This Week in AI: Biden Signs Executive Orders; Nvidia Targets Healthcare

This week in artificial intelligence, President Joe Biden issued executive orders related to AI leadership and safety while Nvidia unveiled partnerships with healthcare organizations to accelerate drug discovery. OpenAI, Amazon and Elon Musk were also in the news.

Biden’s Executive Orders Focus on Governance, Safety

President Joe Biden issued executive orders related to maintaining leadership of AI in the United States and policies to protect against potential AI harms.

He signed an order Tuesday (Jan. 14) to set aside federal lands for the building of AI data centers, with the full cost borne by the builders of these foundation AI models. Companies building data centers such as Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft must ensure that there is a clean energy source for these data centers since AI workloads are famous energy guzzlers.

Biden also signed an order Thursday (Jan. 16) designed to improve the nation’s cybersecurity. The steps he outlined include accelerating the development and deployment of AI.

The order also requires the federal government to adopt secure software acquisition practices and ensure software providers use secure software development practices; adopt proven security practices in terms of identity and access management; and implement strong authentication and encryption to improve the security of communications.

Nvidia Targets Healthcare Industry

Nvidia unveiled partnerships with healthcare organizations Mayo Clinic, Illumina, IQVIA and Arc Institute. They will use Nvidia’s technology to accelerate drug discovery, enhance genomic research and develop advanced services using agentic and generative AI.

They plan to use AI agents that can help accelerate clinical trials, AI models that can help discover new drugs faster and physical AI robots for surgery.

The Mayo Clinic will work with Nvidia to develop pathology foundation models to accelerate diagnosis and treatment of disease. IQVIA, which provides clinical research services, is using Nvidia’s AI foundry service to build custom foundation models trained on its data.

Illumina, a DNA sequencing company, is using Nvidia’s accelerated computing and AI toolsets for drug discovery. Arc Institute, a biology and machine learning research group, will work with Nvidia to develop AI models and tools to advance biomedical discovery.

Scheduling Comes to ChatGPT

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now letting users schedule tasks for a later, or recurring, date. Scheduled tasks is rolling out in beta for users of ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Teams. Enterprise users will get access soon; free users will also eventually get it. OpenAI did not set specific dates.

With tasks, users can tell ChatGPT to do things like set up a daily 15-minute workout that focuses on lifting weights. It also can give them recurring reminders, like taking out the trash on Sundays at 6 p.m. Users can edit or cancel the task.

Scheduled Tasks is available on the ChatGPT website, iOS, Android and macOS. Integration into the Windows app is coming in the first quarter. Tasks use OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. Users are limited to 10 tasks at a time. In addition, each plan’s messaging limits also apply.

Amazon Hits Snags in Transforming Alexa With GenAI

Amazon’s revamp of Alexa to put generative AI at its core is hitting technical snags such as hallucinations.

Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the Financial Times that hallucinations, in which AI models make things up, have to be “close to zero.” Since large language models are probabilistic, they can hallucinate when asked questions or encounter scenarios outside their training data.

That means when a customer orders from Alexa, the agentic AI assistant might purchase another product or invent the number of orders, for example. Alexa’s global scale makes it a sensitive issue. With over half a billion devices, it must get requests and orders right.

FTC, DOJ Signal Support for Elon Musk in OpenAI Lawsuit

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice offered legal analysis supporting Elon Musk’s claim that OpenAI and Microsoft engaged in anticompetitive practices. However, the government was not officially expressing an opinion on the case.

Musk’s lawyer said the participation of the FTC and DOJ is a “sign of how seriously regulators take OpenAI and Microsoft’s misconduct.”

Musk is suing OpenAI to prevent it from becoming a for-profit company from a capped-profit firm with a nonprofit parent. He also alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft are acting anticompetitively by making investors agree not to invest in rival AI firms and by sharing board members.

Treasury Department Hack Committed by Silk Typhoon

Chinese hacking group Silk Typhoon was reportedly behind the December hack of the Department of the Treasury.

The hackers stole a digital key from a third-party service provider and used it to access documents stored on laptops and desktop computers. There is no evidence that the group still has access to Treasury systems or information.

Cyber officials in the U.S. have said that by hacking America’s critical infrastructure, Chinese cybercriminals aim to disrupt critical services to hinder the U.S. military in times of crisis.

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