AI News roundup: EU's new AI law gets preliminary approval, Apple's problems with AI and more

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EU reaches preliminary agreement on European Artificial Intelligence Act

Lawmakers from the European Union (EU) have reached a preliminary agreement on the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, a groundbreaking regulation and guideline for the governance of AI within the territory.

• Speaking to the news agency Reuters, Svenja Hahn, European Parliament deputy, said that the committee reached "a solid compromise" between "conservative wishes for more surveillance and leftist fantasies of over-regulation" and believed the new act would "regulate AI proportionately, protect citizens' rights, as well as foster innovation and boost the economy".
• The new rules also classify AI technologies according to various risk levels, from minimal, limited, high and unacceptable. AI tools given a high-risk rating will not be banned but would need to disclose their data collection policies publicly.

Apple facing inner turmoil over Siri

Apple's reluctance to loosen its stance on user privacy and organisational issues have led to Siri being, "widely derided" within the company.

• The article cites over three dozen former employees of the company who say that by 2018, the Siri team had "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant."
• Many employees supposedly left the company to work with competitors like Google or OpenAI because they believed Apple was too conservative in its approach with Large Language Models (LLM) and AI.

ChatGPT prompts will be the next big thing to learn

Most AI will keep relying heavily on the human in the loop to provide instruction, refine outputs and push the technology to new directions.

• In the very near future, employees working in just about every industry imaginable will need to know how to prompt chatbots such as ChatGPT effectively and efficiently. “Using AI models to generate things is expensive, and the outputs can vary massively,” said Ben Stokes, the creator of PromptBase, a marketplace for good AI prompts.
• There’s another important reason to put prompt engineering at the forefront of education and training. The more you learn what works and what doesn’t, and why, the less threatening AI becomes. Relative to the miraculous mass of soft tissue we keep in our skulls, it is still a dumb machine.