Welcome, humans.
Morgan Freeman took to Twitter to call out a TikTok impersonator using AI-generated imitations of his voice to dupe viewers. Does this mean I have to start ratting out my buddies to the AI overlords every time they attempt a Morgan Freeman impression to narrate their boring daily routines?!
Here’s what you need to know about AI today:
- Perplexity's catching heat for recycling paywalled articles.
- AWS is investigating Perplexity for illegally scraping web content.
- OpenAI has started pushing ChatGPT-3.5 as its default model again.
- Larry Summers says Sam Altman was originally fired for “personnel and process” reasons.
Perplexity or perplexed? You tell us…
Perplexity is the darling of Silicon Valley right now:
- Raised a cool $63M+ from big names like Jeff Bezos and Nvidia.
- Hit unicorn status earlier this year. A month later? Rumors of tripling that valuation.
- Their CEO? Dude's everywhere. If you subscribe to any tech podcast, odds are he’s been a guest on it (including Lex Fridman).
- Some folks are hyping Perplexity as a potential "Google killer".
But lately, more people are wondering: just how legit is this AI darling?
See, Perplexity works by chomping down on internet content and spitting out quick summaries when you ask it something.
Turns out, some of that content isn't exactly theirs to use. Earlier this month, Forbes caught Perplexity with its hand in the cookie jar—they stole a paywalled Forbes article and basically republished it on their new "Pages" product.
Forbes responded by sending a letter to Perplexity’s CEO, accusing it of “willful infringement” of Forbes’s copyrighted articles, to which Perplexity’s CEO said, “we are improving it [Perplexity Pages] with more feedback.”
Then Wired jumped in with an article titled "Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine". Apparently, this isn't a one-off. Perplexity has regularly bypassed robots.txt code on publishers’ websites—this is the digital equivalent of a "No Trespassing" sign for web scrapers.
And just to make things extra awkward, Perplexity accidentally plagiarized Wired's article... about Perplexity stealing content. Oof.
This prompted Amazon Web Services (yes, that Amazon) to investigate whether Perplexity is illegally scraping content using its servers.
Why it matters: This content tug-of-war is bound to spark some new laws or regulations about what's fair game for AI search engines and chatbots. Tech companies are thirsty for content to train their AI, but publishers aren't keen on losing eyeballs to chatbots.
Last week, Microsoft’s head of AI commented that any content published on the open web is “freeware” and allowed to be copied and reproduced.
In related news: OpenAI is out here making friends with publishers left and right. Last week, they shook inked a licensing deal with TIME. Our bet? They're gearing up to launch a search engine that's all about citing sources and playing nice with publishers.
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Around the Horn.
What in the world…
- Peep this new demo of ChatGPT-4o from AI Engineer World's Fair, where a coder "screen shares" his programming problem with ChatGPT, which understands it by looking at it.
- OpenAI board member Larry Summers said that Sam Altman was fired for “personnel and process” reasons, not 'cause they thought he was playing fast and loose with safety.
- Adept’s cofounders are jumping ship to Amazon's AGI team after having previously raised $350M to build AI agents that automate end-to-end workflows.
- ChatGPT-4o is the top-ranking vision model on LMSYS, followed by Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Treats To Try.
LOL
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- Humanize AI makes AI-generated text sound like it came from a real person.
- Typedream transforms your ideas into fully-fledged websites and was just acquired by Beehiiv, which we use to blast these emails!
- Fluently helps people learn and improve their English speaking skills (raised $2M).
- Ario is an AI personal assistant that keeps you on top of your never-ending to-do list.
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Monday Meme.
A Cat's Commentary.
