AI Insights: Baidu's Latest Developments, IBM's Affection for Salesforce, and .ai's $30M Investment

0:00The first thing I want to talk about is that there is a tiny island called Tiny Anguilla. And this island is a small Caribbean island, and it is profiting massively from everything we're seeing in AI today. And that is because of the internet domain ending in.ai. To be honest, like I have a.ai, I have a couple.ai names I have for different companies. And I assume that these actually stood for artificial intelligence. I guess this was naive. And I should have known that.ai actually stands for Anguilla, which is a Caribbean island. But because they own that and they kind of control that, they are making an absolute killing from the fact that everyone is registering these.ai domain names right now.

0:38And since ChatGPT's launch, the developer that is managing the country's domains estimates that revenue is going to hit around$30 million this year, which, let's be honest, is a massive boost for a tiny Caribbean island, especially because pretty much the island is resilient or relies on tourism for their entire economy. That's just kind of a fun fact for you today. The second thing I want to bring up is the fact that Baidu, which is a big tech giant in China, they have officially released their chat GPT rival. We talked about this earlier in the year. They have something called Ernie Bot, but they've officially released this to the public, and this has sent the company's stock absolutely surging.

1:18So the move comes on the heels of Wendy's announcement that China is going to start approving its first AI models, and a lot of people are very excited and hyped about what Ernie Bot is going to do. And it's allegedly, it's like a better AI model for Chinese. It's like killing open AI there. It's left to be seen. We're going to have to look as this thing is finally now going to be launched to the public. The third piece of news that I wanted to bring to you today is the fact that IBM and Salesforce have teamed up on AI. So they are joining forces to bring AI tools and consulting to their mutual customers.

1:53The company's announced on Thursday, IBM is going to provide consulting to help clients integrate and adopt the wealth of Salesforce AI technologies, including Sales GPT, Service GPT, Salesforce Einstein, Slack GPT, and Marketing GPT. In case you didn't know, Salesforce owns Slack. So this is absolutely a big move. These are two very big companies and seeing them join up, I think is a big play. Obviously, Salesforce has went pretty hard on developing a bunch of these models here. And these are all great tools. IBM doing a lot of consulting is going to start pushing that forward. The third piece of AI news here comes from the fact, I saw this first on Twitter, but essentially X, which is, you know, formerly Twitter X, has updated their privacy policy and it has added a mention of using X data to train AI models.

2:48This is what they've just, the phrasing they've actually added. I've seen a screenshot of the privacy policy. It says, we may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy. And then, of course, it goes on to the rest of the policy. Now, what's interesting is very quickly after this was tweeted out, Elon Musk actually commented on the tweet and said just public data not dms or anything private so this is very interesting this has obviously been um confirmed it's kind of interesting because you know usually there's like a press uh like a press room or whatever a press team at a different company that you could like reach out for comment but in this case it's like you tweet about it elon musk just immediately responds to all the news stories about uh his companies it's kind of funny and actually with Twitter for a while when you would send a press request to Twitter, they would just respond back with a poop emoji.

3:47They have now updated that. And I believe if you send a press request, it just says, we'll get back to you soon, which I don't think they will, but I'm assuming the new CEO thought that'd be a little bit more professional. In any case, the recent update in this policy, I think really kind of indicates a shift towards a more comprehensive data collection, including biometric data and users employment and education background so this was actually reported recently by bloomberg um this kind of biometric data employment education background collection that they're doing and i think this move may be more than just a standard policy update another section um released the fact that they're going to be using this for the ai stuff like i just mentioned and i think that this observation was brought to light by a number of different people on AI, which I think is, or on, sorry, X, which I think is always fun that people on the platform are discovering these things and sharing them.

4:40And I think that these latest findings have captured the attention on Y Combinator's discussion forum, Hacker News. If you don't know Hacker News, you definitely should be on there. It's Y Combinator's discussion forum, but they have all sorts of breaking, trending AI and tech news like every single day and you kind of get people's opinions on it. It's really, really, it's a solid place for news. In any case, the revised policy change is explicitly mentioned in section 2.1. It's exactly what I read earlier. But I think the plot thickens a little bit when you start to consider the ambitions of X-Corp's owner, Elon Musk, in the AI sector.

5:16So Musk has, of course, also owns another company, XAI, that he launched. We've covered this in the past. And a lot of people are theorizing that the data collected by x corp could potentially serve as a valuable resource for xai's machine learning endeavors this i don't think is speculation or conspiracy theory or anything i think this is just kind of like in in xai when they did a bunch of when they launched xai um they did a bunch of like press releases and stuff and like uh spaces and everything i think they explicitly said like we're going to use the x twitter data to help us uh with this so it makes a lot of sense they have one of the biggest data sets, biggest social media platforms.

5:54It's obviously lost a massive valuation. So this is a great way to recoup costs is by, you know, tying this to an AI company. And this goes along with the fact that they actually banned or shut off the API access of OpenAI earlier this year from using Twitter data because previously they kind of just had a, the fire hose for free. So they're, you know, shut it off. They may charge for it in the future, or maybe they just want to use it to help train their own AI models. So Musk has earlier indicated that X is going to train its AI models using public tweets. He even criticized tech giants for using Twitter data for training and went as far as threatening Microsoft with a lawsuit over alleged illegal use of Twitter data.

6:33Additionally, Musk also filed legal actions against unidentified entities for data scraping. So this is likely aimed at collecting data for training advanced AI models. He didn't say like who these entities were. And I don't think he signaled out Microsoft in this. A lot of people were speculating on which companies this might be, but apparently like massive amounts of people or massive amounts of data was getting scraped really rapidly from Twitter. And they had to take a bunch of steps, a bunch of things broke in the process where they were trying to shut it down pretty much. But I think this really goes to show the importance for a lot of these big platforms and companies in really protecting their data and keeping it out of the hands of what is going to be their competitors now or future competitors in the future.

7:14So I think in alignment with a lot of these developments, the XAI homepage says that although it operates as a separate entity from XCorp, it aims to, quote, work closely with X or Twitter, Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission. So Elon Musk obviously took XCorp's platform. He went on Twitter X whatever to confirm these policy changes and I think it's interesting right he said that he's only gonna be using public data and not your direct messages or private user info for the actual data training so that that is good I'm sure a lot of people will criticize it I'm sure that it's going to also be beneficial to his companies so it's going to be interesting to see what continues happening with this story