Cecilia Ziniti
Sep 12, 2024
Hi everyone, a federal judge wrote 35 pages about using AI for legal work, and Taylor Swift addresses AI misinformation! Read on. 📖
Read time: 7 minutes 27 seconds
Big Tech
💰OpenAI is securing a funding round at a $103B valuation, up from $86B in February. Thrive Capital is leading, and Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia are rumored to be participating.
📉 Nvidia reported a record quarterly revenue of $30B, up 122% from a year ago, but the stock still dipped 7% on news of a delay in a new chip. Maybe CEO Jensen Huang hasn’t been wearing enough of his signature leather jackets because it’s summertime. Editor’s take? Buy the dip. AI ain’t going away.
🤺 AI model provider Anthropic launched an enterprise version of Claude to compete with OpenAI. It has a longer context window (more than 4x OpenAI’s GPT-4o), meaning it can take in 1200 pages for any one question. “We’re moving to a world where these models will behave much more like virtual collaborators than virtual assistants,” says the company. Your editor agrees, as does the GC AI customer last week who called GC AI her privacy analyst!
🍎 Apple announced the iPhone 16. Your editor preordered it. The phone incorporates Apple Intelligence powered by OpenAI and a dedicated camera button. GC AI summary with a side of legalese-lite here.
Regulatory & Litigation
👀 The Justice Department subpoena’d Nvidia in an escalation of an antitrust investigation, Bloomberg reports. Is the AI chipmaker making it difficult for buyers to switch to other suppliers and enforcing anti-competitive exclusivity agreements?
🌴 California is going ham on tech regulation, with more than more than a dozen bills pending Governor Newsom’s signature, including regulating AI, testing for threats to critical infrastructure, curbing the use of algorithms on children, limiting the use of deepfakes, and more. Highlights:
🎭 AB 1836, requiring consent before deceased performers' likenesses can be used in AI-created digital replicas. Actors’ union SAG-AFTRA supports the bill, which mirrors the language in the union’s deal with major Hollywood studios last year after its strike. GC AI summary here.
🚰🚏AB 3211 would mandate watermarks in the metadata of AI-created images, videos, and audio and require major online platforms like Instagram to label AI-generated content for easy recognition by users. These companies are members of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which put out the C2PA metadata standard for identifying AI-generated material. OpenAI, Adobe, and Microsoft are backing the bill.
👩💼 SB-1047, the core AI model safety bill, which we talked about in the last newsletter, is still pending.
⛑️ AI Model developers OpenAI and Anthropic have each agreed to pre-release safety testing of new models. The agreements are non-legally binding and allow the U.S. AI Safety Institute, established by NIST, to evaluate the models for potential safety risks and work on mitigating them. GC AI overview and links here.
🥊 Now that the DC Circuit has found Google violated antitrust rules, plaintiffs are coming. Up first - Yelp is suing Google for antitrust violations from in Google’s handling of local search queries. Cleverly, Yelp includes Google AI’s statement in response to a market share question: “Google dominates.” GC AI summary here; complaint here.
AI & Legal
⚖️ Big news - 11th Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom devotes a 35-page concurrence to exploring his use of different AI systems (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) in deciding what “physically restrained” means. He even got a clerk to use the developer version of each.
See this GC AI Overview. Kudos, Judge!
Here are the judge’s takeaways, which track lessons in our legal AI prompting classes:
AI is human-like. For example, it re-words its answers slightly if you ask it the same question twice. (Pro tip - the term of art of this is that AI is “non-deterministic.”)
AI is trained on lots of data from the internet.
AI is incredibly useful for legal work, including getting overviews and for textual analyses like he does here.
PS - did anyone work for Judge Newsom? We’d love to host his clerks (or him) for a private GC AI class. Let your editor know!
AI and IP
📂 The Open Source Initiative released new draft standards for Open Source AI and related FAQs. They propose a set of principles and criteria for what constitutes Open Source AI, including the freedom to use, study, modify, and share AI systems and their components. OSI seeks community feedback before finalizing the standards in October 2024.
🍄 “If you ask for a cute game involving an Italian plumber, it’s obvious what [AI]’s going to generate.” Great discussion here on AI and copyright in video games, and the effect of prompting on infringement.
🦚 “Content creation has got to be human centered. Storytelling, the creation of a story, the making of anything, it’s got to be all driven by human beings.” - Donna Langley, NBC Universal’s Chief Content Officer, when asked about AI at the studio.
AI Globally
🇪🇺 Speaking of the EU, former Italian PM Mario Draghi reported on EU competitiveness, and the findings are dire.
Relevant to AI, he says “regulatory barriers … hamper innovation … [as] over 100 tech-focused laws and 270 regulators” actively regulate. Draghi also notes the EU AI act “dictates specific business practices ex-ante to avert potential risks ex-post.” See GC AI summary of his initial findings here, and full report here.
🐈⬛ Speaking of success on a global stage, Taylor Swift addressed AI election misinformation in her endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.
AI Adoption
🔝 “AI, controversial. But we got to be the top of it." - Former US president Donald Trump.
🪦 Payments software company Klarna's CEO says the company is dropping both Workday and Salesforce software as they have created internal versions using AI and plan to reduce staff given all the efficiency from AI.
🇪🇺 Did you know? Under the EU AI Act, Article 4, “[p]roviders and deployers of AI systems shall take measures to ensure, to their best extent, a sufficient level of AI literacy of their staff." The means if your company has an AI product, folks in the company need to be trained on AI. Including the legal team. Speaking of training, check out GC AI’s AI for legal teams classes. 😎
New, Notable, Random & Fun
🧠 Artificial General Intelligence (~AI smarter than humans at most tasks) is still "many decades away, maybe even longer,” per Andrew Ng, an AI pioneer on Amazon’s board.
👂 Google has rolled out AI technology capable of predicting early signs of disease based on sound. Editor’s take as a parent? Humans can absolutely tell based on sound if someone’s ok. Yay AI for being able to do the same.
🧑🏽🎨 “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art” - thought-provoking New Yorker piece. AI helps humans, it doesn’t replace them. 1000s of legal team members work faster and better with AI but the core ideas? Advancing the business you’re a part of with awareness of the stakeholder fcontext you have - AI can’t do that without you. 🙇
“Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience … that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new.”
Events
👩🏻🏫 Legal AI Prompting 101 with GC AI - Friday 09.20 at 10 AM PT. Great for anyone new to legal AI or just looking to get the best results.
👩🏻🔬 Legal AI Prompting 201 - Friday 09.27 at 9 AM PT. Advanced class to become a prompting guru - a legal prompt engineer, if you will. Alumni are some of GC AI’s very top users, topping hundreds of prompts a week and estimating 30-50% time savings in drafting. Wowza!
Product Updates
🏢 Introducing Organizations
Organizations in GC AI make legal team collaboration simpler. Work together in a shared space with a shared company profile and control of who sees what. Keep chats and prompts to yourself or share them easily within your team team or with specific members, ijust like Google Docs. Learn more. PS - feedback welcome!
⌚️ Timestamps! From Feedback Request to in the product in 4 hours
A power user asked in the GC AI Friends Slack channel for timestamps so they could keep track of matters they're working on and their research and analysis time. We saw the request, added the feature, and shipped it. The lesson: request features. We will build them for you!
Good times!
Best,
Cecilia and the GC AI Team
