Bytes: What’s new in tech
Authors bring new AI copyright suit
George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jonathan Franzen are the latest to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement, said Gael Fashingbauer Cooper in CNET. The complaint from 17 boldface authors is the latest in a series of lawsuits questioning the AI company’s datatraining methods. Like others, the plaintiffs say their best-selling books were “downloaded from online e-book repositories and copied into GPT 3.5 and GPT 4, which power Chat GPT.” The complaint mentions that “ChatGPT is already creating books mimicking human authors’ works”—and has even been used to try to generate new volumes of Martin’s Game of Thrones series A Song of Ice and Fire, which the author hasn’t finished. The complaint argues that OpenAI should have paid a licensing fee to use copyrighted works.
Amazon makes its AI play
Amazon took a big leap forward in the AI arms race with a partnership with AI startup Anthropic that could be “akin to Microsoft’s alliance with OpenAI,” said Mike Allen in Axios. Founded by ex-OpenAI employees “who vowed to build a safer, more ethically rigorous AI product,” Anthropic will leverage Amazon Web Services to “build, train, and deploy” future AI models. Those models will then get deployed to AWS customers to help them develop better apps and other programs. Amazon announced this week an initial $1.25 billion investment that could grow to $4 billion. Google has also invested in Anthropic, which appears to be targeting partners with the “computing resources required to train and run” its models.
A surprising defeat for Apple
Apple’s uneasy deal with Qualcomm is an admission of defeat in its quest to build modem chips, said Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie in The Wall Street Journal. In 2018, Apple began trying “to sever its grudging dependence on Qualcomm, a longtime chip supplier” for its smartphones with whom it was battling in court over patent royalties. Apple now makes its own microprocessors for iPhones and MacBooks, but the modem chip, which connects iPhones to wireless carriers, has levels of complexity that the company underestimated, experts say. Apple tested prototypes last year and found they “were essentially three years behind Qualcomm’s best modem chip.” Executives scrapped plans to roll out the chips in the new iPhone 15. Instead, Apple renewed its licensing deal with Qualcomm through 2026.