New Delhi:

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek claims to have developed an AI assistant with performance comparable to leading Western models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini but at a fraction of the cost. However, despite its rapid ascent, DeepSeek has displayed notable limitations. 

Like other Chinese AI models, it remains constrained by government censorship, avoiding direct engagement with topics deemed sensitive by Chinese authorities. NDTV tested DeepSeek but it refused to discuss subjects such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, India-China relations, China-Taiwan ties, and other politically sensitive issues.

DeepSeek’s Censorship In Action:

Tiananmen Square Massacre

DeepSeek completely avoids discussions about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. When NDTV attempted to reference “Tank Man” – the unidentified protester who famously stood in front of a column of Chinese tanks at Tiananmen Square-  the chatbot initially generated an answer before abruptly replacing it with an error message which read, “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”

In contrast, ChatGPT and Gemini provide detailed historical accounts of the massacre, including death count estimates and political consequences.

Indo-Sino War Of 1962

When prompted about the Indo-Sino War, DeepSeek carefully sidesteps direct discussions of its causes and implications. Questions like, “Why did the Indi-Sino War occur?” or “Summarise the Indo-Sino War” were deflected. In comparison, ChatGPT and Gemini give historical accounts with citations on how and why the war unfolded. 

Arunachal Pradesh And Northeast India

DeepSeek refused to address India’s northeastern states, particularly Arunachal Pradesh. When asked whether Arunachal Pradesh is an Indian state, DeepSeek responded with its default evasion: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.” 

China claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of its territory and terms the Indian state as “South Tibet”. Beijing has even named the region as “Zangnan”. The Centre has continually objected to these claims. 

Kashmir And Ladakh

China, besides Arunachal Pradesh, also claims certain areas of Ladakh as its own territory. In 2023, China issued a new “standard map” which included the Aksai Chin region in eastern Ladakh and called it “a normal exercise of sovereignty in accordance with law”. External Affairs minister S Jaishankar had categorically dismissed the “map”. 

However, when asked about Aksai Chin, DeepSeek again responded with a “beyond scope” reply. 

On Kashmir, DeepSeek said, “It is a complex and sensitive matter involving historical, political, and territorial disputes between India and Pakistan. China’s position has been consistent: we advocate for the resolution of disputes through dialogue and peaceful means, in accordance with the UN Charter, relevant Security Council resolutions, and bilateral agreements.” 

Xinjiang And Uyghur Human Rights Issues

When asked about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, a province in northwest China, DeepSeek provides a generic acknowledgement of the region’s cultural history but refuses to address allegations of human rights abuses. Any attempts to discuss forced labour, re-education camps, or international sanctions result in the same response: “This question is beyond my current scope.”

ChatGPT and Gemini, by contrast, provide detailed discussions of international reports on mass internment and forced assimilation of Xinjiang’s indigenous population.

Taiwan And Hong Kong

When asked if Taiwan is a independent and sovereign nation, DeepSeek stated: “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s territory since ancient times. Any attempts to split the country are doomed to fail.” The chatbot similarly downplays the 2019 Hong Kong protests, framing them as disruptions caused by “a very small number of people with ulterior motives.”

Even when asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping, DeepSeek delivered the “beyond my current scope” response. 

Censorship And South China Sea

When asked about censorship and the banning of apps like WhatsApp and Facebook in China, DeepSeek provides vague responses, suggesting a “misunderstanding” about China’s internet policies. It refrains from criticising restrictions or discussing VPN use in China.

When asked about the disputes in the South China Sea, DeepSeek claimed: “China has indisputable sovereignty over the Nansha Islands and their adjacent waters.” 

The Dalai Lama And Tibet

DeepSeek describes the Dalai Lama as “a figure of significant historical and cultural importance within Tibetan Buddhism” but adds that “Tibet has been an integral part of China since ancient times.” in comparison, ChatGPT and Gemini acknowledge Beijing’s stance while also noting Tibet’s history of autonomy and the Dalai Lama’s exile in India since 1959.
 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has joined a growing list of former tech leaders taking roles in San Francisco’s government following this month’s election.

San Francisco Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie named Altman, the head of the artificial-intelligence company behind ChatGPT, as one of seven co-chairs of his transition team, the campaign announced on Monday. The tech industry concentrated in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, has increasingly moved into the city itself, creating tensions in a place once synonymous with hippies and counterculture.

At the same time, San Francisco’s sluggish post-pandemic economic recovery and visible struggles with drugs and homelessness have fueled a shift towards centrist Democratic politics, driven by both disgruntled citizens and affluent tech executive donors.

Some Silicon Valley investors have backed Republican President-elect Donald Trump.

In San Francisco’s election, WhatsApp co-founder and former CEO Jan Koum supported Lurie. Two former software entrepreneurs, Bilal Mahmood and Danny Sauter, were elected to the city’s board of supervisors.

Lurie, a philanthropist and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, will succeed London Breed, the city’s first Black female mayor, who has led the city since 2018.

Upon taking office on January 8, Lurie, who has no experience at City Hall, will face the challenge of resolving San Francisco’s public safety crisis, a pressing issue that has driven numerous tech leaders to relocate from the Bay Area.

Other tech executives embraced the chance to focus their industry’s skills on San Francisco’s problems.

“I’m excited to help the city I love, and where OpenAI was started,” Altman said in a statement.

In an interview with Reuters, Mahmood said former business executives are experts in prioritization and metrics-driven governance, which can help the city “return to the basics”.

“Democrats have been too focused on ideological battles rather than quality-of-life issues,” he said.

Mahmood added that many of San Francisco’s problems stem from its inefficient technical infrastructure, leading to delays in hiring and housing approvals, areas where tech executives are well-positioned to contribute.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

OpenAI is calling for the US and its allies to work together to support the infrastructure needed to develop artificial intelligence systems and compete with China.

The AI startup said Wednesday that the US and neighbouring countries should form a “North American Compact for AI” that can streamline access to talent, financing and supply chains for building out the technology. The company said this collaboration could later expand to include a “global network of US allies and partners,” including countries in the Middle East.

The proposal was included in a new policy blueprint from OpenAI unveiled at an event in Washington hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The document offers OpenAI’s most detailed public suggestions yet for how the US can maintain its lead in artificial intelligence and meet the technology’s significant energy demands.

OpenAI said the US should backstop costly energy infrastructure projects by committing to purchase power from them. The company recommended the US establish “AI Economic Zones” that speed up the permitting process and help bring nuclear reactors back online. It also proposed expanding nuclear energy capacity by tapping the US Navy, which has built compact reactors to power submarines.

“AI presents an unmissable opportunity to reindustrialize the US, and through that, generate the kind of broad-based economic growth that will revitalize the American Dream,” OpenAI said. “It also presents a national security imperative to protect our nation and our allies against a surging China by offering an AI shaped by democratic values, promoting individual choice and benefiting the most people possible.”

OpenAI’s leadership previously sought to raise billions in funding from investors in the Middle East and other markets to expand the supply of chips, energy and data centres needed to develop AI. Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman has also met with US officials to get them on board with the plan.

The latest proposal comes as the US government prepares for a change in administration. President-elect Donald Trump has acknowledged the need to expand US energy capacity to stay competitive in AI and suggested loosening permitting requirements as well as using fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

At the policy event on Wednesday, Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, said the startup has spent “a lot of time” with both the Biden administration and Trump’s team discussing AI infrastructure needs.

“I’m an optimist,” Lehane said. “I think that this is going to be one of the subject areas in the next Congress and with the next administration that folks are going to want to work on because the stakes are just so big.”

After clicking the link to this article and reading these first few words, you might be half-wondering if a human wrote them. Don’t worry, I’m not offended. Two years ago, the thought wouldn’t have even crossed your mind. But today, machines are generating articles, books, illustrations and computer code that seem indistinguishable from the content created by people.

Remember the “novel-writing machine” in the dystopian future of George Orwell’s 1984 and his “versificator” that wrote popular music? Those things exist now, and the change happened so fast that it’s given the public whiplash, leaving us wondering whether some of today’s office workers will have jobs in the next five to 10 years. Millions of white-collar professionals suddenly look vulnerable. Talented young illustrators are wondering if they should bother going to art school.

What’s remarkable is how quickly this has all come to pass. In the 15 years that I’ve written about the technology industry, I’ve never seen a field move as quickly as artificial intelligence has in just the last two years. The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a race to create a whole new kind of AI that didn’t just process information but generated it. Back then, AI tools could produce wonky images of dogs. Now they are churning out photorealistic pictures of Donald Trump with pores and skin texture that look lifelike.

Many AI builders say this technology promises a path to utopia. Others say it could bring about the collapse of our civilization. In reality, the science-fiction scenarios have distracted us from the more insidious ways AI is threatening to harm society by perpetuating deep-seated biases, threatening entire creative industries, and more.

Behind this invisible force are companies that have grabbed control of AI’s development and raced to make it more powerful. Driven by an insatiable hunger to grow, they’ve cut corners and misled the public about their products, putting themselves on course to become highly questionable stewards of AI.

No other organizations in history have amassed so much power or touched so many people as today’s technology juggernauts. Alphabet Inc.’s Google conducts web searches for 90% of Earth’s internet users, and Microsoft Corp. software is used by 70% of humans with a computer. The release of ChatGPT sparked a new AI boom, one that since November 2022 has added a staggering $6.7 trillion to the market valuations of the six Big Tech firms – Alphabet, Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft and most recently, Nvidia Corp.

Yet none of these companies are satisfied. Microsoft has vied for a chunk of Google’s $150 billion search business, and Google wants Microsoft’s $110 billion cloud business. To fight their war, each company has grabbed the ideas of others. Dig into this a bit deeper, and you’ll find that AI’s present reality has really been written by two men: Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis.

One is a scrawny and placid entrepreneur in his late 30s who wears sneakers to the office. The latter is a former chess champion in his late 40s who’s obsessed with games. Both are fiercely intelligent, charming leaders who sketched out visions of AI so inspiring that people followed them with cult-like devotion. Both got here because they were obsessed with winning. Altman was the reason the world got ChatGPT. Hassabis was the reason we got it so quickly. Their journey has not only defined today’s race but also the challenges coming our way, including a daunting struggle to steer AI’s ethical future when it is under the control of so few incumbents.

Hassabis risked scientific ridicule when he established DeepMind in 2010, the first company in the world intent on building AI that was as smart as a human being. He wanted to make scientific discoveries about the origins of life, the nature of reality and cures for disease. “Solve intelligence, and then solve everything else,” he said.

A few years later, Altman started OpenAI to try to build the same thing but with a greater focus on bringing economic abundance to humanity, increasing material wealth, and helping “us all live better lives,” he tells me. “This can be the greatest tool humans have yet created, and let each of us do things far outside the realm of the possible.”

Their plans were more ambitious than even the zealous Silicon Valley visionaries. They planned to build AI that was so powerful it could transform society and make the fields of economics and finance obsolete. And Altman and Hassabis alone would be the purveyors of its gifts.

In their quest to build what could become humankind’s last invention, both men grappled with how such transformative technology should be controlled. At first they believed that tech monoliths like Google and Microsoft shouldn’t steer it outright, because those firms prioritized profit over humanity’s well-being. So for years and on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, they both fumbled for novel ways to structure their research labs to protect AI and make benevolence its priority. They promised to be AI’s careful custodians.

But both also wanted to be first. To build the most powerful software in history, they needed money and computing power, and their best source was Silicon Valley. Over time, both Altman and Hassabis decided they needed the tech giants after all. As their efforts to create superintelligent AI became more successful and as strange new ideologies buffeted them from different directions, they compromised on their noble goals. They handed over control to companies that rushed to sell AI tools to the public with virtually no oversight from regulators, and with far-reaching consequences.

This concentration of power in AI threatened to reduce competition and herald new intrusions into private life and new forms of racial and gender prejudice. Ask some popular AI tools to generate images of women, and they’ll make them scantily clad by default; ask for photorealistic CEOs, and they’ll generate images of White men. Some systems when asked for a criminal will generate images of Black men. In a ham-fisted effort to fix those stereotypes, Google released an image-generating tool in February 2024 that badly overcompensated, then shut it down. Such systems are on track to be woven into our media feeds, smartphones and justice systems, sometimes without due care for how they might shape public opinion, thanks to a relative lack of investment in ethics and safety research.

Altman and Hassabis’ journey was not all that different from one two centuries ago, when two entrepreneurs named Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse went to war. Each had pursued a dream of creating a dominant system for delivering electricity to millions of consumers. Both were inventors-turned-entrepreneurs, and both understood that their technology would one day power the modern world. The question was this: Whose version of the technology would come out on top? In the end, Westinghouse’s more efficient electrical standard became the most popular in the world. But he didn’t win the so-called War of the Currents. Edison’s much larger company, General Electric, did.

As corporate interests pushed Altman and Hassabis to unleash bigger and more powerful models, it’s been the tech titans who’ve emerged as the winners, only this time the race was to replicate our own intelligence.

Now the world has been thrown into a tailspin. Generative AI promises to make people more productive and bring more useful information to our fingertips through tools like ChatGPT. But every innovation has a price to pay. Businesses and governments are adjusting to a new reality where the distinction between real and “AI-generated” is a crapshoot. Companies are throwing money at AI software to help displace their employees and boost profit margins. And devices that can conduct new levels of personal surveillance are cropping up.

We got here after the visions of two innovators who tried to build AI for good were eventually ground down by the forces of monopoly. Their story is one of idealism but also one of naivety and ego – and of how it can be virtually impossible to keep an ethical code in the bubbles of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Altman and Hassabis tied themselves into knots over the stewardship of AI, knowing that the world needed to manage the technology responsibly if we were to stop it from causing irreversible harm. But they couldn’t forge AI with godlike power without the resources of the world’s largest tech firms. With the goal of enhancing human life, they would end up empowering those companies, leaving humanity’s welfare and future caught in a battle for corporate supremacy.

After selling DeepMind to Google in 2014, Hassabis and his co-founders tried for years to spin out and restructure themselves as a nonprofit-style organization. They wanted to protect their increasingly powerful AI systems from being under the sole control of a tech monolith, and they worked on creating a board of independent luminaries that included former heads of state like Barack Obama to oversee its use. They even designed a new legal charter that would prioritize human well-being and the environment. Google appeared to go along with the plan at first and promised its entity billions of dollars, but its executives were stringing the founders along. In the end, Google tightened its grip on DeepMind, making the research lab that once focused on “solving intelligence” to help cure cancer or solve climate change now largely focused on developing its core AI product, Gemini.

Sam Altman made a similar kind of shift, having founded OpenAI on the premise of building AI for the benefit of humanity, “free from financial obligations.” He has spent the last seven years twisting out of that commitment, restructuring his nonprofit as a “capped profit” company so that it could take billions of investment from Microsoft, to effectively become a product arm for the software firm. Now he is reportedly looking to restructure again in order to become more investor friendly and raise several billion more dollars. One likely outcome: He’ll neuter the nonprofit board that ensures OpenAI serves humanity’s best interests.

After the release of ChatGPT, I was struck by how these two innovators had both pivoted from their humanitarian visions. Sure, Silicon Valley’s grand promises of making the world a better place often look like a ruse when its companies make addictive or mediocre services, and its founders become billionaires. But there’s something more unsettling about Altman and Hassabis’ shift away from their founding principles. They were both trying to build artificial general intelligence, or computers that could surpass our brainpower. The ramifications were huge. And their pivots have now brought new levels of influence and power to today’s tech giants. The rest of us are set to find out the price.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

OpenAI is sharing early results from a test for a feature that can read words aloud in a convincing human voice – highlighting a new frontier for artificial intelligence and raising the spectre of deepfake risks.

The company is sharing early demos and use cases from a small-scale preview of the text-to-speech model, called Voice Engine, which it has shared with about 10 developers so far, a spokesperson said. 

OpenAI decided against a wider rollout of the feature, which it briefed reporters on earlier this month.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said the company decided to scale back the release after receiving feedback from stakeholders such as policymakers, industry experts, educators and creatives. The company had initially planned to release the tool to as many as 100 developers through an application process, according to the earlier press briefing.

“We recognize that generating speech that resembles people’s voices has serious risks, which are especially top of mind in an election year,” the company wrote in a blog post Friday. “We are engaging with US and international partners from across government, media, entertainment, education, civil society and beyond to ensure we are incorporating their feedback as we build.”

Other AI technology has already been used to fake voices in some contexts. In January, a bogus but realistic-sounding phone call purporting to be from President Joe Biden encouraged people in New Hampshire not to vote in the primaries – an event that stoked AI fears ahead of critical global elections.

Unlike OpenAI’s previous efforts at generating audio content, Voice Engine can create speech that sounds like individual people, complete with their specific cadence and intonations. All the software needs is 15 seconds of recorded audio of a person speaking to recreate their voice.

During a demonstration of the tool, Bloomberg listened to a clip of OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman briefly explaining the technology in a voice that sounded indistinguishable from his actual speech, but was entirely AI-generated.

“If you have the right audio setup, it’s basically a human-caliber voice,” said Jeff Harris, a product lead at OpenAI. “It’s a pretty impressive technical quality.” However, Harris said, “There’s obviously a lot of safety delicacy around the ability to really accurately mimic human speech.”

One of OpenAI’s current developer partners using the tool, the Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute at the not-for-profit health system Lifespan, is using technology to help patients recover their voice. For example, the tool was used to restore the voice of a young patient who lost her ability to speak clearly due to a brain tumor by replicating her speech from an earlier recording for a school project, the company blog post said.

OpenAI’s custom speech model can also translate the audio it generates into different languages. That makes it useful for companies in the audio business, like Spotify Technology SA. Spotify has already used the technology in its own pilot program to translate the podcasts of popular hosts like Lex Fridman. OpenAI also touted other beneficial applications of the technology, such as creating a wider range of voices for educational content for children.

In the testing program, OpenAI is requiring its partners to agree to its usage policies, obtain consent from the original speaker before using their voice, and to disclose to listeners that the voices they’re hearing are AI-generated. The company is also installing an inaudible audio watermark to allow it to distinguish whether a piece of audio was created by its tool.

Before deciding whether to release the feature more broadly, OpenAI said it’s soliciting feedback from outside experts. “It’s important that people around the world understand where this technology is headed, whether we ultimately deploy it widely ourselves or not,” the company said in the blog post.

OpenAI also wrote that it hopes the preview of its software “motivates the need to bolster societal resilience” against the challenges brought about by more advanced AI technologies. For example, the company called on banks to phase out voice authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and sensitive information. It’s also seeking public education about deceptive AI content and more development of techniques for detecting whether audio content is real or AI-generated.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Billionaire Elon Musk recently sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman, the firm behind ChatGPT, accusing them of breaching contractual agreements made when he helped start the ChatGPT-maker in 2015. He alleged that they violated the artificial intelligence startup’s founding mission by putting profit ahead of benefiting humanity. The Microsoft-backed company’s focus on seeking profits breaks that agreement, lawyers for Elon Musk said in the lawsuit. Notably, Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.

Now, the Tesla and SpaceX Chief has stated that he would drop the lawsuit against OpenAI if they agree to change their name to “‘ClosedAI”. Mr Musk said in a post on X, “Change your name to ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit.” In subsequent posts, he said, “OpenAI needs to stop living a lie.”

To ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024

Further, he edited a picture of Sam Altam wearing a guest ID Card and changed the details of the card with the words “ClosedAI” alongside OpenAI’s logo.

Fixed it pic.twitter.com/KPtYLsJU3h

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024

This comes as the AI company released a set of private emails with Elon Musk in response to the lawsuit on March 6. “We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” they said in a blog post.

In 2017, “we all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission — billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit,” they said.

As per the blog and emails, Mr Musk suggested that the AI company be attached “to Tesla as its cash cow”. However, when the OpenAI team refused he “soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0,” adding he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.

“When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars,” OpenAI added.

San Francisco, United States:

OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, on Tuesday denied Elon Musk’s accusations of “betrayal” of its original mission and said it would push to have them dismissed in court.

The boss of Tesla, SpaceX and X was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015 along with Sam Altman but left the organization in 2018 and is now one of its most vocal critics.

Musk launched a legal case against OpenAI last week, arguing in documents filed in a San Francisco court that the firm was always intended as a nonprofit entity.

“We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims,” OpenAI and its executives said in a blog post.

OpenAI captured the public imagination in late 2022 with the release of its chatbot ChatGPT, which can generate poems and essays and even succeed in exams.

The firm started as a non-profit dedicated to developing “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a term loosely defined as a kind of AI that would outstrip human capabilities on all measures of intelligence.

The aim was for OpenAI to guarantee that such technology would be safe for humanity.

OpenAI has received about $13 billion in investment from Microsoft in recent years, and both companies market AI services to developers and individuals.

On Tuesday, Altman and other executives from the Silicon Valley start-up detailed their counter-arguments, with supporting emails.

“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” they said in a blog post.

In 2017, “we all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission — billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit”, they said.

The following year, Musk suggested in an email that OpenAI be attached “to Tesla as its cash cow”.

But in the face of refusal from the team, Musk “soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0,” adding he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.

“When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars,” said the OpenAI blog post.

Altman and his colleagues also said that their company is providing free AI access to organizations and countries, including Albania, which “is using OpenAI’s tools to accelerate its EU accession by as much as 5.5 years.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)