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Microsoft, Mistral AI e l'AI Act
by Daniela Tafani Feb. 28, 2024

Feb. 28, 2024

Microsoft and Mistral AI announce new partnership to accelerate AI innovation and introduce Mistral Large first on Azure By Eric Boyd, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform, Microsoft https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral-ai-announce-ne… ----- Il commento di Luca Bertuzzi: This is a mind-blowing announcement. Mistral AI, the French company that has been fighting tooth and nail to water down the #AIAct's foundation model rules, is partnering up with Microsoft. So much for 'give us a fighting chance against Big Tech'. The first question that comes to mind is: was this deal in the making while the AI Act was being negotiated? That would mean Mistral discussed selling a minority stake to Microsoft while playing the 'European champion' card with the EU and French institutions. If so, this whole thing might be a masterclass in astroturfing, and it seems unrealistic for a partnership like this to be finalised in less than a month. Many people involved in the AI Act noted how Big Tech's lobbying on GPAI suddenly went quiet toward the end. That is because they did not need to intervene since Mistral was doing the 'dirty work' for them. Remarkably, Mistral's talking points were extremely similar to those of Big Tech rather than those of a small AI start-up, based on their ambition to reach that scale. The other question is how much the French government knew about this upcoming partnership with Microsoft. It seems unlikely Paris was kept completely in the dark, but cosying up with Big Tech does not really sit well with France's strive for 'strategic autonomy'. Especially since the agreement includes making Mistral's large language model available on Microsoft's Azure AI platform, while France has been pushing for an EU cybersecurity scheme to exclude American hyperscalers from the European market. Still today, and I doubt it is a coincidence, Mistral has announced the launch of Large, a new language model intended to compete directly with OpenAI's GPT-4. However, unlike previous models, Large will not be open source. In other words, Mistral is no longer (just) a European leader and is backtracking on its much-celebrated open source approach. Where does this leave the start-up vis-à-vis EU policymakers as the AI Act's enforcement approaches? My guess is that someone will inevitably feel played. https://twitter.com/BertuzLuca/status/1762197130616209765 oppure https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luca-bertuzzi-186729130_introducing-mistral-…

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Re: [nexa] nexa Digest, Vol 178, Issue 52
by maurizio lana Feb. 28, 2024

Feb. 28, 2024

Il 28/02/24 14:44, maurizio lana <maurizio.lana(a)uniupo.it> ha scritto: > vorrei recuperare i messaggi scambiati in lista in cui si parla della scuola, ma sono un po' in difficoltà con > https://www.mail-archive.com/search?a=1&l=all&haswords=&x=12&y=7&from=nexa > posto che gli archivi sono online, ci sono altri strumenti che si possono usare, al posto di mail-archive? PS: eventualmente scaricare il corpus dei messaggi per poter poi cercare in locale? M ------------------------------------------------------------------------ citazioni come briganti ai bordi della strada che balzano fuori armati e strappano l’assenso all’ozioso viandante walter benjamin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Maurizio Lana Università del Piemonte Orientale Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici Piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli

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Google Is Paying Publishers to Test an Unreleased Gen AI Platform
by Daniela Tafani Feb. 28, 2024

Feb. 28, 2024

Google Is Paying Publishers to Test an Unreleased Gen AI Platform In exchange for a five-figure sum, publishers must use the tool to publish 3 stories per day By Mark Stenberg Google launched a private program for a handful of independent publishers last month, providing the news organizations with beta access to an unreleased generative artificial intelligence platform in exchange for receiving analytics and feedback, according to documents seen by ADWEEK. As part of the agreement, the publishers are expected to use the suite of tools to produce a fixed volume of content for 12 months. In return, the news outlets receive a monthly stipend amounting to a five-figure sum annually, as well as the means to produce content relevant to their readership at no cost. “In partnership with news publishers, especially smaller publishers, we’re in the early stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide AI-enabled tools to help journalists with their work,” a Google representative said in a statement. “These tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles.” The AI-enabled results could throttle readership to an ‘apocalyptic’ degree. The beta tools let under-resourced publishers create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article. Other gen AI experiments Google has released over the past two years include the codenamed Genesis, which can reportedly produce whole news articles and was privately demonstrated to several publishers last summer, according to The New York Times. Others, including Search Generative Experience and Gemini, are available for public use and threaten to upend many of the commercial foundations of digital publishing. The program is part of the Google News Initiative, which launched in 2018 to provide publishers with technology and training. Although many of its programs indisputably benefit the publishers involved, the broader reception of GNI has been mixed. Google has used GNI to drum up positive press and industry goodwill during moments of reputational duress, and many of the commercial problems it aims to solve for publishers were created by Google in the first place, said Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint. “The larger point here is that Google is in legislative activity and antitrust enforcement globally for extracting revenue from the publishing world,” Kint said. “Instead of giving up some of that revenue, it’s attacking the cost side for its long-tail members with the least bargaining power.” Details of the program Google first shared a call for news organizations to apply to test the emerging technologies in an October edition of the Local Independent Online News newsletter. GNI began onboarding publishers in January, and the yearlong program kicked off in February. According to the conditions of the agreement, participating publishers must use the platform to produce and publish three articles per day, one newsletter per week and one marketing campaign per month. To produce articles, publishers first compile a list of external websites that regularly produce news and reports relevant to their readership. These sources of original material are not asked for their consent to have their content scraped or notified of their participation in the process—a potentially troubling precedent, said Kint. When any of these indexed websites produce a new article, it appears on the platform dashboard. The publisher can then apply the gen AI tool to summarize the article, altering the language and style of the report to read like a news story. The resulting copy is underlined in different colors to indicate its potential accuracy: yellow, with language taken almost verbatim from the source material, is the most accurate, followed by blue and then red, with text that is least based on the original report. A human editor then scans the copy for accuracy before publishing three such stories per day. The program does not require that these AI-assisted articles be labeled. The platform cannot gather facts or information that have not already been produced elsewhere, limiting its utility for premium publishers. Articles produced by the platform could also draw traffic away from the original sources, negatively affecting their businesses. The process resembles the ripping technique newly in use at Reach plc, except that in this case, the text is pulled from external sources. “I think this calls into question the mission of GNI,” Kint said. “It’s hard to argue that stealing people’s work supports the mission of the news. This is not adding any new information to the mix.” https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unreleased-gen-ai/

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The Stockholm Declaration on AI for Science
by Antonio Vetro' Feb. 28, 2024

Feb. 28, 2024

Dall’appello alla firma pubblicato su Nature qualche giorno fa: Stockholm declaration on AI ethics: why others should sign<https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00517-7> "The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in science has potential to do both harm and good. As a step towards preventing the harms we have prepared the Stockholm Declaration on AI for Science. Signatories commit to using AI responsibly and ethically. We encourage researchers involved in developing AI to sign (see go.nature.com/486azp7) […] " Qui la dichiarazione: https://sites.google.com/view/stockholm-declaration In questo passaggio della dichiarazione (grassetto mio), sostituendo Big Data con AI, sembra di rileggere la “End of theory”<https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/> di Chris Anderson nel 2008: "We believe that by harnessing the power of AI we can propel humanity toward a future where groundbreaking achievements in science even achievements worthy of a Nobel Prize can be fully automated. We believe that this is achievable by the year 2050". Al di là del personale scetticismo che potrebbe essere sbagliato, ritengo utile condividerlo Antonio

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Per un’intelligenza artificiale bene comune.
by don Luca Peyron Feb. 27, 2024

Feb. 27, 2024

Considerazioni interessanti, buona lettura dl https://michelekettmaier.nova100.ilsole24ore.com/2024/02/26/per-unintellige… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Pastorale Universitaria - Apostolato Digitale Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Re: [nexa] Microsoft, Mistral AI e l'AI Act
by Giuseppe Attardi Feb. 27, 2024

Feb. 27, 2024

Facciamolo con fondi pubblici un modello davvero completamente Open, dai dati di apprendimento, al codice, ai pesi del modello, ai test di valutazione. Noi ci vorremmo provare, rispondendo a questa call: https://aiboost-project.eu/ utilizzando in parte il codice OS di OLMo di AI2, con cui siamo in contatto. — Beppe > On 27 Feb 2024, at 08:58, <nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it> <nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it> wrote: > > From: Daniela Tafani <daniela.tafani(a)unipi.it <mailto:daniela.tafani@unipi.it>> > To: "nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it <mailto:nexa@server-nexa.polito.it>" <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it <mailto:nexa@server-nexa.polito.it>> > Subject: [nexa] Microsoft, Mistral AI e l'AI Act > Message-ID: <121e9a4e963e455a97b1f6d830f22229(a)unipi.it <mailto:121e9a4e963e455a97b1f6d830f22229@unipi.it>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Microsoft and Mistral AI announce new partnership to accelerate AI innovation and introduce Mistral Large first on Azure > By Eric Boyd, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform, Microsoft > https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral-ai-announce-ne… > ----- > Il commento di Luca Bertuzzi: > This is a mind-blowing announcement. Mistral AI, the French company that has been fighting tooth and nail to water down the #AIAct's foundation model rules, is partnering up with Microsoft. So much for 'give us a fighting chance against Big Tech'. > The first question that comes to mind is: was this deal in the making while the AI Act was being negotiated? That would mean Mistral discussed selling a minority stake to Microsoft while playing the 'European champion' card with the EU and French institutions. If so, this whole thing might be a masterclass in astroturfing, and it seems unrealistic for a partnership like this to be finalised in less than a month. Many people involved in the AI Act noted how Big Tech's lobbying on GPAI suddenly went quiet toward the end. > That is because they did not need to intervene since Mistral was doing the 'dirty work' for them. Remarkably, Mistral's talking points were extremely similar to those of Big Tech rather than those of a small AI start-up, based on their ambition to reach that scale. > The other question is how much the French government knew about this upcoming partnership with Microsoft. It seems unlikely Paris was kept completely in the dark, but cosying up with Big Tech does not really sit well with France's strive for 'strategic autonomy'. Especially since the agreement includes making Mistral's large language model available on Microsoft's Azure AI platform, while France has been pushing for an EU cybersecurity scheme to exclude American hyperscalers from the European market. > Still today, and I doubt it is a coincidence, Mistral has announced the launch of Large, a new language model intended to compete directly with OpenAI's GPT-4. However, unlike previous models, Large will not be open source. In other words, Mistral is no longer (just) a European leader and is backtracking on its much-celebrated open source approach. Where does this leave the start-up vis-à-vis EU policymakers as the AI Act's enforcement approaches? My guess is that someone will inevitably feel played. > > https://twitter.com/BertuzLuca/status/1762197130616209765 > oppure > https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luca-bertuzzi-186729130_introducing-mistral-…

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Re: [nexa] Quale trasparenza per l'IA?
by alessandro marzocchi Feb. 27, 2024

Feb. 27, 2024

Nell'articolo di Fabio Paglieri vedo due argomenti che meritano di essere valutati esplicitamente. Se il funzionamento è poco comprensibile anche per gli esperti ... quale sorte per la comunicazione? Considerando quanto l'IA è pervasiva ed efficace già oggi. L'altro argomento è strettamente connesso al primo: quale trasparenza? Solo da pochi decenni l'analfabetismo, già condizione della maggioranza, riguarda minoranze: accettiamo il rischio di riprodurlo sotto la veste di poca trasparenza dell'IA? In altre parole: si può ottenere trasparenza dei ""meccanismi di mercato"" ecc ecc, se non sono trasparenti ""procedura e sistema di comunicazione""? Cordialmente. Duccio (Alessandro Marzocchi) * * * Mon, 26 Feb 2024 11:36:12 +0000 From: "Antonio Vetro'" < antonio.vetro(a)polito.it>ha scritto: Segnalo questo contributo di Fabio Paglieri (CNR) per Il Mulino. https://www.rivistailmulino.it/a/quale-trasparenza-per-l-ia Il finale riassume bene la tesi proposta: Questa, dunque, è la trasparenza che occorre rivendicare sull’IA: non la scoperta di come funziona la scatola nera di questi sistemi, spesso poco comprensibile persino agli esperti, bensì le caratteristiche dei meccanismi di mercato che ne determinano il successo, le loro ricadute sugli interessi pubblici e privati, i fattori psicologici e sociali che ci spingono a essere acquiescenti verso sperequazioni grossolane e squilibri evidenti. Da chi promette di spiegarci l’IA, queste sono le risposte che dobbiamo pretendere. A.

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Re: [nexa] l'AI, la automation complacency, e il rischio di erodere competenze
by Federico Guerrini Feb. 27, 2024

Feb. 27, 2024

Ciao, questo articolo mi sembra interessante. In quale misura affidarsi troppo alla AI per svolgere dei compiti può portare a una speciedi analfabetismo di ritorno, per cui si tende a perdere competenze che si credevano ormai acquisite? "The accountants were not concerned about outsourcing their thinking to the software, since it operated almost flawlessly. In other words, they fell prey to “automation complacency”: the assumption that “all is well” while ignoring potential risks. This had three major consequences: they lost their awareness of what automation was doing; they lost the incentive to maintain and update relevant knowledge (such as tax legislation), because the vendor and software did that for them; as the software was reliable, they no longer bothered to check the outgoing reports for accuracy." Il pezzo completo è qui: https://theconversation.com/what-happens-when-we-outsource-boring-but-impor… Buon martedì. Federico http://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/ https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/newsroom-curators-a… My latest book: Content Curation (Italian): http://www.amazon.it/Content-Curation-Federico-Guerrini/dp/8820366126

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Quale trasparenza per l'IA
by Antonio Vetro' Feb. 26, 2024

Feb. 26, 2024

Segnalo questo contributo di Fabio Paglieri (CNR) per Il Mulino. https://www.rivistailmulino.it/a/quale-trasparenza-per-l-ia Il finale riassume bene la tesi proposta: Questa, dunque, è la trasparenza che occorre rivendicare sull’IA: non la scoperta di come funziona la scatola nera di questi sistemi, spesso poco comprensibile persino agli esperti, bensì le caratteristiche dei meccanismi di mercato che ne determinano il successo, le loro ricadute sugli interessi pubblici e privati, i fattori psicologici e sociali che ci spingono a essere acquiescenti verso sperequazioni grossolane e squilibri evidenti. Da chi promette di spiegarci l’IA, queste sono le risposte che dobbiamo pretendere. A.

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MEMENTO | 111° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 28 febbraio 2024, ore 13.00
by Valeria Bergantino Feb. 26, 2024

Feb. 26, 2024

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi ricordiamo che *mercoledì 28 febbraio*, dalle ore 13.00 alle ore 14.00, si terrà il *111° Nexa Lunch Seminar* con un incontro dal titolo: */"Scienza aperta e protezione dei dati personali: un dialogo interdisciplinare sulle politiche europee"/*. Ospite dell'incontro: *Ludovica Paseri* (Università degli Studi di Torino). _L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE._ _SEDE FISICA dell'incontro_: Campus Luigi Einaudi, Lungo Dora Siena, 100 Edificio D2, II piano, Meeting Room Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza (*MAPS* <https://www.google.com/maps/place/Campus+Luigi+Einaudi/@45.0734963,7.699408…>) _STANZA VIRTUALE_ dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Per maggiori dettagli è possibile consultare la pagina web dell'evento: https://nexa.polito.it/lunch-111 Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Officer Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it tel: 3473443585

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