Silicon Valley Tech News Roundup – April 2nd

Technology leaders call for pause on AI training – 3/29

Leading figures in technology signed an open letter asking for the suspension of AI systems training and warned about the potential future risks.

The Future of Life Institute sent out a letter signed by its luminaries including Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, and Andrew Yang. It calls for AI labs to “immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4… If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”

The letter reads: “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?… Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?… Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”

The Future of Life Institute is a non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose mission is to “steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life.”

The letter is a reaction to the latest developments with ChatGPT (the viral AI chatbot), which has impressed experts and researchers with its ability to produce human-like responses to prompts.

Italy bans ChatGPT – 4/1

The Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT over privacy concerns. The Italian regulator said it would investigate OpenAI with “immediate effect” to determine whether it complies with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulation determines how to process, use, and store personal data.

US-based startup OpenAI created the chatbot with backing from Microsoft. Last month, Microsoft added ChatGPT to Bing. Likewise, it also announced it would add the technology to its Office products like Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.

On March 20th, the Italian data protection authority said ChatGPT experienced a breach that involved payment information and user conversations. Furthermore, the regulator stated there is no legal basis for “the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of ‘training’ the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform.” Another point of contention is the app cannot verify the age of users, and it “exposes minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and awareness.”

OpenAI has 20 days to address the concerns expressed by the Italian data protection authority. Otherwise, it faces a fine of €20 million ($21.7 million) or up to 4% of annual profits.

Huawei claims it achieved a breakthrough in semiconductor design technology – 3/31

Last week in a press conference, Eric Xu (the rotating chairman at Huawei) stated Huawei and other Chinese firms created electronic chip design tools that enable them to produce semiconductor chips of 14 nanometers and above. According to Xu, these design tools should be verified this year.

At the press conference, Xu also stated Chinese chip industry would be “reborn” because of U. S. tech export restrictions on China. He said: “I believe China’s semiconductor industry will not sit idly by, but take efforts around … self-strengthening and self-reliance… For Huawei, we will render our support to all such self-saving, self-strengthening, and self-reliance efforts of the Chinese semiconductor industry.”

Over the past few years, the U. S. government posed a number of restrictions on Chinese companies. In 2019, the government prohibited American companies from selling technology to Huawei by putting the company on the Entity List. In 2020, the restrictions were further tightened by prohibiting Huawei access to the latest cutting-edge chip technology it needs for its smartphones.

Meanwhile, on Friday, Huawei posted its biggest annual decline in profit on record. The net profit for 2022 was 35.6 billion yuan ($5.18 billion) (a 69% year-on-year decline). American sanctions and pandemic control in China are some of the causes of the decline.

Sales of “dumb” phones on the rise in the United States – 3/29

The sales of “dumb” phones are rising in the United States as younger generations seek to spend less time on social media and their screens. HMD Global (the manufacturer of Nokia phones) sells tens of thousands of the so-called “feature phones” monthly.

“Feature phones” are flip or slide phones similar to those used in the early 2000s with some additional features like GPS. Punkt and Light are companies producing devices with minimal features created for people who want to spend less time on their phones.

Joe Hollier (Co-founder of Light) said: “What we’re trying to do with the Light phone isn’t to create a dumb phone, but to create a more intentional phone – a premium, minimal phone – which isn’t inherently anti-technology… But it’s about consciously choosing how and when to use which aspects of technology that add to my quality of life.”