This Week in AI: With Chevron’s demise, AI regulation seems dead in the water

"">Hiya, folks, and welcome to technewss's regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “Chevron deference,” a 40-year-old ruling on federal agencies’ power that required courts to defer to agencies’ interpretations of congressional laws.

Cloudflare launches a tool to combat AI bots

Cloudflare, the publicly traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models. Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping an

Europe is still serious about ESG, and Apiday is helping companies comply

European regulation is turning ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reporting from a nice-to-have to a must. This creates new tailwinds for startups such as Paris-based Apiday, whose platform targets private equity funds and blue-chip companies needing to track and pilot sustainability pract

Anthropic looks to fund a new, more comprehensive generation of AI benchmarks

Anthropic is launching a program to fund the development of new types of benchmarks capable of evaluating the performance and impact of AI models, including generative models like its own Claude. Unveiled on Monday, Anthropic’s program will dole out payments to third-party organizations that

Meta changes its label from ‘Made with AI’ to ‘AI info’ to indicate use of AI in photos

After Meta started tagging photos with a “Made with AI” label in May, photographers complained that the social networking company had been applying labels to real photos where they had used some basic editing tools. Because of the user feedback and general confusion around what level

AI-powered scams and what you can do about them

AI is here to help, whether you’re drafting an email, making some concept art, or running a scam on vulnerable folks by making them think you’re a friend or relative in distress. AI is so versatile! But since some people would rather not be scammed, let’s talk a little about what

Apple reportedly working to bring AI to the Vision Pro

Apple's AI plans go beyond the previously announced Apple Intelligence launches on the iPhone, iPad and Mac. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the company is also working to bring these features to its Vision Pro headsets. It's not the most surprising move — if Apple Intelligence

Here are India’s biggest AI startups based on how much money they’ve raised

India is very far from the “uncanny valley” of San Francisco, but it has a massive trove of engineering talent, and some of those people are hopping on the train and turning into founders and builders of AI startups. The story of the AI startup ecosystem in India today is reminiscent o

Gemini’s data-analyzing abilities aren’t as good as Google claims

One of the selling points of Google’s flagship generative AI models, Gemini 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash, is the amount of data they can supposedly process and analyze. In press briefings and demos, Google has repeatedly claimed that the models can accomplish previously impossible tasks thanks to th

SAP, and Oracle, and IBM, oh my! ‘Cloud and AI’ drive legacy software firms to record valuations

There’s something of a trend around legacy software firms and their soaring valuations: Companies founded in dinosaur times are on a tear, evidenced this week with SAP‘s shares topping $200 for the first time. Founded in 1972, SAP’s valuation currently sits at an all-time high of

Women in AI: Sarah Bitamazire helps companies implement responsible AI

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, technewss is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who've contributed to the AI revolution. Sarah Bitamazire is the chief policy officer at the boutique advisor

Detroit Police Department agrees to new rules around facial recognition tech

As part of a legal settlement, the Detroit Police Department has agreed to new guardrails limiting how it can use facial recognition technology. These new policies prohibit the police from arresting people based solely on the results of a facial recognition search, or on the results of photo lineu

MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI

When Rodney Brooks talks about robotics and artificial intelligence, you should listen. Currently the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT, he also co-founded three key companies, including Rethink Robotics, iRobot and his current endeavor, Robust.ai. Brooks also ran the MIT Computer Sci

Zuckerberg disses closed-source AI competitors as trying to ‘create God’

Riffing on what he sees for the future of AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview published Thursday that he deeply believes that there will not be “just one AI.” Touting the value of open source to put AI tools into many people’s hands, Zuckerberg took a moment to dispa