Samsung bans AI, Italy unbans AI, AI pioneer leaves Google and more

Here is a roundup of the tech news that you may have missed this week.

Samsung tells its employees to not use AI

Samsung has banned its employees from using AI tools this week. This comes a few weeks after there were reports of employees sharing sensitive company information with ChatGPT.

Here's what happened — after Samsung allowed its employees to use programs like ChatGPT for work, one reportedly asked the chatbot to check sensitive database source code for errors.

There were two other cases as well, an employee asking the chatbot for code optimisation, and a third person who fed a recorded meeting into ChatGPT to generate minutes.

While this all looks fine and dandy on the surface, ChatGPT's data policy states that, unless users explicitly opt out, it uses their prompts to train its models. This will mean that the program will use the fed information to learn and build its database.

If an employee doesn't opt out of these options, it is highly likely that the program will retain the information presented to it and will keep these things in the database, while spitting it out to the public if there are prompts for it to do so.

AI pioneer leaves Google

Speaking of AI technologies, Geoffrey Hinton, the "godfather of AI", has resigned as Google Vice-President and engineering fellow to freely warn the public of the risks associated with the technology.

Speaking to The New York Times, he was worried about a few AI functions, namely its capacity to create convincing false images and texts, and in turn creating a world where people will "not be able to know what is true anymore".

"It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.

"The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said.

“But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."

If an AI pioneer is saying these things, it might be wise for us to keep an eye out on how the technology is progressing in the months and years to come.

ChatGPT is unbanned in Italy

Weeks after Italy banned ChatGPT due to privacy concerns, the country has now "unbanned" the program, allowing its residents to continue using it.

This comes after OpenAI introduced some new privacy settings in the app, allowing users to turn off its chat history.

Usage of the program when chat history is disabled will not allow ChatGPT to train and improve OpenAI's models.

Chat will also not appear in the history sidebar, but will be retained for 30 days and reviewed "when needed to monitor for abuse."

Sony has sold over 38 million PlayStation 5s

With 19.1 million units being bought in 2022, Sony has successfully sold 38.4 million units of the PlayStation 5 since its launch in 2020.

After the harrowing years of 2020 and 2021, which saw extreme shortages for gaming peripherals and consoles like the PlayStation 5, Sony has finally managed to catch up to the demand for the console.

Forecasting an 18 million-unit sales for the fiscal year of 2022, the company beat its target by 1.1 million units.

On the other side, Microsoft has reported that the sales for the Xbox consoles (Series X and S) are down by 30 percent this year compared, to the same time period in 2022.

But one has to also take into account that Microsoft had resolved the supply shortage by then, with its consoles being available for purchase in early 2022, compared to the shortages suffered by the PlayStation 5.

Also, some PlayStation units (and in particular controllers) might have been bought for a more... unique... purpose.

Dominic loves tech and games. When he is not busy watercooling his computer parts, he does some pro wrestling.

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