This Week in AI: China’s Regulations Go Live While Use-Cases Expand

The wheels of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) marketplace keep moving forward.

And their innovative turns are driving the emergent AI sector toward an exciting future, both from a regulatory and a commercial standpoint.

Not only did significant policy strides take place on the global stage this week, but individual U.S. states have also stepped up their efforts to navigate the intricate landscape of AI regulation.

Separately, a wave of innovative use cases emerged across diverse industries, underlining the transformative potential of AI technology within a business setting.

As AI technology continues its relentless march forward, these are the big stories that PYMNTS was tracking.

On the Policy Front: Addressing the Potential Risks and Benefits of AI

As PYMNTS wrote, nations worldwide are starting to ask the same questions about how to tackle regulating AI technology, and many of them are moving faster than the U.S.

While the European Union (EU) has pushed forward a draft bill of its AI Act, China became the first major market economy to implement an actual and official policy framework of 24 guidelines regulating the use of generative AI.

Foreign firms will need to comply with the set of 24 guidelines from China’s top internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), if they want to do business within the nation’s borders. The rules are meant to ensure that content generated by generative AI is in line with Beijing’s core socialist values and applies to consumer-facing AI rather than enterprise applications.

AI providers whose products are misaligned with the policy will be given a three-month grace period to fix their models, underscoring the delicate balance China is striking as it relates to the dynamic between state control of AI technology and providing enough support that domestic companies can still compete globally and innovate at home.

And while the U.S. has made little progress regulating AI — as well as the tech sector itself more broadly — on a federal level, on Tuesday (Aug. 15), a new task force of state lawmakers meant to develop AI legislation was announced.

The task force includes lawmakers from Colorado, California, Texas, Florida and Minnesota, and will focus on developing legislation with unified language to put guardrails on how AI is used in the public and private sectors.

After all, the questions surrounding oversight of AI technology have captured the attention of institutions and individuals as disparate as the Pope and the Pentagon — and many observers believe getting it right may be one of the foundational questions of our time.

The Transformative Commercial Potential of Generative AI Keeps Growing

Amidst the regulatory buzz, the business world showcased a remarkable array of generative AI applications across various sectors.

Industry pioneer OpenAI made its first-ever acquisition, purchasing Global Illumination — a firm known for building consumer-facing AI-driven experiences, particularly within digital gaming.

And hopefully, the acquisition pans out from a balance sheet standpoint, as OpenAI may reportedly go bankrupt by 2024 if it continues to burn cash at its current rate — around $700,000 a day to run the servers and maintain the compute power necessary for its popular AI products.

The Sam Altman-led company is also hoping to position its AI services to a broader audience, announcing Tuesday (Aug. 15) that companies can use its latest large language model (LLM), GPT-4, to develop AI-assisted content moderation systems.

Over in China, one of the eastern nation’s leading internet companies, Tencent, has announced its intention to release its own proprietary AI model later this year, joining other Beijing-based tech industry leaders such as Baidu and SenseTime Group.

Martin Lau, Tencent’s president, expressed confidence in the Hunyuan model, stating that it is “among the top leading foundation models produced in China.” It will, of course, be subject to the new regulations mentioned above.

Read More: 10 Insiders on Generative AI’s Impact Across the Enterprise

As the AI race heats up, firms are increasingly looking for ways to differentiate themselves and capture customers. Google is reportedly testing an AI assistant with the ability to handle “intimate questions” about the challenges a person might face and provide them with life advances.

The news follows reports from Tuesday (Aug. 15) that Google was preparing to unveil its next-generation Al foundation model, Gemini, this fall.

Elsewhere, SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest operator, has invested $100 million into U.S.-based AI startup Anthropic with the goal of jointly developing a large language model (LLM) and AI platform. The investment comes as the telecom sector more broadly is increasingly looking toward AI capabilities to help bridge legacy and future operational needs.

Voice artificial intelligence firm SoundHound announced a partnership Thursday (Aug. 17) to add its AI technology to Turkish mobility provider Togg’s smart vehicles.

Research by PYMNTS shows that upwards of 60% of consumers think that voice assistants will eventually be as smart and as reliable as humans, with many saying they would be willing to pay for such a service.

Card-issuing platform Marqeta has unveiled its first external-facing generative AI tool meant to enhance its embedded finance offerings by allowing users to receive personalized responses to their questions.

And rounding out the week, Amazon wants to give customers the power to review its reviews with AI-generated review highlights that feature key product insights and allow customers to more easily surface reviews that mention certain product attributes.

Because of the rate and speed at which AI technology’s capabilities are evolving, the present moment represents a microcosm of how policymakers, innovators, and society at large can continue to harness the power of AI for the greater good.