AI Trick or Treat? 🎃 ⚖️

👀 TLDR:

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the scramble to regulate AI. The Biden Administration has released an Executive Order on AI, promising to regulate the sector while promoting innovation. Regulation is needed, of course, but critics contend there’s too much emphasis on the risks and not enough on the rewards of the technology. We also cover a slew of new AI innovations this week, including ChatGPT’s new feature where it can analyze PDFs. We have news on X and Apple, and our Stat of the Week looks at a milestone for GitHub Copilot. Finally, What’s dAppening says a big Happy Birthday to the biggest fish in the crypto sea - Bitcoin.

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Takes 🎬️

🧑‍⚖️🤖 AI – White House Executive Order Weighs Risks and Benefits

On Monday, The White House released an Executive Order (EO) on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.”. The EO covers several areas, ranging from privacy to cyber-security, but the emphasis is on risks much more than innovation. In fact, the term “risks” is mentioned 14 times in what is a relatively short document. Parallels have been drawn with web3 regulation (or lack thereof); there are a few vague sentences on how AI might be beneficial someday, with the rest justifying regulation of the technology. The fear is, like web3, we operate in a regulatory limbo, with regulation by enforcement pushing US innovation offshore. Others claim the regulations will hurt smaller AI startups while protecting the big fish like OpenAI, Amazon, and Google. The order comes in a big week for AI regulation: The UK is hosting the World AI Safety Summit this week, which will include an interview between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Elon Musk, and the G7 released an AI governance edict mere hours after the Biden Administration’s announcement. #AIOrder Read more here.

📃🔍 More AI – A Brief Roundup of Innovations and News this Week

It’s been a busy, busy week for new AI product launches and updates. Let’s start with ChatGPT, which can now directly analyze uploaded documents, including PDFs, which could be a game-changer for businesses and research bodies. Over at Amazon, there have been several new AI initiatives, including an “Explore with Alexa” AI conversational tool for kids and AI-powered image generation for advertisers. Not to be left out, Google has made a huge $2 billion investment in Anthropic, the AI platform that Google believes will one day rival OpenAI. #AIWeek Read more here.

🗞️ News – The Other Stories Catching Our Eye this Week

📉 Twitter/X is now valued at $19 billion, according to Fortune. It’s now a year since Elon Musk paid $44 billion to take control of Twitter. It’s now worth less than half that amount, at least according to a report citing an employee stock plan. Get the details here.

🍏 Back to Black: Apple unveils newest workstations. Apple teased a spooky-themed event last night, and it delivered new Macbooks and iMacs with M3 chips. Cool, except they’re still plugging lightning cables? 🤦🏻‍♂️ Choose your holiday gifts wisely. Read more here.

⚖️ SBF takes to the stand and has a bout of “Samensia”. The disgraced “King of Crypto”, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been given the chance to tell his side of the story at his trial in New York. His statements were characterized by a lot of “I don’t recall” moments. In fact, SBF used a variant of “I don’t recall” or “I don’t know” no fewer than 150 times. Get the details here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 1M Devs

📈👩‍💻 GitHub – AI Copilot Has Crossed 1 Million Subscribers

There’s an AI theme to this week’s newsletter, so let’s factor that into our Stat of the Week. Github Copilot has passed one million paid subscribers across more than 37,000 organizations. It’s an incredible affirmation of how quickly the AI tools have been adopted by developers and tech companies, and we might add that it’s another sign that Microsoft (owner of GitHub) is way ahead in the AI race. #1MCopilots Read more here.

🕸️ What’s dAppening?

🥸🪙 Bitcoin – White Paper on First Cryptocurrency Turns 15 Today

On Halloween 2008, the mysterious and anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin White Paper. How time flies. But where are we after 15 years? It might seem sensible to say that the promised revolution has not quite materialized, but then again, consider that this “funny internet money” has countries using it as legal tender, schoolchildren being taught on the subject, and the world’s largest hedge funds queuing up to secure it for their clients. It might not have completely disrupted finance – yet – but it’s made quite the start. #HBBitcoin Read more here.

Meanwhile at 3Advance…

No time for meanwhile this week. We’re off trick-or-treating!!! Happy Halloween everybody! 🧙🎃

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