Latest news with #LionelBonaventure
The Standard
17-07-2025
- Business
- The Standard
Privacy group files complaint against AliExpress, TikTok, WeChat
This photograph shows a screen displaying the Tiktok social media platform's logo and the European flag in Toulouse, south-western France on April 26, 2023. An Irish regulator helping police European Union data privacy said July 10, 2025, that it had launched an investigation into TikTok over the transfer of European users' personal data to servers in China. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP)
The Standard
15-07-2025
- Business
- The Standard
Pentagon inks contracts for Musk's xAI, competitors
(FILES) This photo illustration shows screens displaying the logo of Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by US artificial intelligence company xAI, in Toulouse, southern France, on January 15, 2025. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP)
Forbes
10-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Grok 4 Accelerates AI Arms Race: Progress and Unresolved Perils
This photograph taken on January 13, 2025 in Toulouse shows screens displaying the logo of Grok, a ... More generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, the American company specializing in artificial intelligence and it's founder South African businessman Elon Musk. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP) (Photo by LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images) Elon Musk's xAI launched Grok 4 on July 9, 2025, amid competing narratives of breakthrough and backlash. While the model sets new benchmarks in reasoning performance, its release demonstrates critical dynamics reshaping the AI industry. An insatiable hunger for compute, intensifying competition in reasoning, especially scientific and medical reasoning capabilities, unresolved safety trade-offs, and the nascent push toward physical-world integration via robotics characterize the AI trend in the next few years. Reasoning at Scale and The Compute Crunch Grok 4's focus on enhancing reasoning, including domain-specific variants, mirrors a broader industry shift toward post-training. Grok 4's architecture represents the development towards mathematical logic, code generation, and scientific reasoning. Unlike Grok 3, Grok 4 processes queries with deeper logical chains. Variants like Grok 4 Code target niche applications, signaling market fragmentation as vendors increasingly compete on domain-specific performance rather than general capabilities. This pivot reportedly enabled Grok 4 to achieve the highest score ever recorded on the 'Humanity's Last Exam" and out perform Gemini, GPT-4 and O3 models, and a grueling assessment curated by domain experts. The exam's 100+ problems span disciplines from math, chemistry, to linguistics, with most insoluble by any single human specialist, according to Musk. The breakthrough, described by Grok 4's core researcher Jimmy Ba, a University of Toronto professor and former Geoffrey Hinton student, as achieving a 'ludicrous rate of progress,' stems from xAI's deployment of massive compute resources in areas of reinforcement learning and reasoning optimization, rather than the pre-training focus of Grok 3. Grok 4's training relied on xAI's Colossus supercomputer, reflecting an industry-wide dependency on advanced hardware. The company also plans to train its video-generation model on 100,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs, which can enable 30 times faster inference than previous systems. This highlights how cutting-edge AI now mandates energy-intensive infrastructure. At $300/month for enterprise access, Grok 4 Heavy's pricing reveals the cost of premium compute, while API fees ($3/million input tokens) signal how GPU scarcity shapes commercialization strategies across the sector. The premium Grok 4 Heavy tier employs multiple parallel AI agents that debate solutions collaboratively to boost complex problem-solving. Physical World Ambitions Though Grok 4 lacks vision capabilities (planned for Grok 6/7), its architecture hints at xAI's physical-world aspirations. Musk claims Grok 4 will simulate hypotheses and confirm them in the real world, aligning with emerging research frameworks such as the world models and robotics that aim at transforming LLM outputs to physical actions. If integrated into Tesla's Optimus humanoid robots or its cars , Grok 4 can possibly adjust and correct its answers based real world data. Unresolved Tensions: Safety Concerns and Hallucinations Grok 4's launch was shadowed by Grok 3's praise for Hitler and antisemitic meltdowns days earlier, exposing unresolved risks. xAI removed Grok 3's answers post-backlash but offered no clear technical safeguards for Grok 4. Despite claims of PhD-level intelligence, xAI researchers at the launch event did not discuss strategies to address common problems with LLMs, including hallucination and safety risks. This omission feels particularly glaring for a system touted as assisting drug discovery and soon to be integrated into robots and self-driving cars. Meanwhile, the voice assistant, who speaks in various tones, raises ethical questions about emotional mimicry that erodes boundaries between humans and machines. Grok 4 crystallizes four trends reshaping AI. First, scalability now depends on securing GPUs and high-performance computing center, concentrating power among well-funded players and igniting a global GPU arms race. Second, benchmark leadership in reasoning tasks (eg, ARC-AGI) is displacing raw parameter counts as the primary competitive metric. Third, research in robotic control is priming LLMs for real-world action. Fourth, tiered subscription models entrench AI as a luxury good, potentially widening the innovation gap and expanding enterprise users. Grok 4's 'superhuman' intelligence cautions us that the pursuit of data efficiency has far outpaced frameworks for AI safety, transparency, and equitable access. As Musk predicts Grok will 'discover new technologies by the end of next year,' the field must confront a pivotal question in the race toward artificial general intelligence: can we align systems with human values before they redefine human knowledge?
IOL News
08-06-2025
- Business
- IOL News
UK regulator leads crackdown on 'finfluencers'
Meta File Pic The announcement came as a group of British MPs said it had sent a letter to Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, asking for information on its approach to financial influencers. Image: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP Market regulators from six countries are cracking down on the illegal promotion of financial products by influencers on social media, UK officials said Friday. Britain's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said the action, which began on Monday, has resulted in three arrests in the UK and the authorisation of criminal proceedings against three individuals. The crackdown is being conducted jointly with regulators from Italy, Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. Some 50 "warning letters" have been issued, which will result in more than 650 requests to remove content from social media platforms and more than 50 websites "operated by unauthorised finfluencers", the FCA said. It has also sent seven "cease and desist" letters, and invited four so-called finfluencers for interviews. So-called finfluencers, or financial influencers, use their social media audiences to promote investment products, share advice, or offer their opinions on investments. Many act legitimately, but some "tout products or services illegally and without authorisation through online videos and posts, where they use the pretence of a lavish lifestyle, often falsely, to promote success", according to the FCA. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading These products can be risky, such as cryptocurrencies. "Our message to finfluencers is loud and clear," said Steve Smart, joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA. "They must act responsibly and only promote financial products where they are authorised to do so - or face the consequences." The announcement came as a group of British MPs said it had sent a letter to Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, asking for information on its approach to financial influencers. The letter from parliament's Treasury Committee follows evidence from FCA officials that Meta took up to six weeks to remove harmful content, longer than other platforms. "There was an isolated incident in late 2024 which resulted in a delay in actioning a small number of reports from the FCA," Meta said in a statement Friday.
