Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #34

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the AI Bulletin! Enjoy our selection of machine learning and data science news from around the globe, arranged chronologically starting with the latest. Have a great weekend, and see you next Friday!

North America

• OpenAI becomes valued at $157 billion after the latest funding round: here’s a succinct video report. The company also introduces a new ChatGPT interface called “canvas” for problem-solving and coding projects.

• Google’s AI voice chatbot Gemini Live now supports more languages, among them German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

• Amazon rolls out a fresh GenAI upgrade across its Fire tablet lineup.

• Microsoft upgrades Copilot with more features, making it a more personalized AI assistant with voice and vision capabilities. Ironically, the next day, Copilot mistakenly reports several living celebrities as dead, including David Attenborough, William Shatner, Michael Caine, and Ian McKellen.

Europe

• Amsterdam-based startup Lapsi Health receives FDA clearance to launch its AI-powered digital stethoscope in the US.

• In Germany, legal experts weigh in on a recent Hamburg court ruling that rejected a photographer’s copyright infringement claim in favor of an AI scraper.

• In the UK, the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch sends a letter to Liz Kendall, the nation’s Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, asking her to abandon plans to monitor bank accounts for fraud using AI. On the same day, Cambridge-based Raspberry Pi unveils its affordable AI Camera with onboard processing.

Asia

• In Singapore, the hotel operations system Vouch announces AI integration across its product suite, which includes content auto-population and real-time language translation. CNA journalist Melody Chan becomes a multilingual AI avatar with help from Tencent Cloud.

• Bhutan Innovation Forum wraps up in Paro, with much of the second day dedicated to discussions about AI-related solutions. 

Africa

• Voice of America releases an episode of the Straight Talk Africa podcast exploring how AI is fueling economic growth on the continent.  

• Small-scale farmers in Kenya are leveraging various AI tools to boost their crop yields: The Guardian takes a closer look.

Latin America

• The Second Ministerial and High Authorities Summit on the Ethics of AI in Latin America and the Caribbean is currently underway in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Australia

• Drawing on their research paper published in August, economists from the University of Tasmania and Monash University in Melbourne outline their vision for how AI can help maintain Australia’s position at the forefront of the global mining industry.