Weekly AI Roundup: Ilya Sutskever Founds AI Company, Runway Launches Gen-3 Alpha

“SSI is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap because it is our sole focus,” the company said in a Wednesday X post. “Our team, investors, and business model are all aligned towards achieving SSI.”

Superintelligence is within reach.

Building secure superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technological challenge of our time.

We launched the world's first Straight Shot SSI Lab with one goal and one product: safe superintelligence.

It's called “Safe Superintelligence”…

— SSI Inc. (@ssi) June 19, 2024

“Superintelligence” is a term coined by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2014 book of the same name, to refer to a hypothetical AI that far exceeds human intelligence and can act autonomously.

Sutskever was a leader in the company's brief dismissal of CEO Sam Altman in November, which led to a board shake-up that put Altman back on top. Sutskever left the company last month along with AI safety researcher Jan Rijke, who quickly found a new role at Anthropik. (Sutskever and Rijke previously led OpenAI's superalignment team.)

Runway releases new video generation model focused on human portraits

AI company Runway on Monday announced Gen-3 Alpha, a new AI model that “excels at generating expressive human characters with a wide range of movements, gestures, and emotions, opening up new storytelling opportunities,” according to a company blog post.

It's also possible to create videos in a variety of artistic styles, even venturing into surrealist and fantasy realms — for example, one of the sample videos shared in the blog post was generated from the prompt, “Look out your window at a giant, strange creature walking through a deserted city at night, with only a single streetlight providing a dim light.”

[Watch: Runway’s head of growth marketing Emily Golden in conversation with The Drum reporter Webb Wright at The Drum Live 2024.]

Report finds audiences uncomfortable with AI-generated content in journalism

This year's Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that significant shares of Americans (52%) and Europeans (47%) are uncomfortable with news content that is primarily created by AI.

Survey respondents reported being particularly wary of AI playing a role in journalism that focuses on more sensitive subjects, such as politics and crime.

The report, which surveyed nearly 100,000 people across 47 countries, comes at a time when a growing number of major news organizations are signing content deals with OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT) and exploring other ways to incorporate AI into their business models.

“Overall, journalists' use of AI is still in its infancy, but this is also the period of greatest risk for news organizations,” the Reuters Institute noted in the report. “Our data shows that audiences remain highly ambivalent about the use of this technology, meaning publishers need to be very careful about where and how they deploy AI.”

EU opens AI office

On Sunday, the European Commission (EC), the European Union's executive arm, opened an AI office, the latest step in the ongoing implementation of AI law.

The agency adopted the law in coordination with the EU's 27 member states and is responsible for overseeing safety assessments of “general purpose” AI models, a category the agency has not yet specifically defined.

The AI ​​law, due to take effect later this summer, will put regulatory guardrails on about 15% of AI-powered products and services currently operating in the EU. The remaining 85% will be exempt from the law as they “pose little or no risk in the EU,” EC spokesman Thomas Regnier told The Drum.

Fast food giant McDonald's Restaurant Business reported on June 14 that the chain has discontinued the rollout of its AI-powered drive-thru assistant, which had been installed in more than 100 restaurants.