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Welcome to The Prompt.
With the advent of AI, some companies are being inundated with applications from people suspected of being North Korean operatives.
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Forbes magazine reported that AI tools are helping North Koreans covertly apply for thousands of remote IT jobs in the United States. Companies large and small are inundated with job applications from thousands of suspected North Korean operatives. They make hundreds of millions of dollars and transfer the money to the North Korean government. The U.S. government believes the money is being used to fund weapons of mass destruction programs. With the help of AI tools, these workers can run multiple job profiles and apply for hundreds of jobs at once.
Now, let's look at the headlines.
Regulation
This week, the California State Assembly will vote on SB1047, a controversial bill that seeks to regulate the most advanced and powerful AI models. If passed, the bill would require developers of AI models that cost more than $100 million to train or require a certain amount of computing power to implement safeguards and have those safeguards audited by a third party.
The bill also requires AI companies to outline how to shut down AI models and effectively implement a technology “kill switch” if necessary. The bill would allow state attorneys general to sue developers if an AI model causes serious harm, such as multiple deaths or injuries or damages of more than $500 million.
Silicon Valley leaders are sharply divided on the bill: xAI and Tesla founder Elon Musk and Anthropik CEO Dario Amodei support the bill, while leaders of OpenAI, Meta, and Google have expressed concern that the bill will stifle innovation.
Personnel restructuring
Three of the five co-founders of French AI startup H have left the company due to “operational and business differences,” The Information reports. The departures come just months after the startup raised a massive $220 million seed round from billionaires including Eric Schmidt and Bernard Arnault to develop AI agents that can handle multi-step tasks.
This Week's AI Deals
Coding automation startup Cursor AI has raised $60 million in Series A funding at a $400 million valuation, CEO Michael Truell told Forbes. The company's AI tools are popular among developers at big AI startups like OpenAI and Midjourney, where they are used to write, edit and predict parts of code. But Cursor isn't short of competitors. The market is flooded with similar AI coding assistants, including Codeium, which unveiled an engine that can process 100 million lines of code, and Cognition Labs, which has produced an AI software engineer named Devin at a $2 billion valuation. Tech giants are also developing their own AI programming tools. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company's AI assistant, Q, has saved $260 million and 4,500 years of time in software development.
Deep Dive
The idea of America is big business on Facebook: The social network is home to more than 100 pages dedicated to the theme of American patriotism, with names like Proud American, Proud To Be An American, American Story and We Are America.
But the vast majority of those pages, despite the name, aren't American at all. Rather, they're run by foreign clickfarmers based in Macedonia, who use AI to produce a near-endless soup of clickbait. Posts sharing prayers for American soldiers, rewritten tweets, memes, and photos of old Hollywood pin-up girls are linked to AI-generated articles against which the clickfarmers can sell ads.
Headlines like “A Father's Heroism: The Tragedy of Phil Delegrazi and Son Anthony” fuel short, uninformative articles on Web sites that are often plastered with sexual ads. These ad-supported pages have a pretense of Americana because they are paid for each click on a link. In the advertising world, American clicks are among the most valuable.
A Forbes investigation identified 67 now-deleted Facebook pages that described themselves as champions of American news, culture and identity but were actually based overseas. As of August 20, these pages had a combined total of more than 9 million followers, more than the Facebook pages of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Thirty-three of the pages were operated in Macedonia and are located in 23 countries, including Canada, France, Morocco, Venezuela and Vietnam.
Click farmers, particularly Macedonian click farmers, have a long history on Facebook. During the 2016 presidential election, teenagers from the small Eastern European country spread fake news to millions of Americans on Facebook, raking in tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue. In 2019, a similar Eastern European page used the same tactics, this time reaching nearly half of Americans on Facebook.
Now, AI has given those same Facebookers the ability to create a nearly limitless amount of low-quality (or outright fake) news, and in at least some cases, this AI-generated crap is starting to break through. Facebook pages have started using generic AI-generated imagery (bald eagles, Stars and Stripes, soldiers in camouflage, and the occasional Statue of Liberty) to appeal to U.S. Facebook users, and in at least some cases, it's working. Last week, a post by the Canadian-based page American Patriots, featuring an AI-generated photo of a U.S. soldier and his child, garnered more than 100,000 likes and 35,000 comments. The American Patriots page, like most others, was directing users off Facebook to click farms with low-quality stories.
Read the full story at Forbes.
Weekly Demo
Want to practice having difficult conversations at work or get tips on negotiating a raise? According to Forbes, companies are increasingly hiring AI-powered career coaches to replace expensive human counselors, who can cost up to $240 an hour. But people who have interacted with AI-based career counselors say the chatbots often lack nuance and sometimes give confusing advice. “I'm already confused about my career. AI just makes me more confused,” said one third-year law student.
AI Index
Two years ago, the Biden administration passed the CHIPS Act to encourage domestic semiconductor and chip development in the US as it competes with China over the development of AI models. But bureaucracy and rigorous application processes mean little of the funding reaches the small businesses that need it most, Forbes reports.
Less than 7%
Applicants received funding from 380 companies that submitted applications.
9 of 23 results
The semiconductor manufacturers approved for financial assistance were small and medium-sized enterprises.
$4 billion out of $134 billion
The amount of grants and loans given to small and medium-sized enterprises. The rest went to semiconductor giants such as Intel, TSMC, and Samsung.
Model Behavior
American rapper and singer Will.i.am is launching an AI-powered radio station called Raidio.FYI. Listeners will be able to listen to songs, news and ask questions to hosts through a chatbot app built on OpenAI's large-scale language model, according to The Sunday Times. The rapper is reportedly an investor in OpenAI and Anthropic.
