Meta argues its AI needs personal information from social media posts to learn ‘Australian concepts'
In a submission to the Productivity Commission's review on harnessing data and digital technology, published this week, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp argued for a 'global policy alignment' in the Albanese government's pursuit of privacy reform in the AI age.
Meta said generative AI models 'require large and diverse datasets' and cannot rely on synthetic data – data generated by AI alone. The company said available databases, such as Australian legislation, were limited in what they could offer AI compared to datasets containing personal information.
'Human beings' discussions of culture, art, and emerging trends are not borne out in such legislative texts, and the discourse that takes place on Meta products both represents vital learning on both how individuals discuss Australian concepts, realities, and figures, as well as, in particular, how users of our products engage,' Meta said.
'This means that authentic and effective learning to ultimately power meaningful products of communication is best realised from training that includes those discussions and artefacts themselves.'
Meta has been training its AI, Llama, on publicly-accessible Facebook and Instagram posts since last year. The company was ordered to stop training its data on users' posts for those based in Europe, and Meta ultimately gave users in the EU an opt-out option.
Guardian Australia reported last year that such an option was not available to Australian users because the opt-out option in Europe was 'in response to a very specific legal frame'.
Meta said in the Productivity Commission submission it was 'concerned that recent developments are moving Australia's privacy regime to be out of step with international norms, impose obligations on industry that conflict with broader digital policy objectives to promote age appropriate and safe experiences online, and disincentivise industry investment in AI in Australia or in pro-consumer outcomes'.
Hardware giant Bunnings, which is appealing a privacy commissioner finding last year against the company's trial of facial recognition technology in select stores, also took aim at Australia's privacy laws. The company told the Productivity Commission that while it was 'committed to protecting customer privacy' it believed 'every team member deserves to feel safe at work, and every customer should be able to shop without fear of harm'.
'Privacy must be considered in the context of an employer's strict liability and an occupier's legal obligations to maintain a safe place of work and business,' it said.
Woolworths said it supported privacy reform but said 'the proposals as presently structured could pose unnecessary challenges in how we serve our customers who increasingly expect personalised engagement and a single, frictionless shopping experience'.
Tech giant Google said there was too much regulatory uncertainty in Australia around AI, including the proposed AI guardrails, and the company repeated its call for changes to copyright law to allow its AI to be trained without breaching copyright.
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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘It's missing something': AGI, superintelligence and a race for the future
A significant step forward but not a leap over the finish line. That was how Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, described the latest upgrade to ChatGPT this week. The race Altman was referring to was artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical state of AI where, by OpenAI's definition, a highly autonomous system is able to do a human's job. Describing the new GPT-5 model, which will power ChatGPT, as a 'significant step on the path to AGI', he nonetheless added a hefty caveat. '[It is] missing something quite important, many things quite important,' said Altman, such as the model's inability to 'continuously learn' even after its launch. In other words, these systems are impressive but they have yet to crack the autonomy that would allow them to do a full-time job. OpenAI's competitors, also flush with billions of dollars to lavish on the same goal, are straining for the tape too. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook parent Meta, said development of superintelligence – another theoretical state of AI where a system far exceeds human cognitive abilities – is 'now in sight'. Google's AI unit on Tuesday outlined its next step to AGI by announcing an unreleased model that trains AIs to interact with a convincing simulation of the real world, while Anthropic, another company making significant advances, announced an upgrade to its Claude Opus 4 model. So where does this leave the race to AGI and superintelligence? Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, says the race towards a theoretical state of AI is taking place against a backdrop of scientific uncertainty – despite the intellectual and financial investment in the quest. Describing AGI as a 'thought experiment as much as it is a technology', he says: 'We don't really have a theoretical model of why generative AI models work so well and what would have to happen for them to get to this state of AGI.' He adds: 'It's like saying 'we're building the Apollo programme but we don't actually know how gravity works or how far away the moon is, or how a rocket works, but if we keep on making the rocket bigger maybe we'll get there'. 'To use the term of the moment, it's very vibes-based. All of these AI scientists are really just telling us what their personal vibes are on whether we'll reach this theoretical state – but they don't know. And that's what sensible experts say too.' However, Aaron Rosenberg, a partner at venture capital firm Radical Ventures – whose investments include leading AI firm Cohere – and former head of strategy and operations at Google's AI unit DeepMind, says a more limited definition of AGI could be achieved around the end of the decade. 'If you define AGI more narrowly as at least 80th percentile human-level performance in 80% of economically relevant digital tasks, then I think that's within reach in the next five years,' he says. Matt Murphy, a partner at VC firm Menlo Ventures, says the definition of AGI is a 'moving target'. He adds: 'I'd say the race will continue to play out for years to come and that definition will keep evolving and the bar being raised.' Even without AGI, the generative AI systems in circulation are making money. The New York Times reported this month that OpenAI's annual recurring revenue has reached $13bn (£10bn), up from $10bn earlier in the summer, and could pass $20bn by the year end. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly in talks about a sale of shares held by current and former employees that would value it at about $500bn, exceeding the price tag for Elon Musk's SpaceX. Some experts view statements about superintelligent systems as creating unrealistic expectations, while distracting from more immediate concerns such as making sure that systems being deployed now are reliable, transparent and free of bias. 'The rush to claim 'superintelligence' among the major tech companies reflects more about competitive positioning than actual technical breakthroughs,' says David Bader, director of the institute for data science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion 'We need to distinguish between genuine advances and marketing narratives designed to attract talent and investment. From a technical standpoint, we're seeing impressive improvements in specific capabilities – better reasoning, more sophisticated planning, enhanced multimodal understanding. 'But superintelligence, properly defined, would represent systems that exceed human performance across virtually all cognitive domains. We're nowhere near that threshold.' Nonetheless, the major US tech firms will keep trying to build systems that match or exceed human intelligence at most tasks. Google's parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon alone will spend nearly $400bn this year on AI, according to the Wall Street Journal, comfortably more than EU members' defence spend. Rosenberg acknowledges he is a former Google DeepMind employee but says the company has big advantages in data, hardware, infrastructure and an array of products to hone the technology, from search to maps and YouTube. But advantages can be slim. 'On the frontier, as soon as an innovation emerges, everyone else is quick to adopt it. It's hard to gain a huge gap right now,' he says. It is also a global race, or rather a contest, that includes China. DeepSeek came from nowhere this year to announce the DeepSeek R1 model, boasting of 'powerful and intriguing reasoning behaviours' comparable with OpenAI's best work. Major companies looking to integrate AI into their operations have taken note. Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, uses DeepSeek's AI technology in its main datacentre and said it was 'really making a big difference' to its IT systems and was making the company more efficient. According to Artificial Analysis, a company that ranks AI models, six of the top 20 on its leaderboard – which ranks models according to a range of metrics including intelligence, price and speed – are Chinese. The six models are developed by DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, Alibaba and MiniMax. On the leaderboard for video generation models, six of the top 10 – including the current leader, ByteDance's Seedance – are also Chinese. Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, whose company has barred use of DeepSeek, told a US senate hearing in May that getting your AI model adopted globally was a key factor in determining which country wins the AI race. 'The number one factor that will define whether the US or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world,' he said, adding that the lesson from Huawei and 5G was that whoever establishes leadership in a market is 'difficult to supplant'. It means that, arguments over the feasibility of superintelligent systems aside, vast amounts of money and talent are being poured into this race in the world's two largest economies – and tech firms will keep running. 'If you look back five years ago to 2020 it was almost blasphemous to say AGI was on the horizon. It was crazy to say that. Now it seems increasingly consensus to say we are on that path,' says Rosenberg.
Times
3 hours ago
- Times
They said I was late to AI, but I've picked a winner in Microsoft
Which would you rather back with your money: artificial intelligence or natural stupidity? Do you stand with Demis Hassabis — a Nobel prizewinner and chief executive of the AI researcher Google DeepMind, who last week expressed cautious optimism that AI 'will be ten times bigger than the industrial revolution' — or the losers venting cheap cynicism online? I can't pretend to be neutral about this, having suffered my fair share of abuse after reporting how AI prompted me to invest a little more than 2 per cent of my life savings in the software giant Microsoft (stock market ticker: MSFT) at $233 and $241 in January 2023. Several pessimists said I was too late and predicted doom. Some of them might have felt justified, briefly, when the arrival of DeepSeek, China's AI champion, wiped nearly $1 trillion off American tech giants' stock market value last January. It's early days yet, but those Microsoft shares were trading at $525 on Wednesday and are now the ninth most valuable holding in my 50-stock forever fund, so I really mustn't grumble. Less happily for society as a whole, it remains unclear whether the commercialisation of AI will lead to the 'radical abundance' predicted by Hassabis or mass unemployment. Here and now, Alphabet (GOOGL) is extending its AI search facility to Britain this month, after launching in America and India. Unlike conventional Google, which has proved so successful that its brand has entered the language as a verb, Google AI can answer complex questions at length and in plain English, instead of providing a list of links. Never mind, for now, that this business is essentially disrupting itself, with some advertisers grumbling that fewer folk are linking through to them than they did before. Google had to go higher up the AI ladder to avoid being rendered obsolete by ChatGPT, one of the most successful app launches ever. There's no need to take my word for this, Google AI reports that its rival ChatGPT 'achieved a remarkable feat by reaching 100 million users in just two months after its November 2022 launch'. • Google has signalled the death of googling. What comes next? Unfortunately for investors, ChatGPT is owned by OpenAI, a company that is not listed on a stock exchange. Fortunately, news that Microsoft had invested $10 billion in its unlisted Californian technology competitor in January was enough to prompt this small DIY investor to take the plunge and buy a stake in the future via Microsoft. The company combines long-established streams of revenue — including the world's most popular desktop operating system, Microsoft Windows, plus PowerPoint and Word — with substantial exposure to capital growth in future, through its stake in OpenAI and ChatGPT. Microsoft's modest dividend yield of 0.63 per cent has increased an eye-stretching annual average of 17 per cent over the past five years, according to LSEG, formerly the London Stock Exchange Group. Dividends are not guaranteed and can be cut or cancelled without notice. However, if that rate of ascent could be sustained, it would double shareholders' income in less than four and a half years. So this investor, who hopes to fund an enjoyable retirement, sees it as a relatively safe each-way bet. By contrast, my biggest technology shareholding, Apple (AAPL), has largely failed so far to make the AI trend its friend. Worse still, most iPhones are made in China, and so this business is extremely exposed to the unpredictable trade war between America and China, causing Apple's share price to plunge 12.5 per cent since the start of this year. That plucked it off the top slot in my forever fund, pushing it down to third place by value. But, having originally invested in Apple at $23.75 in February 2016, as reported here at that time, allowing for a subsequent stock split, I remain sanguine about these shares, which were trading at about $212 on Wednesday. One reason is that I suspect Apple Vision Pro, an augmented reality (AR) headset, has been widely misunderstood. This company has long-established success in selling technology to people who aren't that keen on technology, so I think Apple may be first to achieve commercial success with AR — which enhances the real world by overlaying graphics and information — when the price comes down and the choice of apps goes up. This would be a good time to confess that my cerebral software dates from the 1950s. So I can't claim to understand the more technical aspects of these trends, which was why I began my exposure to this sector with an investment trust more than a decade ago. Polar Capital Technology (PCT) shares were trading at 43p each, allowing for subsequent stock split, when I transferred them from a paper-based broker in September 2013. They were trading at £3.97 on Wednesday and may have further to go. Better still for bargain-hunters, shares in the £5.1 billion fund continue to be priced 10 per cent below their net asset value. Fund management charges of 0.8 per cent seem reasonable for professional stock selection in a sector where older investors may struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation. • Read more money advice and tips on investing from our experts For example, when I worked in the City office of another newspaper, three people were employed in the library just to collate clippings about companies listed on the stock exchange. Now all that information, and much more, is available on my mobile. Returning to where we began, I take contrarian comfort from the fact that many critics claim AI is all hype. As I may have pointed out before, perennial pessimism is an easy way to simulate wisdom about the stock market, but it ain't the way to make money. Space is the final frontier for new technology, and few have gone there more boldly, albeit by proxy, than the eccentric billionaire Elon Musk. Even if you wouldn't dream of getting into one of his rockets, with their star-studded passenger lists, there is good reason to consider gaining exposure to Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, as an investment. Musk's antics with the equally eccentric President Trump may have distracted attention from the fact that SpaceX has lifted more than 8,000 satellites into low earth orbit. This has already extended the internet to parts of our planet that were previously offline. Most importantly, from a commercial point of view, if data capacity can be expanded sufficiently, SpaceX and its Starlink wi-fi subsidiary could eventually replace every internet service provider on Earth. Coming down from the clouds of technical speculation, small investors willing to accept high risks can gain a ground-level stake in SpaceX via a handful of investment trusts holding these unlisted shares. To be specific, just more than 14 per cent of Edinburgh Worldwide's £770 million assets is invested in two tranches of SpaceX stock. I paid £1.52 an Edinburgh Worldwide share in January 2024. It has been a bumpy ride, as you might expect, and there are no dividends, but I am happy to hang on to shares trading at £1.94 on Wednesday. Drawing inspiration from the Spitfire that flew over my head a few moments ago, I am reminded of the Royal Air Force motto, per ardua ad astra, which means through adversity to the stars. Perhaps even more appropriately, this small shareholder could say: 'Beam me up, Musky!'
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
CEO of AI company gets bloodied pig's head in horror package as he's called a 'Clark Kent knockoff'
The CEO of an AI startup in Las Vegas receives a package containing a severed pig's head and threatening letter - believed to stem from his company's use of artificial intelligence. Blake Owens, founder and CEO of Agrippa, an AI-powered platform to connect commercial real estate investors and developers without traditional brokers, received the bloodied pig's head along with the menacing note on July 29. The gruesome parcel was sent to a relative's home, and the message criticized Owens' use of AI - with personal insults that called him a 'Clark Kent knockoff' and ended ominously with: 'And don't get greedy because pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.' SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO Owens told KLAS: 'Perhaps this person watched too much of The Godfather. 'Needless to say, I still take it very seriously, but don't feel like I'm being truly threatened. It was a message.' The note was signed only with the initial 'M' and appeared to be motivated by a June TV segment that profiled Owens and Agrippa's AI tool, known as 'Marcus', to automate real estate transactions by matching developers with investors and evaluating property bids. The sinister letter also said: 'AI is not going to replace brokers. Clearly you don't understand real estate wasn't built by developers or investors. And it sure as hell wasn't built by tech guys in Lululemon. It was built by brokers. We did it the hard way. No shortcuts, no tech, just people.' Owens said he believed the sender was fearful of being displaced by automation. The businessman said: 'I understand this person is probably just frustrated that business isn't going well for them, and then they see AI replacement stories on top of that. And I just so happen to be someone they can focus their frustration on.' A photo of the package showed the sender was labeled as 'Marcus Agrippa' - a reference to the company's AI system. Owens joked: 'Is this a message that you know your own AI is turning against you? I wasn't quite sure how to interpret it.' Las Vegas PD confirmed it was investigating the incident and classified it as a harassment case. A suspect was yet to be identified. Owens said he did not feel 'genuinely threatened' and would not press charges should the sender be eventually identified. He told KLAS: 'I don't want to punch down on this person; they may be in a tough spot in life. I do see this as an opportunity to show people you don't become a better person by making another man a lesser person.' Owens also addressed potential anxiety surrounding AI's growing presence in the workforce, particularly in fields such as real estate that had historically relied on personal relationships. He said: 'You know, people are scared. They feel displaced and when disruption moves faster than education, fear just fills the gap.' Owens added that Agrippa was not designed to replace humans but it was created to empower professionals through AI. He said: '[Winston Churchill] said to be perfect is to change often. I think a lot of people are afraid of change and what's coming with AI, because it really is a tsunami of change that people are trying to resist. But the more you embrace it, the better you'll do, the more skills that you'll accumulate, more value you'll bring to the table.' Despite the threatening nature of the package, Owens remained committed to encouraging dialogue and told Inman: 'If I knew who this person was, I'd say, "Hey, feel free to reach out to me - maybe not with a package, just send me an email - I'm happy to share whatever education I can on keeping up with AI."' The investigation into the incident remained ongoing.
