Artificial intelligence has the potential to deliver massive gains in economic productivity and enable positive social change around the world. So it's little surprise that the number of companies adopting AI-powered software, tools, and platforms, including generative AI (gen AI), has surged throughout 2024. But that enthusiasm has been accompanied by a fair amount of trepidation: in McKinsey research, 91 percent of respondents doubt their organizations are 'very prepared' to implement and scale the technology safely and responsibly.1'Implementing generative AI with speed and safety,' McKinsey Quarterly, March 13, 2024. Such doubt is understandable. Along with its potential to boost productivity and innovation, gen AI in particular poses novel risks'for example, hallucinations and inaccurate or biased outputs'which threaten to undermine trust in the technology. To capture the full potential value of AI, organizations need to build trust. Trust, in fact, is the foundation for adoption of AI-powered products and services. After all, if customers or employees lack trust in the outputs of AI systems, they won't use them. Trust in AI comes via understanding the outputs of AI-powered software and how'at least at a high level'they are created. Organizations increasingly recognize this. In a McKinsey survey of the state of AI in 2024, 40 percent of respondents identified explainability as a key risk in adopting gen AI. Yet at the same time, only 17 percent said they were currently working to mitigate it.2 'The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value,' McKinsey, May 30, 2024....

Google's NotebookLM has rapidly become one of the most popular AI tools since the release of ChatGPT. Podcast generation is by far the most popular feature of NotebookLM. These days I constantly find social media threads that use audio clips generated by NotebookLM to the point that I am starting to become familiar with the voices in the podcast. The audio generation in NotebookLM touches on aspects such as humor, regular questions, interruptions etc which are incredibly hard to master. How did Google achieved this' Well, NotebookLM's audio generation capabilities were the result of combining several techniques developed by Google DeepMind over the last few years. Specifically NotebookLM audio magic was powered by innovations in two key models: SoundStorm and AudioLM, which underpin Google DeepMind's approach to audio generation. Audio generation represents a burgeoning area of research within the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This field centers on the creation of artificial systems capable of generating realistic and coherent sounds, including speech and music. Google DeepMind has made notable strides in this domain, pioneering novel techniques that are significantly impacting audio generation....

Spotify will no longer allow developers building third-party apps with its Web API to access several features within the music streaming platform, such as song and artist recommendations, the company announced in a developer blog post on Wednesday. The company appears to be limiting third-party developers from building AI apps using data from Spotify listeners. The changes are designed to limit certain developers who it believes have been misusing its API, including by scraping data from its platform. The features Spotify is revoking access to could reveal information about the Spotify userbase's listening habits, including the artists and songs that are often listened to by different listener groups. These could be used to create competitive AI music recommendation models, which Spotify itself has been developing in recent years. Beyond Spotify's song and artist recommendations, developers are losing access to Spotify's Audio Analysis, which describes a track's structure and rhythm. Developers also lost access to Audio Features, which reference the different characteristics of a song, including its 'danceability,' energy, and whether it's acoustic. Spotify cut access for developers to use its algorithmically-created playlists, as well....

The Biden administration is expected to announce a sweeping set of measures on Monday designed to further restrain China's ability to develop advanced artificial intelligence, people familiar with the matter told WIRED. The controls could include sanctioning dozens of Chinese companies that produce equipment for making semiconductors, as well as placing restrictions on a handful of chip manufacturing plants, some of which have ties to the Chinese tech giant Huawei. The US Department of Commerce has also discussed including controls on the sale of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, an advanced kind of 3D-stacked computer memory component that is often used in high-performance GPUs and customized AI chips. Bloomberg previously reported that the Biden administration was considering clamping down on China's access to HBM chips. In total, the Biden administration could end up adding around 200 Chinese firms to an entity list maintained by the Bureau of Industry and Security'an agency within the Commerce department'which would require other companies to acquire special licenses to supply them with software or products from the United States. The US government has been discussing the new measures with its allies and representatives from the semiconductor industry for months, and the exact details of what will be announced on Monday were still in flux as of earlier this week....