Good morning, and welcome to Tech News Now, TheStreet’s daily tech rundown.
In today’s edition, we’re covering oh so many lawsuits against OpenAI and Google, earnings results out of Salesforce and European privacy complaints against Meta.
Tickers we’re watching today: (AAPL) , (META) , (GOOG) .
DON’T MISS: Apple CEO Tim Cook said at Wednesday’s annual shareholder meeting that Apple is investing heavily in AI. He said that Apple will share progress on its work in the sector later this year.
And Automattic, the company behind Tumblr and WordPress.com, is reportedly about to enter into a content licensing deal with OpenAI and Midjourney, in which it will sell user data.
Let’s get into it.
Related: Popular social media platform to sell user data to the company behind ChatGPT
Big Tech and all the lawsuits
The lawsuits keep piling up in the Big Tech arena.
OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, was hit with several new lawsuits alleging more copyright infringement Wednesday.
Both copyright lawsuits — brought against OpenAI by news organizations The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet — allege that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, in which the removal of author and title information from protected works done to reasonably conceal copyright infringement was prohibited.
Both suits — filed by the same law firm — cite data from Copyleaks that states that nearly 60% of ChatGPT responses contain some form of plagiarized content.
But they go further, stating that OpenAI chose to strip away the copyright management information present in the articles it trained ChatGPT on, training the model “not to acknowledge or respect copyright, not to notify ChatGPT users when the responses they received were protected by journalists’ copyrights and not to provide attribution when using the works of human journalists.”
“Defendants had reason to know that ChatGPT would be less popular and would generate less revenue if users believed that ChatGPT responses violated third-party copyrights,” The Intercept’s suit says.
These are far from the first copyright lawsuits OpenAI has dealt with. Perhaps the most prominent is the one filed by the New York Times at the end of 2023 alleging massive copyright infringement in both the input and output of OpenAI’s products.
These new suits, however, take a slightly different tack, using OpenAI’s removal of title and author information from articles used to train ChatGPT to prove a violation of the DMCA, which is not mentioned in the Times’ complaint.
Read The Intercept’s complaint here. Read Raw Story and AlterNet’s complaint here.
Related: Copyright expert predicts result of NY Times lawsuit against Microsoft, OpenAI
Google, too
Just to make sure it didn’t feel left out of Wednesday’s legal frenzy, a group of 32 media companies — including Axel Springer, the parent of Business Insider — filed a $2.3 billion lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company’s abuse of its dominant search and advertising position has caused the companies to incur losses.
“The media companies involved have incurred losses due to a less competitive market, which is a direct result of Google’s misconduct,” a statement issued by lawyers Geradin Partners and Stek said.
“Without Google’s abuse of its dominant position, the media companies would have received significantly higher revenues from advertising and paid lower fees for ad tech services. Crucially, these funds could have been reinvested into strengthening the European media landscape,” the lawyers said.
A Google spokesperson told Reuters that the company opposes the lawsuit, calling it “speculative and opportunistic.”
Related: OpenAI accuses New York Times of paying someone to hack ChatGPT
And Elon Musk
One more.
Today, a U.S. judge will consider whether to dismiss X’s lawsuit against the nonprofit The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has tracked hate speech on the platform since Musk’s takeover.
Musk has accused the nonprofit of attempting to “scare” away advertisers.
Related: Marc Benioff and Sam Altman at odds over core values of tech companies
The earnings of AI
Shares of Salesforce (CRM) rose about 1% in pre-market trading after the company reported an earnings beat that came alongside a lighter revenue forecast.
Salesforce reported earnings of $2.29 per share — above expectations of $2.26 — on revenue of $9.29 billion — above expectations of $9.22 billion — for the quarter ending Jan. 31.
Issuing full-year guidance, Salesforce said it expects to see $38 billion in revenue for the 2025 fiscal year, below analyst expectations of $38.62 billion.
CEO Marc Benioff said the past year was a “phenomenal year of transformation” for the company.
The report came the same day as NPR published a lengthy investigation into Benioff’s private acquisition of land in Hawaii, for reasons no one can quite figure out.
The company initiated a quarterly dividend of 40 cents per share.
Meta hit with more privacy concerns
Eight consumer groups from the European Consumer Organization Wednesday filed complaints against Meta, saying the tech giant is not complying with the fair data processing rule laid out in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The complaints additionally claim that Meta does not have a “valid legal basis” to justify its “massive collection of data” from Facebook and Instagram users.
More deep dives on AI:
Think tank director warns of the danger around ‘non-democratic tech leaders deciding the future’ George Carlin resurrected – without permission – by self-described ‘comedy AI’Artificial Intelligence is a sustainability nightmare — but it doesn’t have to be
Meta’s “pay or consent” choice — unique to Europe — is, according to Ursula Pachl, deputy director general of the European Consumer Organisation, nothing but “smoke and mirrors to cover up what is, at its core, the same old hoovering up of all kinds of sensitive information about people’s lives which it then monetizes through its invasive advertising model.”
“Surveillance-based business models pose all kinds of problems under the GDPR and it’s time for data protection authorities to stop Meta’s unfair data processing and its infringing of people’s fundamental rights,” Pachl said.
A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that its subscription option for no ads “addresses the latest regulatory developments, guidance and judgments shared by leading European regulators and the courts over recent years.”
Related: New report finds Facebook users are tracked by thousands of companies
Another Llama
At the same time, The Information reported that Meta is planning to release the latest version of its AI model Llama 3 in July.
Researchers at Meta are reportedly trying to “loosen up” the model in an effort to enable it to at least provide greater context to controversial queries.
The looser approach to guardrails reportedly comes as Meta’s current model, Llama 2, has been deemed too “safe” by senior leadership at the company.
Related: Huge new ChatGPT update highlights the dangers of AI hype
The AI Corner: Must-read studies
In a paper posted earlier in February, AI researcher Melanie Mitchell and coauthor Martha Lewis sought to analyze the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
The study tested and compared humans and GPT models to investigate the generality of analogy-making abilities, finding “evidence that, despite previously reported successes of LLMs on analogical reasoning, these models lack the robustness and generality of human analogy-making.”
“The kinds of mistakes that these models make are different from the kinds of mistakes that humans make,” the report says. “These results imply that GPT models are still lacking the kind of abstract reasoning needed for human-like fluid intelligence.”
Read the full report here.
Contact Ian with tips and AI stories via email, [email protected], or Signal 732-804-1223.
Related: George Carlin resurrected – without permission – by self-described ‘comedy AI’
