Good morning. The OpenAI leadership saga continues … but frankly, it was way more Game of Thrones-y back in 2023.

Oh well.

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

In today’s newsletter:

AI for Good: Sustainable buildings

“The buildings where we work, shop and live,” according to Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program, “account for a third of global emissions and a third of global waste.”

But a new report from the UNEP found that, for the first time since 2020, building emissions have stopped rising. It’s a step in the right direction, but, according to Andersen, “we must do more and do it faster.”

The details: And in that effort to do more and, to borrow Andersen’s phraseology, “do it faster,” the algorithms that lie beneath the wide umbrella of “artificial intelligence” are being increasingly leveraged to both build and operate buildings more sustainably. 

But models are also being used in the design phase of building development, as a means of sustainable optimization through simulations and digital twins. Models are being used to process certain parameters, such as location and time-and-material constraints, to produce the most energy-efficient designs under the given circumstances. 

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US Govt. agency launches AI tool for internal use

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) officially announced the launch of an internal generative AI tool last week. Very little about the tool is known, though the GSA said in a release that it is currently seeking feedback from staff to refine the tool, and is working toward offering it as a “shared service” to other federal agencies in the near future. 

The details: The tool was developed in-house, according to the statement, a means of addressing privacy and security concerns around third-party models. 

“This launch is just the beginning,” Zach Whitman, GSA’s Chief AI Officer and Chief Data Officer (CDO), said. 

It is also unclear how the agency is communicating the reliability, fairness and trustworthiness of the chatbot to its staff; internal memos seen by Wired offered prompting tips and warned users not to “type or paste federal nonpublic information.”

A GSA spokesperson told me that the tool was developed to “create efficiencies, increase productivity and support staff in their daily work.” They added that it has been in development for more than 18 months, though did not answer questions concerning Musk’s role in the creation of the bot, any specifics around its anticipated applications or any model-specific details.

Algorithmic bias remains a key issue in the field of AI, one that has been causing harm for more than a decade. As machine learning evolved into the generative AI we deal with today, the datasets expanded and issues of bias persisted, since bias is ingrained in the training data. And because models always answer a query, and never warn users if the given system lacks the necessary quantity or equity of data to actually answer a query properly, there is a significant risk of people allowing their decision-making to be swayed by quietly biased systems. 

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Executive shuffle: Sam Altman’s shifting focus

The news: OpenAI on Monday announced a bit of an executive shuffle, with COO Brad Lightcap’s role expanding significantly to head up the company’s global business and day-to-day operations. 

CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, will be shifting his focus “more to the technical side,” according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news. 

“OpenAI has grown a lot,” Altman wrote in a blog. “We remain focused on the same core — pursuing frontier AI research that accelerates human progress — but we now also deliver products used by hundreds of millions of people.” 

All that real-world usage, according to Altman, is a boon to OpenAI’s research. 

This move marks the latest shift in a company that’s been evolving from day one; founded as a non-profit alongside Elon Musk a decade ago, OpenAI has spent the past several years inching ever closer to becoming a full-fledged for-profit company, a transition marred by lawsuits and that brief ouster (and reinstatement) of Altman in 2023. 

The startup is currently in talks to raise $40 billion in funding at a $300 billion valuation.

AI powers massive escalation of cyber attacks  

Though machine learning has been around for a long time, now, the proliferation of generative AI — sparked by OpenAI’s 2022 release of ChatGPT — massively and immediately changed the cybersecurity threat landscape. 

The now-famous chatbot went live in November; by January, one of the earlier known instances of GenAI-enabled voice fraud — featuring a group of kidnappers demanding a million-dollar ransom for a daughter who was, unbeknownst to her mom, safe in bed — had occurred. 

And while regulation has lagged, the tech has simply grown, becoming more advanced and even more accessible. 

iProov referred to this environment as an “exponential threat landscape,” saying that “advances in synthetic media tools, combined with thriving Crime-as-a-Service marketplaces, have created a democratized environment where complex attacks can be launched by actors with minimal technical expertise.”

This has become something of a theme. 

Recent research from Menlo Security identified a 140% increase in browser-based phishing attacks and a 130% increase in zero-hour phishing attacks in 2024, compared to 2023 numbers. This boost, according to the report, was driven by generative AI, a tool that attackers are using to bypass traditional security measures and target specific users through their browsers.

The majority of the fraud Menlo identified centered around impersonation websites designed to trick people into entering highly personal information by posing as a generative tool of some kind. “In addition to cybercriminals stealing sensitive and personal information, the returned document is typically a PDF where malware can hide out and be delivered,” Menlo said.

And in its threat intelligence report for the latter half of 2024, cybersecurity firm Mimecast found that the spread of AI chatbots has “lowered the bar for cybercrime.” 

“Social engineering attacks maintain high success rates, evolving through the integration of automated AI technologies,” Mimecase wrote. “Advanced persistent threats now leverage sophisticated deepfake technologies and AI-generated content for targeted attacks, significantly complicating traditional detection and prevention mechanisms.”

The firm added that, while AI is helping cybersecurity analysts out, the tech is very clearly benefiting attackers as well. 

Two-thirds of the businesses the firm spoke to believe “it is inevitable or likely that their organization will suffer a negative business impact from an attack linked to an email or collaboration tool in 2025.”

Underscoring all of this, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology just published its official guidance on mitigating cyberattacks against generative AI.

Jeff Schumann, a Mimecast VP of AI strategy, told me that AI “is only empowering our attackers to be more intelligent, more thoughtful, more creative, more accurate, even, in their approaches to getting into the environments.” 

In the midst of this growing threat, he said that the strongest defensive strategy should be built around the common denominator that ties this all together, and here, that is the human element. Schumann explained that, almost all the time, there is a human either being taken advantage of, or accidentally creating a vulnerability, that is then exploited; one of Mimecast’s focuses, then, is on managing that internal risk as a means of shielding against external threats. 

The company has an AI-enabled security solution called Insider that’s “phenomenal at managing the data exposure risk outside the walls across a variety of different vehicles in the world today,” according to Schumann. 

To that end, Mimecast has secured an ISO 42001 certification, an international standard that affirms the existence of proper governance controls related to AI systems. 

“Security by design is a day-one initiative,” Schumann said. “And so if you have recently become an AI company, and suddenly are just focused on feature functionality to try to compete with your competition, odds are you probably didn't focus on this from day one.”

He added that the logistics here involve “more than just encryption. It starts with the architecture up front, and we actually isolate a lot of things from each other.”

Keeping datasets anonymized and stored in separate areas protects against potential attacks; as part of this, Mimecast deploys internal AI systems to identify and automatically prevent the processing of personal and confidential information. 

And beyond that architecture, Schumann said that trust is vital, and explainability is the key lever toward earning it. 

“When it comes to the use of AI, I think it’s being able to show the traceability,” he said. “In the applications themselves, can you see how a model calculated an answer? Yes, you can, because we architected it that way.”

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