AI News Roundup

There’s a lot happening in the world of AI. To help you stay on top of the latest news, we have compiled a roundup of the developments we are following.

The Beijing Internet Court has ruled that a plaintiff who used generative AI to produce a digital image has established that he exhibited, through a series of prompts, a sufficient amount of control over the image creation process to have an enforceable copyright. This is in some tension with the US Copyright Office’s position that an author can only be granted a copyright over the portions of an image that were the result of human creativity.

The UK High Court has held that an invention involving an artificial neural network does not fall into that country’s subject matter exclusion on computer programs per se. The UKIPO has responded by updating its examination guidance to be in line with the holding. This potentially opens up the UK as a venue for machine learning and AI patenting, whereas it was previously considered to be hostile to those technologies.

Google DeepMind published a paper in Nature including 2.2 million different crystal structures. The set of new materials includes 380,000 novel stable materials, expanding the number of known stable materials by an order of magnitude. The DeepMind researchers utilized an AI tool called graph networks for materials exploration (GNoME), which is a graph neural network trained on known materials. Google claims that external researchers have independently created 736 of GNoME’s new materials in the lab.

Amazon announced a corporate-focused AI assistant named “Q.” The chatbot aims to help employees with daily tasks, such as “summarizing strategy documents, filling out internal support tickets and answering questions about company policy.” Amazon claims that Q is more secure and private than a consumer chatbot, better addressing corporate security and privacy concerns.