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Welcome back to The Prompt.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, some companies have been overwhelmed with applications from suspected North Korean operators.
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AI tools help North Koreans apply for thousands of remote IT jobs in US, Forbes reported. Businesses large and small are being inundated with job applications from thousands of suspected North Korean operatives, who are making hundreds of millions of dollars and sending the money back to the regime, which the US government believes is being used to fund its weapons of mass destruction program. Using AI tools, these workers are able to run multiple job profiles and apply for hundreds of jobs at once.
Now let’s get into the headlines.
REGULATION
This week, California lawmakers will vote on SB1047, a controversial bill that seeks to regulate the most advanced and powerful AI models. If passed, the bill would require the developers of AI models whose training either cost more than $100 million or required a certain amount of computing power to implement security measures and allow third party audits of safety practices.
It also requires AI companies to outline methods to shut down the AI model effectively implement a “kill switch” for the technology if necessary. The legislation will give the state attorney the opportunity to act against a developer if its AI model causes serious harm, such as mass casualties or more than $500 million in damages.
Silicon Valley leaders are deep shared on their attitudes on the bill: xAI and Tesla founder Elon Musk and Anthropics CEO Dario Amodei have come out in support of the bill, while executives from OpenAI, Meta, and Google have expressed concern that the bill would stifle innovation.
TALENT COST
Three of the five co-founders of the French AI startup H have left the company after “operational and business disputes,” according to The information. The departure comes just a few months after the startup raised one huge 220 million dollars seeds round from billionaires like Eric Schmidt and Bernard Arnault to building AI agents for multi-step tasks.
AI DEAL OF THE WEEK
Coding automation startup Cursor AI raised $60 million in Series A funding at a $400 million valuationCEO Michael Truell said Forbes. The company’s AI tools are popular with developers at leading AI startups such as OpenAI and Midjourney, where they are used to write, edit, and predict sections of code. But Cursor isn’t without competition — the market is flooded with similar AI coding assistants like Codeium, which launched an engine capable of digesting 100 million lines of code, and Cognition Labs, which is valued at $2 billion and created an AI software engineer called Devin. Tech giants are also developing their own AI programming tools in-house; Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said its AI assistant, called Q, has helped save the company $260 million and 4,500 year time in the form of software development.
DEEP DIVE
The idea of America is big business on Facebook. The social network has hosted more than a hundred pages that have adopted American patriotism as its themewith names like Proud American, Proud To Be An American, American Story and We Are America.
But a large part of these sites – despite their names – are not American at all. Instead, they are run by foreign click farmers, many of whom are based in Macedonia, who use AI to pump out an almost endless sea of clickbaity soup. Posts sharing prayers for US soldiers, paraphrased tweets, memes and pictures of old Hollywood pin-up girls link to AI-generated articles against which the click farmers can sell advertising.
Headlines like “A Father’s Heroism: The Tragic Story of Phil Dellegrazie And His Son Anthony” tease short, uninformative articles on websites with often sexual advertisements. The sites that promote them fake Americanism because they get paid every time someone clicks on one of their links, and in the advertising world, American clicks are some of the most valuable.
ONE Forbes the review identified 67 Facebook pages — now taken down — that identified themselves as champions of American news, culture or identity but were actually based overseas. Per August 20 they had more than 9 million followers combined – more than the Facebook pages of the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. Thirty-three of them were run from Macedonia, with others spread across 23 different countries, including Canada, France, Morocco, Venezuela and Vietnam.
Click farmers, especially those from Macedonia, have a long history on Facebook. During the 2016 presidential election, teenagers in the small Eastern European country pushed fake news to millions of Americans on Facebook, earning tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue. In 2019, similar Eastern European sites ran the same playbook – this time reaching nearly half of all Americans on the platform.
Now AI has given those same operations the capacity to produce almost endless amounts of low-quality (or outright fake) news — and in at least some cases, this AI-produced slop breaks through. The pages have started to use genergetic AI-generated images (bald eagles, stars and stripes, camo soldiers, and the occasional Statue of Liberty) to appeal to American Facebook users — and at least in some cases, it works. A post made last week by the Canada-based site American Patriots contained one AI-generated photo of an American soldier and his children, and received more than 100,000 likes and 35,000 comments. The American Patriots site, like most others, directed people from Facebook to click farms with low-quality articles.
Read the full story at Forbes.
WEEKLY DEMO
Do you want to practice a tough workplace interview or get tips on how to negotiate a salary increase? Companies are increasingly implementing AI-powered career coaches as an alternative to expensive human advisors which can cost up to $240 an hour, Forbes reported. But people who have interacted with these AI-based career advisors note that these chatbots often lacks nuance and can sometimes give confusing advice. “I’m already confused about my career. AI [only] throwing me for a bigger loop,” said a third-year law student.
AI INDEX
Two years ago, the Biden administration passed the CHIPS Act to encourage the development of semiconductors and chips in the United States as the country battled with China to develop AI models. But bureaucracy and a grueling application process has largely kept funding out of reach of smaller businesses that need it most, Forbes reported.
Less than 7%
Applicants who received support from the 380 companies that submitted applications.
9 out of 23
Semiconductor manufacturers approved for the financing were smaller companies.
$4 billion out of $134 billion
The amount of grants and loans provided to small businesses; the rest went to chip giants such as Intel, TSMC and Samsung.
MODEL CONDUCT
The American rapper and singer Will.i.am launches a AI powered radio station called Raidio.FYIwhich will allow listeners to listen to songs and news and ask questions of the host through a chatbot app built on OpenAI’s large language models, according to The Sunday Times. The rapper is reportedly an investor in OpenAI and Anthropic.