Author: Becky Anderson

Russian propaganda may be influencing certain answers from AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Meta AI, according to a new report. NewsGuard, a company that develops rating systems for news and information websites, claims to have found evidence that a Moscow-based network named “Pravda” is publishing false claims to affect the responses of AI models. Pravda has flooded search results and web crawlers with pro-Russian falsehoods, publishing 3.6 million misleading articles in 2024 alone, per NewsGuard, citing statistics from the nonprofit American Sunlight Project. NewsGuard’s analysis, which probed 10 leading chatbots, found that the chatbots collectively repeated false Russian…

TechCrunch Sessions: AI kicks off on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley — and we want AI leaders to take part in industry-changing conversations. Make your mark by leading breakout sessions and discussions with over 1,200 startup founders, VC leaders, and other industry pioneers at TC Sessions: AI. But don’t wait, you have until tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT to apply.  Are you an innovator driving the discourse and want a rare chance to take center stage? TC Sessions: AI wants to highlight your expertise. Apply to lead a 50-minute breakout session, complete with a presentation, panel discussion,…

X is actively working to expand the reach of xAI’s Grok model to more users on the platform. Multiple users noted today that people can now mention Grok in replies and ask a question to get an explanation about a post. Users of the Elon Musk-owned social media platform could already access Grok through a button in the sidebar. They can also click on the Grok button placed next to all posts so that the AI-powered chatbot explains the post’s text and image through the image understanding feature the model gained last year. For the last few weeks, AI-powered search engine…

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is investigating the data-labeling startup Scale AI for compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act, TechCrunch has learned. That’s a federal law that regulates unpaid wages, misclassification of employees as contractors, and illegal retaliation against workers. The investigation has been active since at least August 2024, a document seen by TechCrunch shows. And it’s ongoing, according to a person directly familiar with the matter.  The mere existence of an investigation doesn’t mean Scale AI has done anything wrong, of course, and the investigation could find in favor of the company or be dismissed. Scale…

OpenAI’s flagship AI chatbot, ChatGPT, returned to solid growth in the latter half of 2024, according to a new report published on Thursday by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While it took ChatGPT nine months to grow from 100 million weekly active users in November 2023 to 200 million in August 2024, it’s now taken less than six months for the app to double those numbers yet again, the report found. Shortly after its November 2022 release as a research preview, ChatGPT became the fastest app ever to reach 100 million monthly active users — a milestone it hit in…

AI company founders have a reputation for making bold claims about the technology’s potential to reshape fields, particularly the sciences. But Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief science officer, has a more measured take. In an essay published to X on Thursday, Wolf said that he feared AI becoming “yes-men on servers” absent a breakthrough in AI research. He elaborated that current AI development paradigms won’t yield AI capable of outside-the-box, creative problem-solving — the kind of problem-solving that wins Nobel Prizes. “The main mistake people usually make is thinking [people like] Newton or Einstein were just scaled-up good…

Nearly 6,500 artists demanded in an open letter that fine art auction house Christie’s cancel its first show dedicated solely to works created with AI. Yet, the show, Augmented Intelligence, went on — and reportedly exceeded expectations. According to Christie’s, the show brought in more than $700,000, with many lots reaching beyond their high estimates. The top sale was Refik Anadol’s “Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A,” a dynamic painting that algorithmically reimagines data from the International Space Station and satellites. It fetched $277,200. Christie’s VP and director of digital art sales, Nicole Sales Giles, told Artnet that the…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, can now directly edit code — if you’re on macOS, that is. The newest version of the ChatGPT app for macOS can take action to edit code in supported developer tools, including Xcode, VS Code, and JetBrains. Users can optionally turn on an “auto-apply” mode so ChatGPT can make edits without the need for additional clicks. Subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team can use the code editing feature as of Thursday by updating their macOS app. OpenAI says that code editing will roll out to Enterprise, Edu, and free users next week. In a…

Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low.  However, the recent launch of its chat assistant on mobile app stores was met with some hype, particularly in its home country. “Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a…

A high-profile ex-OpenAI policy researcher, Miles Brundage, took to social media on Wednesday to criticize OpenAI for “rewriting the history” of its deployment approach to potentially risky AI systems. Earlier this week, OpenAI published a document outlining its current philosophy on AI safety and alignment, the process of designing AI systems that behave in desirable and explainable ways. In the document, OpenAI said that it sees the development of AGI, broadly defined as AI systems that can perform any task a human can, as a “continuous path” that requires “iteratively deploying and learning” from AI technologies. “In a discontinuous world…