Good morning. In a move that feels very familiar to anyone who watched the Inflection - Microsoft saga unfold, Google has made a deal with Character.AI.

We break it all down for you below.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

AI for Good: ALS drug discovery

ALS, known also as Lou Gehrig’s disease, doesn’t currently have a cure. 

Because of this, it has become an area of focus for some biotech and pharmaceutical companies. 

It’s an area that Verge Genomics, a biotech company built around an AI-powered drug discovery and development platform, has been making headway in. 

The details: After evaluating 11.4 million data points from ALS patient tissue and genetic datasets, Verge’s Converge platform discovered a new causative mechanism for ALS, and developed a new therapeutic target to address it. 

Verge in March announced a strategic collaboration with pharmaceutical company Ferer to develop the drug, which Verge said has “shown efficacy” throughout its pre-clinical run of trials. 

Why it matters: “For years, researchers have heavily relied on animal or cell models to identify new targets, in a way that oversimplifies the enormous complexity of human biology, particularly for diseases like ALS,” Dr. Robert H. Scannevin, Verge’s chief scientific officer, said in a statement. “The Converge platform starts with, and integrates, human data and human model systems throughout discovery and development,” providing “unique insights into the biological underpinnings of ALS.”

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Google makes a deal with the founders of Character.AI 

In yet another Big Tech/startup shakeup, Noam Shazeer — who led the team of Google researchers that built LaMDA before leaving to start Character.AI in 2021 — is rejoining the tech giant. 

The move is part of a wider deal announced Friday between Google and Character.AI; as part of the agreement, Character will provide Google with a “non-exclusive license for its current LLM technology.” In return, Character will receive “increased funding,” though it didn’t specify the amount. 

Some context: The situation seems awfully similar to Microsoft’s soft-acquisition of Inflection AI in March, in which Microsoft hired Inflection’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and the majority of the company’s staff in a $650 million deal. 

Both the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority have said that they are investigating the deal.

Cognitive scientist and AI researcher Gary Marcus said that this pattern of well-funded startup founders jumping to Big Tech indicates that things are “starting to fizzle.” 

“2023 was the year of AI promise,” he said. “2024 is the year of AI reality.”

Nvidia’s newest AI chip is delayed 

Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell family of GPUs will be delayed by at least three months due to design flaws, according to The Information. 

The delay comes as a series of Big Tech corporations — including Meta, Tesla, Google, OpenAI and Microsoft — have ordered billions of dollars worth of Nvidia GPUs. The delay also coincides with a retreat of Nvidia’s stock, which has fallen some 15% in the past 30 days. 

The details: Nvidia unveiled its latest GPU — the Blackwell — in March; in May, the company said it planned to ship the chips later this year. Now, the chips likely won’t start shipping until the first quarter of 2025. 

"As we've stated before, Hopper demand is very strong, broad Blackwell sampling has started and production is on track to ramp in the second half," an Nvidia spokesperson said. 

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CivAI’s latest program can deepfake you in under 5 seconds 

One of the most significant threats of generative artificial intelligence involves deepfakes. The severity of the threat here has to do with the breadth of the implications; deepfakes can be — and have already been — used to spread various types of misinformation, including the political and election-related kind; deepfaked images have impacted the stock market, supercharged fraud, phishing, thievery and identity theft and created a whole new way to harass women and girls online (through explicit and nonconsensual deepfake images). 

The world that deepfakes are ushering in is one of a stark, yet convincing, unreality; a digital environment that — by default — shouldn’t be trusted by its users. 

A non-profit called CivAI — co-founded by software engineers Lucas Hansen and Siddharth Hiregowdara — has made it its mission to help local governments better understand the threats at hand. 

You can try the demo out here. 

“It's a way for someone to build a small amount of intuition around how AI actually works, to feel at a gut level that this is powerful and magical in novel ways,” Hiregowdara told me. “That’s the intuition that undergirds all of our work … we want to give people a concrete understanding by interacting with AI firsthand.”

And while deepfakes aren’t new, the point the founders want to drive home is that the proliferation of genAI has made it remarkably easy to scale convincing synthetic content; as Hiregowdara said: “The bar has gotten so much lower that the quantity has a quality all of its own.”

Right now, they said, we’re at something of a crossroads when it comes to deepfakes and AI in general; we can adapt regulation reactively and over time, or we can adopt regulation proactively to mitigate harms in advance.  

“But there isn't a mechanism to perhaps nudge (regulation) to happen,” Hansen said. “I think public opinion is one and that has been somewhat helpful. I think that's part of why education is important.”

The (brief) state of regulation: While the European Union’s AI Act recently began entering into force, U.S. AI legislation at the federal level remains largely nonexistent. The Defiance Act — which would allow victims to sue over the creation/sharing of explicit, nonconsensual deepfake images — recently passed the Senate. States, meanwhile, have begun to erect a patchwork layer of regulation boasting varying levels of strength. 

This all comes as AI companies continue to increase their lobbying efforts.

A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

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