AI Transformation Brief – October 2024

Author(s): Bill Wong

VOL 10 | OCTOBER 2024

INFO-TECH AI INSIGHTS

AI Transformation Brief

Featuring AI best practices and insights to enable our members to strategize, plan, develop, deploy, manage, and govern AI-based technologies and solutions.

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In This Issue – AI in the News | AI Research Highlights | Vendor Spotlight | Upcoming Events & Resources

AI IN THE NEWS

United Nations proposes global AI governance initiative

Read the United Nations press release to transform global AI governance

Read the UN's Governing AI for Humanity Report

On September 22, 2024, the United Nations released a list of AI initiatives, including commitments by world leaders to:

Govern artificial intelligence, with a roadmap that includes an international scientific panel and a global policy dialog on AI.
Make data more open and accessible, with agreements on open-source data, models, and standards.

ANALYST ANALYSIS

The United Nations' publication "Governing AI for Humanity" proposes a global framework for governing AI. The global AI governance program would be designed to ensure equitable opportunity and assign accountability to protect people from unintended consequences of AI. Key recommendations of the report include:

Establishing a global AI standards exchange
Developing a global AI data framework
Establishing a UN AI office to oversee AI governance initiatives
International cooperation to develop and implement effective AI risk assessment frameworks

The Global AI Index 2024 released

Read the Tortoise Global AI Index 2024

On September 19, 2024, Tortoise released its fifth annual Global AI Index. The index ranks 83 counties on their level of implementation, innovation, and investment in artificial intelligence. The top 10 countries are:

United States
China
Singapore
United Kingdom
France
South Korea
Germany
Canada
Israel
India

ANALYST ANALYSIS

The ranking of countries is based on three broad categories and seven subcategories: Implementation (Talent, Infrastructure, Operating Environment), Innovation (Research, Development), and Investment (Government Strategy, Commercial Ecosystem). A few observations on the countries surveyed:

Unsurprisingly, the United States continues to be the leading country on the index with a score of 100. It hosts 27% of the top-tier AI researchers and has $249 billion in private funding.
China continues to rank second with a score of 53, with $95 billion in private investment between 2022 and 2023.
The United Kingdom is the next largest AI market with a current valuation of $21 billion, which it estimates will reach $1 trillion by 2035.
Canada ranks third with respect to its government strategy – a metric measuring the commitment of a country's national government to artificial intelligence investigation and spending.

Geoffrey Hinton awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics

Read the University of Toronto article

Watch Info-Tech's Geoffrey Hinton interview from LIVE 2023

On October 8, 2024, Geoffrey Hinton (for inventing a way to autonomously discover properties in data/images) and John Hopfield (for creating associate memory that can store and reconstruct images) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Both laureates leveraged statistical physics to design artificial neural networks to function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.

ANALYST ANALYSIS

In addition to recognizing Hinton with the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (for their work on AlphaFold and protein structure prediction) and David Baker (for his work on computational protein design). The fact that these AI pioneers have been recognized by Nobel science committees, comprised mainly of physicists and chemists, demonstrates the impact AI is having on society. Note: Researchers in computer science are generally awarded the Turing Award, which has already been awarded to Hinton.

California governor vetoes AI safety bill

Read California governor vetoes contentious AI safety bill article

Read California polls show most people support the AI Safety Bill (SB-1047)

On September 4, 2024, the US Attorney's Office charged Michael Smith in connection with a scheme to create hundreds of thousands of songs with AI and use bots to stream the AI-generated songs billions of times. Smith is accused of fraudulently obtaining more than $10 million in royalty payments through this scheme.

ANALYST ANALYSIS

The US Attorney's Office is accusing Smith of creating thousands of bot accounts on leading streaming platforms (such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music) and using software to cause the bot accounts to continuously stream songs that he owned. Smith estimated that he could use the bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128. He is charged with three counts of fraud (wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy), each carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

First criminal case involving artificially inflated music streaming

Read the US Attorney's Office's case against North Carolina man charged with music streaming fraud

On September 29, 2024, the governor of California vetoed a highly contentious AI safety bill. Detractors of the bill, primarily Big Tech vendors, positioned the proposed legislation as something that "nobody wants," but national and state polls show that most people supported all aspects of the AI safety bill.

ANALYST ANALYSIS

The outcome of this comprehensive AI legislation demonstrates how influential Big Tech vendors are in directing proposed state and federal regulations. The Big Tech vendors opposed to this proposed legislation include OpenAI, Google, and Meta. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, who claimed that they "need regulation," is obviously on condition that OpenAI first needs to approve that regulation. Hopefully these vendors will have less influence over the UN's proposed global AI governance program.

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