AI Artwork Sells for $1M

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, Anthropic becomes the latest AI company to cozy up with the US government. And before that, in the headlines, an AI painting is sold for over a million dollars. The AI Daily Brief is a daily video and podcast about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:24Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. It is the end of a very consequential week, and one that when it comes to new launches and new products has been a little bit quiet in the world of AI. You gotta think that people didn't want to compete with the US election show when it came to announcing anything of significance. And yet there were some really interesting stories this week, notably that an AI artwork has sold for a million dollars. The artwork was called AI God, and was by AI DeRobot, who Sotheby's said was the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork sold at auction.

1:02Sotheby's had anticipated that the painting would sell for between$120 ,000 and$180 ,000, so this massively outperformed. Sotheby's ultimately said that there were 27 bids for the art, and that the sale, quote, launches a new frontier in the global art market, establishing the auction benchmark for an artwork by a humanoid robot. The artist, AI DeRobot, said, quote, The key value of my work is its capacity to serve as catalyst for dialogue about emerging technologies. The work invites viewers to reflect on the godlike nature of AI and computing while considering the ethical and societal implications of these advancements.

1:34Notably, the subject was Alan Turing, who was a codebreaker during World War II and an early computer pioneer. Really interesting stuff, and of course the question will be, is this a one-time novelty, or will we start to see this type of art show up at auction again? Next up, we move over into the legal realm. OpenAI has scored a small victory. One of the copyright lawsuits against OpenAI has been dismissed based on a lack of damages. The federal court has dismissed the case brought by Raw Story Media and Alternet Media against OpenAI. The plaintiffs had claimed that OpenAI used their articles and training data without proper attribution.

2:07In making her ruling, Judge Colleen McManon said that the publisher could not show enough harm to ground their claims. She allowed them to file a new complaint, but said she was, quote, skeptical that they could allege a cognizable injury. Notably, the case was a little bit different to the New York Times lawsuit. These plaintiffs were not alleging copyright infringement, but simply reproduction of the articles without copyright management information, or CMI. The judge said, let us be clear about what's really at stake here. The alleged injury for which the plaintiffs truly seek redress is not the exclusion of CMI, but the use of plaintiffs' articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation.

2:39Essentially, the judge said that this harm is not sufficient enough to justify the lawsuit. Still, the plaintiffs said they were confident they could address the concerns in court through an amended complaint. OpenAI competitor Mistral has launched a new API, meanwhile, for content moderation. Powered by a fine-tuned version of their MiniStral 8B model, the feature can be tailored to specific applications and safety standards. The model is trained to classify text in 11 languages, including French, German, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. It can identify harmful content across nine categories, including sexual, hate and discrimination, violence and threats, and more.

3:11In a blog post, Mistral wrote, Over the past few months, we've seen growing enthusiasm across the industry and research community for new AI-based moderation systems, which can help make moderation more scalable and robust across applications. Following up on a previous story, filmmakers at Lionsgate are already using AI and are pleased with the results. You might remember that back in September, Lionsgate signed a deal with Runway to provide access to their generative video tools. The deal was the first with a major studio and reignited concerns about AI displacing film crew and talent. During this week's earnings call, Motion Picture Chair Adam Fogelson said, There were some questions when it was reported.

3:44Once we clarified for our filmmaking partners, for our talent partners, exactly what this was, how it would be used, what it is, what it isn't, we've had great support and our filmmakers are using it already. CEO John Feldheimer added, We believe that AI harnessed within the appropriate guardrails can be a valuable tool to serve our talent. And we believe that over the long term, it will have a positive transformational impact on our business. Lastly today, in a world first, Google has used AI to find a zero-day exploit in widely used software. Google claimed to have found the vulnerability in the SQ Lite open-source database engine with the help of a code auditing agent, BigSleep.

4:17In a blog post, they wrote, we believe this is the first example of an AI agent finding a previously unknown exploitable memory safety issue in widely used real-world software. BigSleep is a specifically trained LLM developed by Google's DeepMind and Project Zero Divisions. The blog continued, we think that this work has tremendous defensive potential. Finding vulnerabilities in software before it's even released means that there's no scope for attackers to compete. The vulnerabilities are fixed before attackers even have a chance to use them. Overall, lots of interesting stuff going on, but that is going to do it for the headlines.

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6:39Go to bsuper.ai to learn more about this AI enablement network. And now back to the show. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. One of the really interesting phenomenon that we've been watching across the tech industry for the last couple of years is the return to favor of the defense tech category. Now, companies that worked with the military in the past had been for some time effectively persona non grata in Silicon Valley. With some frequency, you saw employees rebel or reject when their companies like Microsoft and Google tried to engage with the U.S. government and the U.S. military. But that has definitely started to shift.

7:14The success of companies like Palantir and Anduril have certainly been a part of that, but you're absolutely seeing it interact with the world of AI as well. The latest news on that front is that Anthropic is partnering with Palantir to provide Claude to the U.S. military. The way that this will work is that defense and intelligence agencies will have access via Amazon's government AWS servers. Anthropic's head of sales, Kate Earl Jensen, said that the collaboration would allow the military to, quote, operationalize the use of Claude. We, of course, just recently discussed the news that Meta would be making their LAMA models available for defense as well.

7:46And part of what's shifted seems to be the discourse represented in the White House's recent memorandum on AI and national security. It appears at least nominally like the codifications from that document have given leading AI labs more comfort with engaging with the U.S. government in this way. The integration into Palantir's platform will allow Claude to have access to classified documents for the first time. CLAWD has been cleared for use in systems that access information classified as secret, which is one step below top secret. Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir, said, Our partnership with Anthropic and AWS provides U.S.

8:18defense and intelligence communities the toolchain they need to harness and deploy AI models securely, bringing the next generation of decision advantage to their most critical missions. Palantir is proud to be the first industry partner to bring CLAWD models to classified environments. We've already seen firsthand the impact of these models with AIP in the commercial sector. For example, one leading American insurer automated a significant portion of their underwriting process with 78 AI agents powered by AIP and Claude, transforming a process that once took two weeks into one that could be done in three hours.

8:46We're now providing the same asymmetric AI advantage to the US government and its allies. Anthropics Jensen added, We're proud to be at the forefront of bringing responsible AI solutions to US-classified environments, enhancing analytical capabilities and operational efficiencies in vital government operations. Access to Claude within Palantir on AWS will equip U.S. defense and intelligence organizations with powerful AI tools that can rapidly process and analyze vast amounts of complex data. This will dramatically improve intelligence analysis and enable officials in their decision-making processes.

9:14As you might imagine, the big discourse around this is all about how it does or doesn't interact with anthropic self-perception and brand. Based Beth Jezos writes, if you're in AI safety, pivot to AI defense. Nabil Qureshi writes, imagine telling the safety-concerned effective altruist founders of Anthropic in 2021 that a mere three years after founding the company, they'd be signing partnerships to deploy their around-AGI models straight to the military front lines. Danielle Fagella writes, Anthropic partners with Palantir's and you guys are still like, no, but this new AGI lab is really all about the social good.

9:45These guys really care. Brother, no one has a choice in this arms race. You gotta signal virtue and drive for power both at the same time full throttle. Perceived benevolence and raw AGI capability must be pursued in tandem. At Yassin MTB writes, It's so funny that Anthropic has partnered with Palantir. Ha ha ha ha ha. Let's go. E-A-C-C. Calamaze writes, Let's be real. It's being used for analytics. I dislike Anthropic being two-faced as much as the next guy, but this is a total nothing burger. Yassin responds, I should make my feelings clear. I don't fault Anthropic for this. I think it's based.

10:14And they think that you should be using it for military and SIGINT, and it's not going to PowerPoint slides. Day in the CISO, Atanthropic competitor OpenAI writes, Very promising. we need every advantage we can get to improve our defensive and intelligence capabilities, and to ultimately deter our adversaries. Leveraging AI for DoD and IC challenges benefits us all, peace through strength. Now to be fair, Anthropic's terms of service are actually less restrictive than metas when it comes to use in the defense industry. They already allow tasks including legally authorized foreign intelligence analysis, identifying covert influence or sabotage campaigns, and providing warning in advance of potential military activities.

10:51Anthropic also says they will, quote, tailor use restrictions to the mission and legal authorities of a government entity based on factors such as, quote, the extent of the agency's willingness to engage in ongoing dialogue. Still, hold all of that aside, and I think that what's clear is that American AI companies are going to be involved with American military establishment. This wasn't the only news we got from Anthropic. However, Amazon is considering investing more in Anthropic. Back in March, Amazon completed a$4 billion investment in Anthropic, which notably required the startup to use AWS for their compute.

11:22According to the information, this deal goes one step further, requiring Anthropic to use Amazon-developed Tranium chips to train their models. The problem, the information writes, is that Anthropic prefers to use Amazon servers powered by NVIDIA-designed AI chips. They continue, the size of Amazon's total investment in Anthropic could depend on the outcome of this discussion, specifically on the number of Amazon chips Anthropic agrees to use. The information also notes, shifting to the Amazon server chip could be technically challenging for Anthropic because the Amazon software the developers must use with the Tranium chips isn't as mature as NVIDIA's CUDA software.

11:54Such a move could also lock Anthropic into using Amazon Tranium servers, making it more difficult for the AI startup to use other cloud providers or to lease its own data centers in the future. Right now, none of the details are confirmed. It does appear that Anthropic is out seeking another round of fundraising that could see the company valued at$40 billion. And just given the incredible high costs of competing, I would be surprised if we didn't get more news about that fundraising soon. But it's a good reminder that at the size and scale that Anthropic is now playing at, there are a very limited number of partners that can actually compete and fund them at scale.

12:25And with that, we close today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace.