Tag: Walter Isaacson

This Startup Has Built an Algorithm to Pay Creators for Their Work Used to Train A.I.

[ad_1]

Some startups are exploring the revenue-sharing model to solve A.I.’s growing IP dilemma. Alex Shuper/Unsplash

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has come under fire from publishers and artists who alleged the company scraped their work from the internet to train GPT, its large language model, without their consent. These concerns have sparked lawsuits against the A.I. giant on accusations of copyright infringement, highlighting a major ethical dilemma that comes with pushing A.I.’s capabilities forward. Some startups are exploring a solution that focuses on sharing revenue with content creators. In August, Perplexity AI, an A.I.-powered search engine, introduced a program to pay publishers a portion of ad revenue generated by search queries if their content informs its outputs. ProRata.ai, a startup founded by a pioneer of the early internet monetization model, is developing a similar algorithm to compensate publishers, authors and other creators whose work is used to train generative A.I.

ProRata claims it has created an algorithm that can review an A.I.-generated output, identify the source of information based on novel facts and textual styles, and calculate how much each source contributed to the response. These percentages are then used to cut checks to these creators at the end of every month—a model that, in theory, could help protect the livelihoods of creatives and prevent future lawsuits around intellectual property.

“If you don’t share, then creativity is unsustainable. There’s no way for you to make a living,” ProRata’s co-founder and CEO Bill Gross told Observer regarding the careers of artists. Gross is credited as the inventor of the pay-per-click monetization model for internet search with a company he founded in the late 1990s that was later acquired by Yahoo, according to ProRata’s website.

The startup, which raised $25 million from venture capital firms Mayfield Fund, Prime Movers Lab, Revolution Ventures and IdeaLab Studio in a series A funding round in August, is set to showcase the algorithm through an A.I.-powered search engine expected to release in October. Starting at $19 a month, the engine will monetize queries through advertisements and subscription payments, according to Gross. While 50 percent of the revenue generated will go to ProRata, the other half will be split proportionately across creators.

ProRata’s ultimate goal isn’t to create an alternative to Google Search, but to introduce a new business model that search engines could adopt to ensure creators get paid for their contributions to A.I. “We want to make that the industry standard,” Gross said. While A.I. search features from Google and Microsoft’s Bing don’t directly share ad revenue with publishers, they refer users to links from publishers as a way to drive traffic to their sites.

The answer engine will only be trained on data from creators who partner with ProRata. That means the model will draw from a limited amount of data that could potentially compromise the accuracy of outputs. Still, ProRata isn’t focused on making its A.I. search engine a standalone product but rather on having the pay-per-use model adopted by major search engines.

So far, the company has inked deals with publishers like The Atlantic, Fortune, Financial Times, Time, and Axel Springer, the German company that owns Politico and Business Insider. Authors like Walter Isaacson, Adam Grant, and Ian Bremmer have also agreed, as have music industry veterans like Universal Music Group. ProRata hasn’t encountered any resistance or skepticism from its partners yet, according to Gross. “Most people just want us to be wildly successful so they’ll get a paycheck,” the CEO said. The real challenge, he notes, is convincing Big Tech companies who’ve been crawling web data for free to adopt ProRata’s business model.

“It’s amazing to me that some of the people think that crawling is not stealing,” Gross said. “Basically, Mustafa, the CEO of Microsoft A.I., came out and said, ‘Hey, if it’s available on the web, it’s free for us to use.’ And that’s just bullshit,” Gross added, referring to comments made by Google Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman during a CNBC interview in July when asked if training A.I. models on web content is akin to intellectual property theft. “Just because something is available and visible doesn’t mean it’s open source,” Gross said.

ProRata.ai CEO Bill Gross. Andres Castaneda

Paying creators may be a temporary “Band-Aid” solution

Financial compensation may not fully address the ethical concerns of having a creator’s work used for A.I. training without explicit permission, according to Star Kashman, a tech lawyer and partner at Cyber Law Firm with expertise in digital copyright law. She cites actress Scarlett Johansson as an example, who allegedly refused to give OpenAI permission to use her voice for ChatGPT despite financial offers.

“Many authors and creators have personal, moral objections to their work being utilized for A.I. training, regardless of compensation,” Kashman told Observer. “Without explicit permission, paying creators may be a temporary ‘Band-Aid’ solution, but it may not be an all-encompassing resolution to deeper concerns about consent and the impact on creative works.”

The “pay-per-use” model could also potentially lead to a new crop of legal issues. Creators may disagree over whether the payment they receive “accurately reflects” what they contributed to the A.I. systems, especially if they can’t set their own rates, Kashman said. Moreover, A.I. tools may favor the work of bigger, more established creators over smaller ones even if their content is more relevant to a particular query, similar to how search engine optimization (SEO) works. Compensation may also not fully protect A.I. companies from being sued for intellectual property theft, which she said could be easier to prove in court with concrete attribution.

“There will continue to be many IP cases until the Copyright Act is amended to allow scraping on copyrighted content for the purposes of training LLMs,” Gabriel Vincent, another partner at Cyber Law Firm, told Observer, echoing Kashman’s comments.

ProRata has plans to diversify its model to include more than just text. After the October launch, the startup will focus on collaborating with music companies, according to Gross. He also hopes to collaborate with video and movie brands as well as smaller, independent creators and plans to license its attribution technology to A.I. companies that can implement it into their own models.

“A.I. is so amazing, but it needs to be fair to all parties,” Gross said.

[ad_2]

Aaron Mok

Source link

September 3, 2024
SpaceX Working on Hundreds of Swarming Spy Satellites for U.S. Intelligence Agency

[ad_1]

SpaceX is working with the National Reconnaissance Office to build a classified system of swarming spy satellites, according to a report published by Reuters. And while the $1.8 billion contract was reportedly signed in 2021, news of the program’s ties to NRO just leaked on Saturday—a great reminder that it’s entirely possible for some tech companies to do highly classified work for years without the public learning about it.

Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their View

The new satellite spy network is being built under SpaceX’s Starshield unit, which also manages Starlink satellite internet. The program is described by Reuters as consisting of, “hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits.”

The five sources of information on the new program aren’t named in the new Reuters article, though one anonymous source is quoted as saying that “no one can hide” from the new satellite system.

From Reuters:

The satellites can track targets on the ground and share that data with U.S. intelligence and military officials, the sources said. In principle, that would enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe, aiding intelligence and military operations, they added.

[…]

The Starshield network is part of intensifying competition between the U.S. and its rivals to become the dominant military power in space, in part by expanding spy satellite systems away from bulky, expensive spacecraft at higher orbits. Instead a vast, low-orbiting network can provide quicker and near-constant imaging of the Earth.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the existence of a new satellite program being developed by SpaceX in February, but Reuters was the first to provide new information about the customer for what sounds like an incredibly powerful new spy system.

SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk have received criticism over the past two years as the billionaire has expressed skepticism that the U.S. should be involved in helping Ukraine during its fight against Russia’s invasion. The war started in Feb. 2022 and has killed tens of thousands on both sides, but Musk has become vocally opposed against the U.S. continuing to help its ally with intelligence and weapons. That would appear to be a big problem for the U.S. military establishment, since Ukraine is so dependent on Starlink satellite internet for command and control in the battlefield.

Musk infamously denied Ukraine use of Starlink to mount a counterattack of Russian forces in Crimea, a story told by his biographer Walter Isaacson, that was awkwardly walked back at Musk’s insistence after the book was published. But whatever actually happened in Crimea, there appears to be nervousness within the Pentagon about how reliant the U.S. military has become on Musk. And the leak of this latest contract between SpaceX and NRO proves the public probably doesn’t know the half of it.

As Reuters explained in the new report on Saturday:

The network is also intended to greatly expand the U.S. government’s remote-sensing capabilities and will consist of large satellites with imaging sensors, as well as a greater number of relay satellites that pass the imaging data and other communications across the network using inter-satellite lasers, two of the sources said.

NRO was formed in 1960 on the heels of some major failures by the U.S. Air Force to get a military satellite program up and running. The shoot down and capture of U-2 pilot Gary Powers by the Soviet Union in May 1960 was a highly embarrassing international incident for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, which made it obvious the U.S. needed to get some proper mechanical eyes in the sky that couldn’t be shot down by adversaries.

The establishment of NRO in 1960 was an attempt to make the nation’s spy satellites an independent agency that could service U.S. military customers and U.S. intelligence agencies without causing turf wars. Giving an agency like CIA, for example, sole control of spy satellites could lead to unnecessary internal competition with other agencies. At least that’s the way Eisenhower’s science advisors thought about it at the time.

While a system of swarming satellites deployed by U.S. intelligence may sound futuristic, it’s important to remember U.S. imaging capabilities are already incredibly advanced and frankly make the 1998 surveillance thriller Enemy of the State look like a documentary. As just one example, the existence of ARGUS-IS, a 1.8 gigapixel camera developed by Darpa and BAE Systems, was revealed in a January 2013 episode of the PBS documentary “Rise of the Drones.”

The ARGUS-IS could provide images of an entire U.S. city, while allowing users to zoom in on any part and see enough detail to capture someone waving their arms. And it’s a pretty safe bet that the realities of U.S. spying capabilities in 2013 were much more advanced than what the public was allowed to see on PBS. The mind boggles to think what kind of resolution America’s eyes in the sky can get a decade later, to say nothing of how SpaceX’s swarming satellites might change the game in low Earth orbit.

The new report from Reuters says roughly a dozen prototypes for this new swarming system have been launched on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets alongside other satellites presumably with civilian purposes. But that kind of thing is far from new. As Gizmodo reported back in 2017, NRO was intimately involved in the design of NASA’s Space Shuttle, even if we still don’t know many details about the payloads NRO was hitching a ride to get into space. Same as it ever was, it seems.

[ad_2]

Matt Novak

Source link

March 17, 2024
Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk Is a Genius When It Comes to Engineering, Not Human Emotion

[ad_1]

Isaacson, the former editor of Time, chair of CNN, and CEO of the Aspen Institute, stayed away from discussing Musk’s recent controversies during Monday night’s event. But in sharing insights gleaned while reporting the biography, he offered some explanations for the behavior. Take Ukraine, for instance; one of the biggest revelations to come out of Isaacson’s book was that Musk, according to a passage in the biography, “secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.” The passage was in an excerpt published a few days before Elon Musk came out in September, prompting an outcry and leading Musk to explain that the “Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything.” Isaacson then went on to “clarify” the matter on X, also telling New York magazine that he had “misinterpreted” Musk. “I thought he had just made that decision. In fact, he was simply adhering to a policy he had previously implemented,” Isaacson wrote to the publication. While Stengel and Isaacson didn’t get into all of this on Monday, Isaacson did say: “He loves playing superhero on the world stage. I mean, he’s Captain Underpants.” Last month, amid the Israel-Hamas war and accusations that antisemitic content was flourishing on his social platform, Musk visited Israel and met with top leaders, including Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Near the end of the discussion, Stengel asked Isaacson about the pros and cons of writing the biography of a living person versus a dead one. “Doing somebody who’s living is a lot more exhausting,” said Isaacson. “After I did [Henry] Kissinger, it was such a roller coaster ride that I said, Okay, I’m going to do somebody who’s been dead for 200 years, and then did [Benjamin] Franklin.” Then he did Jobs—writing the book at the Apple cofounder’s request and releasing it less than three weeks after Jobs’s death. “After Steve Jobs, I was like, Okay, dead for 500 years,” said Isaacson, whose next biography was of Leonardo da Vinci. The most significant difference, said Isaacson, is the ability to observe and talk to a living person versus just reading documents left by the dead. “I knew maybe a thousand times more about the curve of the iPhone than I did about the flying of the kite,” he said.

By Marc J. Franklin.

Stengel’s last question for Isaacson was which of his subjects—living or dead—he’d most like to have dinner with. The “most fun” companion would be Franklin, Isaacson said, also describing him as “the person you need right now the most.” He added, however, that “the most interesting to talk to” would be da Vinci. “I thought you would say Einstein,” Stengel said. “I’d be kind of intimidated,” replied Isaacson, smiling sheepishly.

[ad_2]

Charlotte Klein

Source link

December 19, 2023
Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk’s Boswell, Tells the “Tale of an Impulsive, Dark, but Also Risk-Taking Dude”

[ad_1]

There are biographies that are biographies and there are biographies that are major news events in and of themselves. Walter Isaacson’s new book, Elon Musk, falls into the latter category. That’s not just because Isaacson, who formerly edited Time, ran CNN, and served as president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, is famous for tomes on titans like Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs. It also has a lot to do with the fact that Elon Musk, the Tesla/SpaceX CEO and Twitter—sorry, X—owner, is presently one of the world’s most polarizing and controversial figures, as well as the richest.

Accordingly, Isaacson has already made plenty of news with a steady cadence of excerpts that have trickled out over the past week. The most incendiary of these gained traction from a CNN story that reported, based on a passage from the book, that Musk “secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.”

The revelation set off a whole series of fireworks and alarm bells. By Sunday, Jake Tapper was grilling Secretary of State Antony Blinken about whether he’s “concerned that Musk is apparently conducting his own diplomatic outreach to the Russian government.” Granted, the full section in the book about the Starlink episode (chapter 70, page 428, if you want to jump right there once it hits shelves Tuesday) is a bit more complex than what was in the initial CNN piece, which Musk pushed back on. “CNN missed the nuances, and Musk understands the story the way I have it in the book,” Isaacson told me when we spoke over Zoom this past Friday. The author further clarified the matter to New York’s Shawn McCreesh, whose great Isaacson profile is hot off the presses: “I realized that I misinterpreted him…when he told me he was not allowing Starlink to be used during the attack. I thought he had just made that decision. In fact, he was simply adhering to a policy he had previously implemented. So I posted a correction” on X.

In any case, Isaacson and I had lots more to talk about than Elon and Ukraine. (Of course I wanted Isaacson’s thoughts about the future of CNN.) Read it all in the condensed and edited transcript below.

Vanity Fair: Let’s start with Elon going to war with the Anti-Defamation League. A lot of people think it’s over the top, dangerous, and of course hypocritical in terms of his free speech crusade. Why does he do things like this?

Walter Isaacson: Let me just agree with what you said: it’s over the top, it’s dangerous, and it’s hypocritical. In the book, you see an addiction to late-night tweets when his mind is in a very dark place. Whether it’s calling some cave explorer in Thailand a pedophile or retweeting something about Paul Pelosi, he does reckless and dangerous tweets. When one of his friends said, alright, you’re in a dark space, I’m going to take your phone and put it into a hotel-room safe, Musk, at three in the morning, calls security at the hotel and makes him open the safe. So there’s an addiction to tweeting, which is one reason he’s always been fascinated with the company.

He just can’t help himself is the short answer.

This past New Year’s Eve, he and his family are sitting around and saying, what do you regret most for the year? He says, I keep shooting myself in the foot, I need Kevlar boots. He’s somewhat self-aware, but the problem is, there’s not one Elon Musk. There are multiple Elon Musk personalities and demons dancing around in his head. There’ll be times when he’s very self-aware and has good intentions, and there’ll be times he gets in demon mode and he is very dark, and you get some of these tweets coming out. As Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who’s one of his girlfriends, says, demon mode’s very dangerous to be around. It’s really awful. But sometimes, it’s demon mode that gets shit done. So the book tries to take you on this tale of an impulsive, dark, but also risk-taking dude.

How did the book come about?

We had crossed paths many times, including at a Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, and at one point, a mutual acquaintance, Antonio Gracias said, you really should do Musk. At the time, he had just become the richest person on the planet. He was “Person of the Year” of Time magazine. He had taken Tesla from the brink of bankruptcy to being more valuable than all other car companies combined. And he had gotten Americans into orbit. So I said, great idea. We had had a long talk where I said two things: I need to do this book not based on a bunch of interviews, but based on two full years of being by your side whenever I want to be, in every meeting and every meal and every walk in the factory, and just watching you so I can get stories and not just interview answers. And number two is, you have to agree that you have absolutely no control over the book. He agreed to both. And then he said, could I tell people? I said, well, I guess so. I hadn’t told my editor or my agent, and I was a guest at somebody’s house, where I was having the conversation [with him] upstairs. I went downstairs and after a few minutes everybody’s going, Hey, what, you’re doing Elon Musk? I said, what do you mean? They said, well, he just tweeted out, Walter Isaacson’s writing my biography.

[ad_2]

Joe Pompeo

Source link

September 11, 2023
Elon Musk biographer moves to ‘clarify’ details about Ukraine and Starlink after backlash

[ad_1]

Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, looks on as he attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, France, June 16, 2023.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Author Walter Isaacson took to social media to try to “clarify” an excerpt from his upcoming book, “Elon Musk.” The excerpt received swift backlash after it described how Musk thwarted a Ukrainian attack on Russian warships.

Isaacson’s book claims that Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, ordered engineers to shut off Starlink’s satellite network over Crimea last year in order to disrupt a Ukrainian military initiative. Musk’s Starlink terminals arrived in the early days of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine as Western governments worked to supply Kyiv with artillery and air defense systems.

Musk eventually soured on the arrangement and said “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars,” according to the book. The tech billionaire told Isaacson he was worried the Ukrainian attack on Russian vessels would provoke the Kremlin into launching a nuclear war.

But in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, late Friday, Isaacson shared new details.

“To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not,” Isaacson wrote. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.”

Crimea is a peninsula on the Black Sea that Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and it is home to Russia’s Black Sea warships. In the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Black Sea fleet fired missiles on once-industrious Ukrainian coastal cities while imposing a devastating naval blockade.

Isaacson went further in a second post on Saturday, saying that said he “mistakenly” thought Musk made the decision to shut off Starlink’s satellite network on the night of the attack.

“Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack that night,” Isaacson said. “He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy.”

Isaacson’s X posts came after a top aide to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lashed out at Musk over the excerpt.

“By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military fleet via Starlink interference, Elon Musk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities,” Mykhailo Podolyak wrote Thursday on social media after CNN reported on some of the details from Isaacson’s book.

“As a result, civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego,” he added.

Isaacson’s complete book is slated for release on Tuesday.

Read the full excerpt about Starlink and Ukraine in the Washington Post.

— CNBC’s Amanda Macias contributed to this report.

[ad_2]

Source link

September 9, 2023