Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #19

Hello and welcome to the latest issue of our AI bulletin. This week is packed with interesting events and happenings, so jump right in. Have a splendid weekend!

North America:

• DuckDuckGo launches AI Chat promising IP anonymity and total data protection for users.

• Researchers from UPenn’s de la Fuente Lab publish a seminal paper on ML-powered antibiotics discovery.

• eBay introduces an AI feature that turns everyday photos into professional-grade imagery for product listings.  

• Rest of World posts an interview with Irene Solaiman, Head of Global Policy at Hugging Face, in which she discusses challenges of the AI industry, including racial bias and voice cloning. 

• Mozilla announces Mozilla Builders, an inaugural accelerator aimed at attracting developers and creating AI models that can run directly on personal devices instead of relying on cloud services.

Europe:

• In Austria, the privacy advocacy portal NOYB lodges a complaint in 11 European countries against Meta’s new privacy policy change, which allows the company to utilize and share user profile data for AI training.   

• Google rolls out its Gemini app in Europe and releases SurfPerch, an AI tool for coral reef preservation jointly developed with researchers from the University of Bristol and University College London.

• AI-generated images are competing in the semifinal of the first international AI beauty pageant, the World AI Creator Awards, launched by the UK-based Fanvue.

• Microsoft announces a $3.2 billion investment in Sweden’s AI infrastructure.  

Asia:

• Asia’s largest tech expo focusing on AI innovation, Computex, concludes in Taipei with an appearance by Taiwan-born Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

• Singapore unveils a US-backed AI Talent Bridge initiative with the goal of providing tech opportunities for 130,000 workers in the Southeast Asian nation.

• An AI team from Stanford apologizes to China’s OpenBMB for unknowingly plagiarizing their LLM. 

Australia:

• Scientists from the University of South Australia are developing a new AI-based image processing solution that could prevent future occurrences of the country’s infamous wildfires.