🤖 If AI Becomes Conscious, Here's How Researchers will Know

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(Total read time: 4 minutes)

Welcome to WhatAi, your #1 source for the latest in Ai & Tech.

It’s Tuesday, August 29, and today we’re covering how Google’s Crawl bot handles AI content, how researchers know if AI became conscious, tech giants invest massively in AI firm Hugging Face, how the AI gold rush is reviving the tech industry, and much more.

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🚀 BIG TECH & STARTUPS

How Google’s Crawl Bot Handles AI Generated Content (4 min read)

Google’s Martin Splitt was asked how Googlebot’s crawling and rendering was adapting to the increase in AI generated content. Martin’s answer provided insights into how Google handles AI generated content and the role of quality control. It comes down to these two answers: There’s nothing new being applied for AI content, and Google uses quality detection for both human and AI content. In other words, AI content is being treated as ‘normal’ content by Google - and ranked on its quality (not its source perse).

Ex-Meta Researchers Have Raised $40 Million From Lux Capital For An AI Biotech Startup (5 min read)

Former Meta researchers who developed an AI language model for biology have launched a new startup and raised at least $40 million. The founding staff of eight all come from the same unit, where they created a transformers-based model trained on data about protein molecules in order to predict the structures of other unknown proteins. They used it to create a database that today contains 700 million possible 3D structures– key puzzle pieces for developing drugs that could cure diseases, micro-organisms that could clean up pollution or alternative ways to manufacture industrial chemicals.

Lux Capital led the roughly $40 million round, it was said that the financing valued EvolutionaryScale at $200 million and that prominent AI investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, participated in it.

🧑‍🚀 SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

If AI becomes conscious: here’s how researchers will know (2 min read)

Many researchers say that AI systems aren’t yet at the point of consciousness, but that the pace of AI evolution has got them pondering: how would we know if they were? To answer this, a group of 19 neuroscientists, philosophers and computer scientists have come up with a checklist of criteria that, if met, would indicate that a system has a high chance of being conscious.

Can news outlets build a ‘trustworthy’ AI chatbot? (3 min read)

A group of tech outlets is attempting to incorporate generative AI into its websites, promising that readers can “get their tech questions answered by AI, based only on stories and reviews by our experts.” The AI chatbot, dubbed Smart Answers, appears across nearly all articles and on the homepages of the sites, which are owned by media / marketing company Foundry. The goal is to help readers looking for specific pieces of information among the mountain of writing.

🧠 MISCELLANEOUS

How the AI ‘gold rush’ is reviving the tech industry (3 min read)

The recent surge in generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology is boosting the tech industry after growth slowed across the sector earlier this year. The buzz around generative AI, especially since the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool in November, is leading to an influx of venture capital money in the industry. There have been $14.6 billion in venture capital deals in generative AI in the U.S. so far this year. As generative AI becomes more widely embraced, there’s also been a spike in jobs around the technology, there was a 122 percent increase in postings for generative AI jobs in July compared to the same month last year.

Google, Amazon, Nvidia and other tech giants invest in AI startup Hugging Face, sending its valuation to $4.5 billion (3 min read)

Hugging Face, an AI firm based in New York, has raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation from some of technology’s biggest companies.

Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm contributed to the round, the company said. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said the funds are to be focused on hiring talent to be competitive in the artificial intelligence space.

AI is biased. The White House is working with hackers to try to fix that (3 min listen)

The White House is concerned AI can perpetuate discrimination. It helped host a red-teaming challenge at the Def Con hacker convention to figure out flaws. (Story aired on ATC on Aug. 26, 2023.)