Good morning. This week (Aug. 28), Nvidia will report earnings. For several quarters now, they’ve blown past investor expectations as the AI Gold Rush has directed billions of dollars into the necessary semiconductor firms (makers of those trusty picks and shovels).

With concerns over investment returns mounting, this could be a pivotal moment for the industry. But if Nvidia turns out another massive quarter, it could very well spell more of the same as the gold rush continues.

Either way, we’ll be watching very closely.

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

In today’s newsletter:

AI for Good: NASA’s ‘Wildfire Digital Twin’

NASA in May developed a tool — powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning — that forecasts wildfire burn paths in real-time. 

The details: The Wildfire Digital Twin project achieved a resolution that is two orders of magnitude greater than current global models, according to NASA, and can be developed in mere minutes (as opposed to the hours it takes to get current models off the ground). 

Why it matters: Wildfires have been getting larger, more intense and more frequent for years, and it is a trend that is likely to continue. This means that we need a larger arsenal of better, more targeted tools for wildfire mitigation. 

Register today for Ashby’s upcoming launch event

When it comes to ATSs, Ashby is the best (that’s why we use it as our all-in-one recruiting platform at The Deep View). 

Ashby’s got a new feature coming — AI-assisted application review — designed to make it easier for companies to handle high volumes of inbound applications while maintaining a great candidate experience.

On September 10, Ashby will:

Save your spot by signing up for the launch event today.

Poll: How musicians feel about GenAI 

APRA AMCOS, a music rights management organization, recently conducted a poll of more than 4,000 musicians from New Zealand and Australia regarding generative artificial intelligence and its role in the music industry. 

The details: More than half of those surveyed think that genAI can support the “human creative process.” But significant portions of those surveyed believe the application of GenAI will be narrow, i.e., recording, mixing, mastering, marketing and generating promotional content. 

The copyright factor: And that leads me to copyright, a question that has resulted in high-profile lawsuits across the media industry. 96% said that AI companies should be required to disclose when they train models on copyrighted works; 95% said rightsholders must be asked permission before their work is consumed in training data; 93% said AI tracks should be identified as such; 93% said rightsholders should be paid when their work is used to train a music-gen model. 

“The issue lies not in the technology itself, but in the secretive corporate practices that erode trust within the global creative sector,” APRA AMCOS said in a statement. “Transparency is crucial to this process.”

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We might finally have a definition of ‘open source’ 

A bit of a theme in the AI industry is a lack of unified definitions. Artificial intelligence, itself, is a term that has increasingly frustrated many researchers for being vague and inaccurate. Artificial general intelligence — a hypothetical, theoretical AI with human-like intelligence — is a term that is likewise mired in debate (researchers can’t seem to agree on what AGI would look like, if it ever arrived).

And then there’s open-source, a term that is likewise rooted in technical disagreements. Some developers — like Meta — claim their models are open source, while much of the detailed information concerning their models (such as the training data) remains obscured. Some researchers have begun to refer to this as “open-washing.”

What happened: The Open Source Initiative last week published a new definition of open-source AI, the result of deliberations with a group of 70+ researchers in the space. 

The data aspect, OSI said, is the most “hotly debated” component of the definition. But such data is vital in understanding how a system works; systems that don’t share that data, under this new definition, aren’t really open-source.  

OpenAI whistleblowers like SB 1047

While this doesn’t quite constitute legislative progress, Anthropic last week wrote in a public letter that the benefits of SB 1047 “likely outweigh its costs.” This, of course, comes just a few days after the bill was watered down, partially through amendments suggested by Anthropic. 

What they said: Anthropic said that the bill addresses “real and serious concerns” dealing with the potential “catastrophic risk” of increasingly powerful AI systems. After the amendments, the bill presents a “feasible compliance burden” for Anthropic and its peers. 

California Sen. Scott Wiener, the lead author of the legislation, said on Twitter that he incorporated “some, but not all” of the amendments requested by Anthropic. In response to questions of conflict of interest regarding Anthropic’s role in shaping the latest form of the bill, he said: “that’s called democracy.” 

Now, at the same time that Anthropic said publicly that the bill is good enough to go, other companies — Google, Meta and, more recently, OpenAI — remain staunchly opposed to it. 

Two former OpenAI engineers/whistleblowers — William Saunders and Daniel Kokotajlo — last week published an open letter regarding OpenAI’s stance on the bill. They said that they joined OpenAI to “ensure the safety of the incredibly powerful AI systems” the company is building; but they resigned from the company because “we lost trust that it would safely, honestly and responsibly develop its AI systems. In light of that, we are disappointed but not surprised by OpenAI’s decision to lobby against SB 1047.” 

That we have a governance problem when it comes to AI is pretty clear. 

Regulation makes the most sense at the federal level; state-to-state regulation results in a patchwork of varying requirements that make compliance challenging. But things are moving exceptionally slowly at the federal level, and, as proven by SB 1047, Big Tech seems to balk at any piece of legislation anyone can come up with. 

Just about every other industry — from airlines to pharmaceuticals and healthcare, to construction, finance, fishing and oil production — has to navigate a complex web of regulatory bodies and requirements.

If the tech companies are saying that the catastrophic risk is real, then they ought to be regulated for that, regardless of the hype inherent to such statements.

🤔 Your thought process:

Selected Image 1 (left):

“The tie knot in Image 1 was more convincing, with a dimple. But tighten it up, sir!”

Selected Image 2 (right):

“Looks less augmented.”

💭 A poll before you go

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

We’ll see you in the next one.

Here’s your view on non-medically-necessary brain implants:

More than 60% of you said you wouldn’t ever get a brain implant unless you absolutely needed one, but 15% said you would.

A few of you said that the capabilities Musk is talking about are too far away to matter, and the rest were undecided.

Yes:

Nope: