The Crypto Miners Winning The AI Gold Rush

Welcome back to The Prompt.

AI is now helping humans correct AI output. OpenAI has trained a new GPT-4-based model called CriticGPT to catch mistakes in code produced by ChatGPT. As generative AI models advance and their errors become more subtle, models like CriticGPT could help humans train the systems more efficiently by spotting more problems. Like other AI systems, CriticGPT is not fully accurate–but humans that use the tool to train AI outperform others by 60%.

Now, let’s get into the headlines.

POLITICS + ELECTION

Popular AI chatbots like Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT regurgitated disinformation about the presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Thursday, NBC News reported. Answers produced by the chatbots repeated false claims from a conservative writer’s post that there would be a delay in CNN’s broadcast of the debate which would be used to edit parts of the debate’s footage before it reached the public. CNN denied the claims.

DATA DILEMMAS

AI search startup Perplexity is increasingly citing as sources AI-generated blogs and social media posts, which contain inaccurate and contradictory information, Forbes has learned. The startup is drawing data from AI-generated materials on a wide variety of topics encompassing travel, politics, sports and medical information. In some instances, the answers generated by Perplexity’s search engine also reflected the inconsistencies prevalent in the AI-generated sources, a study by AI content detection platform GPTZero found. Perplexity Chief Business Office Dmitri Shevelenko said in an email statement to Forbes that its system is “not flawless” and that it continuously refines its processes to identify high quality sources.

Meanwhile, Amazon is investigating Perplexity to assess whether the startup violated its terms of service by scraping websites even after developers had attempted to prevent them from doing so, according to Wired. The investigation comes after Wired found a web crawler that was affiliated with the company had disregarded a common web standard that lets entities indicate which websites should not be scraped. Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick said PerplexityBot, the company’s web crawler, had respected the web standard and had not violated terms of service.

Plus, Quora’s chatbot Poe is letting users download files of paywalled news articles, Wired reported.

TALENT RESHUFFLES

In an effort to beef up its artificial general intelligence team, Amazon has hired the cofounders and some employees of Adept, a startup that’s building AI agents that perform various computer-related tasks. As part of the deal, Amazon will also license the two-year-old startup’s technologies, AI models and datasets, the company said. Adept has raised over $400 million in funding from backers like General Catalyst and Greylock and is valued at over $1 billion. The deal mirrors a similar partnership struck by Microsoft, which in March hired most of Inflection’s employees as well as the startup’s CEO Mustafa Suleyman to head its consumer AI business.

AI DEAL OF THE WEEK

VC firm Benchmark is raising $425 million for its eleventh fund to back early stage AI startups, Forbes has learned. The firm’s five partners — Peter Fenton, Eric Vishria and Chetan Puttagunta, Sarah Tavel and Victor Lazarte — plan to invest in AI companies within their area of expertise like consumer tech and cloud computing. The investment firm has already backed a number of AI startups including AI agent startup Sierra and video generation company HeyGen.

DEEP DIVE

Energy has become the hot commodity in the artificial intelligence world. Take cloud computing provider CoreWeave, which earlier this month inked a $3.5 billion deal with Core Scientific. The agreement involves CoreWeave paying $290 million annually over 12 years to host AI-related computing hardware at the Austin-based bitcoin miner’s data centers. CoreWeave will also cover all the related capital expenditures.

The deal was so good that Core Scientific’s stock doubled to $10 in early June, leading some observers to view the company as a new “picks and shovels” play for AI. On June 26, CoreWeave announced a second contract for additional infrastructure, this one projected to bring Core Scientific $1.2 billion in revenue in the coming years. Core Scientific emerged from bankruptcy in January and is one of the largest bitcoin miners in North America.

The soaring demand for heavy-duty computer capacity is driven by the energy needed for AI applications such as ChatGPT—its queries require 10 times the electricity of traditional Google searches. That’s an advantage for companies like Core Scientific that have access to cheap power in states such as Texas and North Dakota. Having sufficient power is vital when you consider that building and connecting new data centers to the grid can take as long as six years, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory research center.

“The demand is insatiable,” says Adam Sullivan, Core Scientific’s CEO. “If we just execute on what is within our current contracted power today, we’d be a top 10 data center company in the United States.”

Driven by the AI boom, data centers’ energy demand could surge to 9% of U.S. power generation by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, which is more than double the current usage.

A shift to AI operations for those with available infrastructure and energy capacity offers potentially compelling benefits. By replacing the volatility of bitcoin with more stable revenue from AI computing, miners can benefit from predictable budgets funded by established customers. This also helps miners boost income to be able to afford the high capital investment necessary to stay competitive with new mining equipment, concluded analysts at Morgan Stanley in an April report.

Read the full article in Forbes.

YOUR WEEKLY DEMO

NBC Universal will use an AI-generated clone of iconic American sportscaster Al Michaels’ voice to offer daily recaps of the Paris 2024 Olympics, the company said. The synthetic voice, trained on Michael’s past NBC broadcasts, will be used to offer personalized coverage of the games via the app. Viewers can pick the sports and topics they are interested in receiving highlights of and the AI-generated voice can render 7 million different versions of recaps, pulling from 5,000 hours of live coverage of the event.

AI INDEX

976

AI-generated news and information websites have been identified by misinformation tracking site NewsGuard.

54

AI-generated content farms are being aggregated by Google News, the report found.

43

Of those AI-generated news sites earn revenue from programmatic advertising.

QUIZ

This semiconductor tech company is using light-based chips to help meet AI’s growing energy demand for data centers:

1. Intel
2. Qualcomm
3. Samsung
4. TSMC

Check if you got it right here.

MODEL BEHAVIOR

Toys ‘R’ Us released an advertisement made almost entirely with OpenAI’s text-to-video AI tool, Sora, eliciting mixed reviews from viewers. (Sora created 80% of the advertisement and post production teams edited the video to add finishing touches.) The ad depicts the company’s late founder, Charles Lazarus, as a young boy who dreams of a toy store. People were quick to point out that the boy’s appearance changes throughout the video and objects keep melting into one another. On social media, people characterized the ad as “lame,” “hollow” and “like a weird dream.”