Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #24

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of our AI bulletin! Check out this week’s selection of the most interesting AI events and happenings. We hope you like it, see you next week! 

North America

• In the US Senate, a new bill titled COPIED is introduced, which is aimed at protecting original written work from being scraped by AI models.  

• Microsoft drops its seat on the OpenAI board, while OpenAI announces a new ML-centered bioscience partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

• Vimeo becomes the latest media platform to implement mandatory AI content labeling.

Europe

• In Badajoz, Spain, 15 minors are sentenced to probation by a local court for distributing explicit AI-generated images of their female classmates. 

• Google’s DeepMind, headquartered in London, publishes a seminal paper, detailing how Google Gemini 1.5 Pro was used to train an AI robot to respond to commands and navigate its way around an office. 

• In Iceland, an early-stage VC fund specializing in AI startups closes its latest funding round with nearly $90 million, showcasing a growing interest in AI technologies across Scandinavia. Despite its population of fewer than 400,000 people, Iceland currently enjoys the highest invested capital per capita of all Nordic countries.

Asia

• Japan’s SoftBank acquires British semiconductor producer Graphcore, elevating its position in the global AI race.

• An international film conference, featuring a contest for AI-produced short films, concludes in Buncheon, South Korea. 

• Alibaba’s AI model is rated first in China and consequently third globally, trailing only GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is embracing AI-powered vehicles by allowing Tesla to bring the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature to the nation’s roads. 

Latin America 

• A Chilean artist based in Santiago, who went viral with his song on social media, explains how AI technology kick-started his music career.

Africa

• A pilot project utilizing AI to power ultrasound imaging for pregnancy scans is launched in Uganda. 

Australia

• Ahead of AI Appreciation Day on July 16, a new report projects that AI spending in Australia will reach $6.4 billion by 2026, further solidifying the nation’s commitment to AI adoption and growth.