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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, walks from lunch during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 6, 2022, in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence research startup OpenAI on Tuesday introduced a tool that’s designed to figure out if text is human-generated or written by a computer.

The release comes two months after OpenAI captured the public’s attention when it introduced ChatGPT, a chatbot that generates text that might seem to have been written by a person in response to a person’s prompt. Following the wave of attention, last week Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI and said it would incorporate the startup’s AI models into its products for consumers and businesses.

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Schools were quick to limit ChatGPT’s use over concerns the software could hurt learning. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said education has changed in the past after technology such as calculators has emerged, but he also said there could be ways for the company to help teachers spot text written by AI.

OpenAI’s new tool can make mistakes and is a work in progress, company employees Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Lama Ahmad, Scott Aaronson and Jan Leike wrote in a blog post, noting that OpenAI would like feedback on the classifier from parents and teachers.

“In our evaluations on a ‘challenge set’ of English texts, our classifier correctly identifies 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as ‘likely AI-written,’ while incorrectly labeling human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time (false positives),” the OpenAI employees wrote.

This isn’t the first effort to figure out if text came from a machine. Princeton University student Edward Tian earlier this month announced a tool called GPTZero, noting on the tool’s website that it was made for educators. OpenAI itself issued a detector in 2019 alngside a large language model, or LLM, that’s less sophisticated than what’s at the core of ChatGPT. The new version is more prepared to handle text from recent AI systems, the employees wrote.

The new tool is not strong at analyzing inputs containing fewer than 1,000 characters, and OpenAI doesn’t recommend using it on languages other than English. Plus, text from AI can be updated slightly to keep the classifier from correctly determining that it’s not mainly the work of a human, the employees wrote.

Even back in 2019, OpenAI made clear that identifying synthetic text is no easy task. It intends to keep pursuing the challenge.

“Our work on the detection of AI-generated text will continue, and we hope to share improved methods in the future,” Hendrik Kirchner, Ahmad, Aaronson and Leike wrote.

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Microsoft enters portable gaming with new ROG Xbox Ally devices

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Microsoft enters portable gaming with new ROG Xbox Ally devices

Microsoft ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X Handheld devices

Source: Xbox

Microsoft Xbox players will soon be able to take their favorite games anywhere with the launch of the new ROG Xbox Ally handhelds.

This is a first for Xbox, which has never released a handheld before.

The devices, developed in collaboration with ASUS, offer a full-screen Xbox experience meant for portable play.

Players will be able to access Xbox games, stream content, and play on the go with built-in support for cloud gaming.

“Players can look forward to an approachable gaming experience that travels with you wherever you go, featuring several new and first-of-their kind features on both devices,” Microsoft said in a press release.

The announcement follows last week’s debut of Nintendo‘s flagship Switch 2 and sets the stage for a new chapter in portable gaming.

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Vantage raises $820 million in a first-of-its-kind cloud and AI data center deal in Europe

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Vantage raises 0 million in a first-of-its-kind cloud and AI data center deal in Europe

U.S. data center operator Vantage has raised 720 million euros ($821.4 million) — the first of its kind deal in Europe.

The asset-backed securitization (ABS) deal, the first ever euro-denominated with data center assets on the continent, involves four data centers in Germany.

The company said it will be paying on average a 4.3% coupon on the bonds issued through the process.

In an ABS, Vantage raises money by using its data center infrastructure and future revenues from the facilities as collateral.

Vantage said it will use the funds primarily to pay off existing construction loans previously secured for the facilities.

“We believe the ABS market in particular is kind of best suited for our type of asset, which is real estate centric, high credit quality tenants, long term leases, something that is almost perfect for the ABS investor,” Sharif Metwalli, chief financial officer of Vantage Data Centers, told CNBC.

Vantage added that despite the large sum borrowed, the demand from investors exceeded the amount raised.

“So this transaction was actually pretty highly levered, frankly,” Rich Cosgray, senior vice president of global capital markets at Vantage Data Centers told CNBC. “It was higher leverage than our prior transaction and we had some investors that just weren’t comfortable at that leverage level.”

“Yet, despite that, we were basically two and four times oversubscribed on the respective financings, and we were able to tighten pricing pretty meaningfully through the marketing process,” Cosgray added.

The four facilities — two in Berlin and two in Frankfurt — have access to around 55 megawatts of power and “are fully leased to hyperscale customers,” the company said in a statement. The four facilities were valued at more than $1 billion earlier this year.

Last year, Vantage also raised £600 million through the first-ever securitization of a data center in Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA). The deal involved two units from the company’s Cardiff campus with 148 megawatts of electricity power. Across the region, the company has 2,500 megawatts of data center capacity either operational or under development.

The transaction was led by Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank as joint lead managers and Vantage was represented by the British law firm Clifford Chance.

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IonQ buys UK quantum startup Oxford Ionics for more than $1 billion

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IonQ buys UK quantum startup Oxford Ionics for more than  billion

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

IonQ is buying United Kingdom-based quantum computing startup Oxford Ionics in a deal valued at nearly $1.1 billion.

Shares gained about 4%.

The companies said in a release that the deal will combine IonQ’s quantum computing hardware and software knowledge with Oxford Ionics’ semiconductor chip technologies. The company aims to deliver breakthroughs in the field and capitalize on growing revenue opportunities.

“We believe the advantages of our combined technologies will set a new standard within quantum computing and deliver superior value for our customers through market-leading enterprise applications,” said IonQ CEO Niccolo De Masi in a release.

The deal, which is expected to close this year, includes $1.065 billion worth of IonQ shares and about $10 million in cash. The merged company expects to build systems with 256 qubits by 2026, over 10,000 by 2027 and 2 million by 2030.

Interest in quantum computing has skyrocketed in recent months after technology giants Microsoft and Alphabet announced new chip breakthroughs. Experts tout the technology’s ability to solve intricate computing tasks unachievable by other computers.

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IonQ’s CEO previously told CNBC that he wants the company to become the “800-pound gorilla” in the quantum world.

Shares of Maryland-based company, which went public through a special purpose acquisition company in late 2021, are down about 6% year to date. The stock has soared more than 400% from a year ago.

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