OpenAI Has Everything Under Control 😎

It looks like large-scale fears about the rise of artificial intelligence have reached the ears of OpenAI as the ChatGPT creator looks to aussage those concerns. The Microsoft-backed company said it is creating a new research team to "steer and control AI systems much smarter than us" and prevent it from going rogue.

As part of those efforts, the company will dedicate 20% of its compute power to date over the next four years to solving the problem of alignment, which focuses on ensuring AI remains beneficial to humans. So far though, OpenAI says it cannot prevent a superintelligent AI from going rogue. Yikes!

Furthermore, the company was candid about when it expects a so-called superintelligent AI to be available to the world at large: sometime this decade. "We focus on superintelligence rather than AGI to stress a much higher capability level. We have a lot of uncertainty over the speed of development of the technology over the next few years, so we choose to aim for the more difficult target to align a much more capable system," the company said.

OpenAI taking a preemptive step to have fail safes in place before something goes terribly, terribly wrong is an encouraging start, but is also akin to self regulation in the AI industry. Industry self regulation is a slippery slope, so there's no telling how this will work.

Halo x World of Warcraft? Coming Right Up!

Xbox fans hoping to see a World of Warcraft subscription in their Gamepass subscription might not have to wait for long after a U.S. judge cleared a key hurdle in Microsoft's pending acquisition of videogame maker Activision Blizzard, Reuters reported.

The Windows maker was facing resistance from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which argued the merger would hurt gamers and is bad for competition, including by limiting the wildly successful Call of Duty franchise to Xbox consoles. Microsoft has already argued that limiting the games to its own consoles would hurt its bottom line and pointed at the 10-year contracts it has reached with rivals (except Playstation maker Sony) that would give them continued access to the Call of Duty games.

After hearing arguments from both sides, U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco sided with Microsoft, concluding that the U.S. FTC had failed to show "it is likely to succeed on its assertion the combined firm will probably pull Call of Duty from Sony PlayStation, or that its ownership of Activision content will substantially lessen competition in the video game library subscription and cloud gaming markets."

The report further said Britain's Competition and Markets Authority is also backtracking on its previous opposition to the deal, now offering to work with Microsoft on addressing its concerns so the deal can go through.

And just like that, Microsoft is now much, much closer to buying Activision Blizzard for nearly $69 billion in one of the largest merger transactions in video gaming history.

Microsoft ranked #6 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings while Activision Blizzard was on the #26 spot.

In Other News.. 📰

• More than a quarter of jobs in the OECD rely on skills that could be easily automated in the coming artificial intelligence revolution, and workers fear they could lose their jobs to AI — via Reuters.
• US judge blocks Biden officials from contacting social media sites — via The Verge.
• Google quietly ditched plans for an AI-powered chatbot app for Gen Z — via CNBC.
• Google hit with lawsuit alleging it stole data from millions of users to train its AI tools — via CNN.
• Meta exec says ‘the metaverse hype is dead’ and he’s happy: ‘Now we can put our heads down to build’ — via Fortune.
• Microsoft cuts more jobs — via Axios.

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends!

See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon