Good morning. Drones are still flying over the East Coast, and no one really knows what they are.

I haven’t seen any (have you?). The government continues assuring people that there is no evidence the drones pose a threat to public safety, but we still don’t know what exactly they are, or who’s operating them.

The FBI suggested most of the sightings are a case of “mistaken identity,” with people misidentifying small, legal and manned aircraft as drones of mysterious origins.

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

In today’s newsletter:

AI for Good: NASA’s expanded geospatial model 

In August of 2023, NASA — in collaboration with IBM — released the Prithvia Geospatial foundation model, an openly accessible AI model trained on an enormous quantity of geographical data and designed to enable targeted Earth observation. 

What happened: This month, NASA released an updated version of the model that expands its capabilities and its potential applications. 

Why it matters: “We’ve embedded NASA’s scientific expertise directly into these foundation models, enabling them to quickly translate petabytes of data into actionable insights,” Kevin Murphy, NASA’s chief science data officer, said. “It’s like having a powerful assistant that leverages NASA’s knowledge to help make faster, more informed decisions, leading to economic and societal benefits.”

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Microsoft’s new model: Small, but mighty

Even as many developers remain convinced of the endless, exponential power afforded them by steadily increasing the size of already enormous Large Language Models (LLMs), some have been paying increasing attention to the idea of Small Language Models (SLMs). 

Functionally, there’s no difference between the two other than size; where an LLM might have trillions of parameters (GPT-4 is rumored to have 1.8 trillion), an SLM might have only billions. The idea is to optimize the training and post-training process to design a more efficient model — which makes it cheaper to use and more energy efficient — that is generally as capable as an LLM. 

What happened: Microsoft last week released Phi-4, the latest in its series of small Phi models. Microsoft markets the Phi family as the “best quality for the cost,” adding that it’s a “smaller, less compute-intensive model for generative AI solutions.”

The details: This latest version of Phi-4 — a 14 billion parameter model — is either comparable with, or outperforms, similar and larger models on certain benchmarks, according to Microsoft. The research presenting Phi-4 has not been peer-reviewed, and so has not been independently verified. 

This involved three main steps; a careful curation and filtering of high-quality data, — “including web content, licensed books and code repositories” — a refined post-training process and a synthetic data pipeline. The researchers used the organic data as “seeds” for the synthetic data, inputting it through a generative AI system to transfigure it into synthetic information far better suited to the internal structure of a language model. 

ONLY 2 DAYS LEFT: This Startup is Giving AI The Upgrade it Needs

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Meta rolls out a different kind of AI model 

Meta last week launched two new AI models. In a departure from the regular slew of model announcements and launches, these aren’t your normal generative AI models. 

The details: The first, called Meta Motivo, is a foundation model designed to achieve more realistic movements of virtual avatars. According to Meta, it paves the way toward a more realistic Metaverse.

You can try a demo of both models here. 

These latest releases come as Meta has steadily increased its AI investments; it is expected to spend as much as $40 billion in capital expenditures this year alone. 

Meta said it is openly releasing the code in addition to the models themselves, making these two models more open than other Meta releases, such as Llama. 

None of the research here has been peer-reviewed or independently verified. 

UK considers upending copyright law in favor of AI companies  

U.K. government officials, according to reporting from the Sunday Times and Politico, are planning to launch a consultation this week regarding a series of proposals intended to reshape copyright law in the country.

The details: According to the reports, the proposal at hand here would legally allow AI developers to train their models on copyrighted materials. 

Artists, including Paul McCartney, have come out against the proposal, calling instead for an ‘opt-in’ regime. The proposal additionally prompted a letter from the Copyright Alliance, a U.S. organization, that warned Peter Kyle, secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, away from the proposal, according to the FT. 

“Any UK government action that degrades copyright — by creating an exception for AI use, for example — creates a legal environment that discourages U.K. and U.S. creators and rights holders from participating and investing in creative endeavors within the United Kingdom,” the letter reads. 

The government responded by saying no decision had yet been made. 

The backlash: Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of Fairly Trained, said the proposals would be “disastrous for creators (and) the creative industries.”

The landscape: A U.K. parliamentary committee in February published a 95-page report on AI that specifically included mention of the copyright challenges posed by the tech. 

OpenAI, shortly before the publication of said report, told the House of Lords that it would be "impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials."

The copyright infringement lawsuits, meanwhile, filed against AI developers have become numerous and have yet to be either dismissed or otherwise resolved. The AI developers have stuck hard to their perspective that it is morally and legally fair for them to train their models using copyrighted material without the permission or compensation of the original creators; the creators have largely, and vehemently, disagreed, leading to battles in U.S. courts over that fundamental issue of whether training an AI model is legally protected as “fair use” in the U.S. 

This will be an interesting one to watch. However things land, we’re looking at a pivotal point in the U.K., one that will either enshrine protections for creators or give tech companies free rein, something that might well make London a desirable location for AI development. 

I’ll just add, as Newton-Rex has said in the past, that requiring licensing of copyrighted material does not prevent society from reaping any benefits that generative AI has to offer; health models, weather models, climate models, geospatial models — all of which offer an inkling of the true positive promise of the technology — don’t need copyrighted data to function, and they don’t threaten to disrupt entire industries.

🤔 Your thought process:

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💭 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 data center air pollution:

While 44% of you said you don’t live near a data center, 22% do, and they said that the air pollution is terrible.

10% of you said you live near a data center, but you haven’t noticed any air pollution from it.

Seems fine:

I do not: