files containing trade secrets to a personal Google Cloud account. These files included detailed information about the architecture and functionality of GPU and TPU chips and systems, software for chip communication and task execution, and software orchestrating thousands of chips into a supercomputer for cutting-edge machine learning and AI technology.
While still employed at Google, Ding was offered and accepted the position of chief technology officer at an early-stage technology company in China that emphasized AI usage. He traveled to China to participate in investor meetings aimed at securing capital for the company. Additionally, Ding founded and served as CEO of a separate China-based startup focused on training large AI models powered by supercomputing chips. Neither of these affiliations was disclosed to Google before his resignation on December 26.
The indictment also details how Ding attempted to evade detection by copying data from Google source files into the Apple Notes application on his Google-issued MacBook, converting them into PDFs, and then uploading them to an external account[1]. After resigning, Ding was found to have booked a one-way ticket to Beijing, scheduled to depart two days past his end date at Google. His activities came to light after Google began investigating his unauthorized uploads, leading to the seizure of his electronic devices by the FBI in January…..
By Benj Edwards of Ars Technica
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