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| Happy Labor Day! Enjoy your day off by reading up on how scientists are looking at the threats AI poses, how SoftBank hopes ARM's IPO will reverse its revenue decline, and a farewell to a Windows mainstay that is being logged off. If you find this newsletter useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Thank you. Christopher
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| 1 | | Leading scientists and AI innovators see the current boom in AI as scary, but for different reasons. One side of the argument has scientists who are worried about how AI is being rolled out and how it could harm human beings, while the other is concerned about AI being used to spread misinformation and amplify human biases. More: - Dario Amodei, leader of AI developer Anthropic, Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, and Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, are among those who have expressed concerns about the existential threat that AI poses.
- Altman, Musk, and other leaders are meeting with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer next week to discuss AI.
- Other scientists say AI companies and regulators need to point resources toward the technology's existing threats, such as systems that amplify the impact of misinformation and bias.
- They also feel that AI companies are touting the existential risk, or x-risk, to show their technologies' sophistication.
- "It's a very real and growing dichotomy," said Nicolas Miailhe, co-founder of the Future Society. "It's the end of the month versus the end of the world."
- Experts in AI ethics and fairness, on the other hand, highlight how AI can deepen inequality and want tech companies to implement training standards to reduce that risk.
Q: Do you see AI as more of a threat existentially or in how it's implemented? Join the conversation here. |     | |
| 2 | | SoftBank Group has seen its revenue plummet due mostly to poor returns on investments. 
What the data says: SoftBank's quarterly revenue dropped by more than $10B at the end of 2022, from a high of $22.43B three years earlier. The holding company founded by tech billionaire Masayoshi Son has hit a bad stretch of investments, including British chip designer ARM, which it purchased for $32B in 2016. Relevance: ARM filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month for an initial public offering (IPO) due on Sept. 13. SoftBank hopes to reverse its revenue decline once the IPO is launched. Back in 2016, Son said he was confident that ARM would "grow 5x in five years." ARM has seen its revenue rise 65% since 2016, missing Son's target by a wide margin. More: Analysts expect ARM's IPO on the Nasdaq exchange to be the biggest one of the year. SoftBank Group is expected to sell 10% of its stake in the company. It valued ARM at $64B when it bought out a stake held by its own Vision Fund in April. If that valuation is confirmed at the time of the IPO, ARM will have doubled SoftBank's investment. Some analysts don't think that ARM's IPO will prompt other major companies to go public in the last three months of the year. | | | |
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| 3 | | Microsoft is removing the WordPad application from Windows after nearly 30 years. Microsoft has asked subscribers to use Microsoft Word and Windows Notepad instead of WordPad, which was first made available in Windows 95. More: - "WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows," Microsoft said in a support note published on Friday. "We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt."
- Microsoft on Saturday said it made updates to Windows Notepad, including features like autosave and automatically restoring tabs.
- WordPad was last updated with a slight redesign as a part of Windows 8 in 2012.
- Windows 12 is set to be released in 2024.
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| 4 | | Anti-piracy groups are taking aim at Books3, a pirated library filled with over 196,000 books, and other databases used to train generative AI. There are multiple court cases involving training AI on copyrighted data that could shape how AI companies develop their technology in the future. More: - Books3, made up of thousands of books scraped off the Internet, was released in 2020 by the nonprofit AI collective Eleuther, and was later used by Meta and Bloomberg to train their AI tools.
- Since the database contains copyrighted works by Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, and more, its use to train AI models may be against the law.
- The Danish anti-piracy group The Rights Alliance, combed through Books3 and found over 150 works by authors it represents.
- It has filed Digital Millenium Copyright Act notices against organizations hosting Books3 and has succeeded in it being taken down.
- The Rights Alliance is also aiming to block sites that host Books3 through European courts, and has also contacted Meta and Bloomberg.
- Over 10,000 authors have signed a petition by the Authors Guild urging generative AI companies to stop using copyrighted data sets.
- Comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors have filed lawsuits arguing that Meta and OpenAI trained their large language models on libraries like Books3 in violation of their copyrights.
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| 5 | | Multiple senior staffers at YouTube fear that Shorts, the short-form video competitor to TikTok, could cannibalize the platform's core business. Recent YouTube strategy meetings have discussed the risk of long-form videos being a dying format, according to sources who spoke to the Financial Times. More: - Shorts has amassed more than two billion users since its 2021 launch, and some YouTube staffers fear that the section is drawing eyes away from longer videos.
- Short-form videos are popular among younger viewers, in part because they are easier to watch on a hand-held device.
- Longer videos typically generate more advertising revenue because they can contain more product placements and have a higher click-through rate, sources said.
- Creators have expressed concerns about posting long-form videos. "A lot of influencers and content creators don't have that big, wonderful personality energy that lasts for 30 minutes," Fumi Desalu-Vold, who has nearly 650,000 subscribers on YouTube told the the FT.
Zoom Out: - Last October, YouTube saw its first-ever decline in ad revenue since 2020. The next two quarters saw the same fate. But ad revenue increased by 4.4% in the second quarter of 2023.
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| 6 | | Globalstar, the satellite communications company Apple uses for its Emergency SOS feature on the iPhone 14, has signed a deal with SpaceX to launch more satellites. Under the $64M deal, SpaceX will send at least 17 Globalstar satellites into space in 2025. More: - The upgraded satellites will help boost Emergency SOS capabilities and expand coverage.
- Apple will be reimbursing Globalstar for 95% of the capital expenditure, including launch costs, of the satellites.
- Apple will also lend $252M to Globalstar to finance the rocket launches and upgrade its communications network on the ground.
- In return, Apple will use 85% of Globalstar's network capacity to service Emergency SOS, which is available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Portugal.
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- Google is increasing the prices for its Nest Aware and Nest Aware Plus subscriptions.
- WIRED published a piece on the Indian Institutes of Technology and how its success of graduating tech CEOs overshadows the toxic culture it instills.
- Spotify announced it is limiting its ad payouts for white noise podcasters.
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 | Freelance Editor | | Christopher Hachey is a freelance writer and editor based in the New York City area. He has spent most of the past 15 years in newsrooms covering all kinds of topics like sports, tech, business, finance, and commerce. He's now returning to his broadcast journalism roots by diving into podcasting news. Reach out to him at chris@inside.com | | This newsletter was edited by NO ACCOUNT ASSOCIATED WITH THE EDITOR | |
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