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Meta, Google and Qualcomm along with four other technology companies have announced that they are putting together a new group called the Coalition for Open Digital Ecosystems (CODE), to encourage and ensure the development of open digital systems.
The moves comes after a marathon 38 hours of discussion over three days in Europe led to the drafting of the new AI Act which is due to go into effect in 2025.
According to reports in Reuter’s news agency, the group aims to promote platforms that are more open and systems to ensure growth in the industry across Europe by working with academics and policymakers through the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and through any new rules that come into effect in Europe.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA), according to the legislation, sets out a list of clearly defined objective criteria to identify “gatekeepers.”
Gatekeepers, the act explains, are large digital platforms providing core services, such as online search engines, app stores and messenger services. The DMA will come into effect starting in March 2024.
More to the point, the DMA envisages a situation where third party apps will be interoperable with the gatekeepers’ services.
The new CODE group will push for the implementation of these open systems to offset the possible negative impacts of the upcoming EU AI act. The other members of the group include Honor, Lenovo, Motorola, Nothing, Opera and Wire. It also includes French augmented reality start-up Lynx, in an area of tech development which France has actively encouraged.
"We have had a number of conversations in the past few months about what 'good' looks like when it comes to digital ecosystems in Europe, what fosters innovation, and what will positively impact competitiveness. We think openness is the crucial element," Lynx founder Stan Larroque said in a statement sent to Reuters.
This is possibly why the French president, on a visit to the southern French city of Toulouse, came out against the proposed EU legislation as it currently stands, saying that he believed it could stifle innovation in artificial intelligence and risks hampering European tech companies more than rivals in the US and China.
The irony of it is that the legislation, while completed, has been not been seen by anyone other than lawmakers. However, a statement from the European parliament outlined what is likely to be included in banned applications. They include:
- Untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases
- Emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions
- Social scoring based on social behavior or personal characteristics
- AI systems that manipulate human behavior to circumvent their free will
- AI used to exploit the vulnerabilities of people (due to their age, disability, social or economic situation)
There is still a lot to be done before the act is finalized, but it is on the way in the first half of next year. What the law looks like when passed remains to be seen, but with the likes of CODE, opposition to the legislation seems sure.
Collaboration Platform LiveTiles Calls In Receivers
Despite the massive appeal of enterprise collaboration platforms and the ongoing digital transformation strategies being implement by many companies, LiveTiles has been forced to call in receivers.
The company’s assets and operations are now in the hands of KordaMentha, who were appointed on December 7th.
According to a statement from KordaMentha, “the receivers are appointed to LVT only and not to any of LVT’s subsidiaries…which remain unaffected by the receivership appointment.”
The statement adds, “Receivers expect that all subsidiaries will continue to operate on a business-as-usual basis and with minimal disruption, while the receivers seek offers for the sale or recapitalization of the group.”
Earlier this year, LiveTiles reviewed its operations in order to cut its operating costs, which results in a 36% reduction in operating costs, according to reports in ARN. However, this impacted revenues, which dropped by 42% compared with the previous year and had a negative impact on its R&D partnerships.
The company had previously said that it had more than 900 enterprise customers and had secured 63 new customers over the course of 2023.
Founded in 1994 by Karl Redenbach and Peter Nguyen-Brown, LiveTiles focuses developing and improving employee experiences without neglecting functionality. It has made three acquisitions over the course of its history including Cycl in 2019, Wizdom in 2019 and Hyperfish in 2018.
Microsoft Upgrades Microsoft 365 Tools for New Year
However, collaboration capabilities are still driving workplace development at Microsoft, and there are no signs that this is going to change any time soon. Case in point: the recent release of support for voice transcriptions in the Outlook for Windows app. However, that is not all that is on the way, particularly for Microsoft 365.
In February, for example, Microsoft will bring Copilot to Outlook for Windows, which will help users write emails using the tone necessary to create a suitable reply to messages, according to a new entry on its roadmap. Copilot here will “coach [users] on how to best get your message across and you can adjust the tone and length of your message,” the entry reads. Copilot is also getting a new place in Teams. According to the roadmap, it will soon be included in the chat list for users so that they will not have to leave Teams to access it.
There is more for Teams on the way too. The roadmap shows that as of February, watermark enabled Microsoft Teams meetings will support PowerPoint Live and Whiteboard watermarks, while administrators will also be able to decide if users will be able to participate in external meetings or not. For those that need to chat between multi-tenant organization contacts, the new default setting will enable external chat creating a single conversation thread. As part of this change, existing B2B chat threads will be available as read-only.
Finally, for SharePoint, Microsoft will offer support for search that allows users customize out of the box verticals for Microsoft Search and add new verticals and filters based on SharePoint content.
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All of these add to the growing functionality of Microsoft 365 and the different apps that come with it, and goes a long way to explain why Statista reports that in the first quarter of the 2024 fiscal year, Microsoft reported $10 billion dollars in income from productivity and business processes. This represents an increase of close to $2 billion dollars compared to the same quarter in the previous year.
According to the same source, in its 2023 financial year, Microsoft generated $69 billion U.S. dollars from its productivity and business processes segment and a further $88 billion through its intelligent cloud segment.
Mistral AI Raises $415M, Partners with Google Cloud
If anyone had any doubts about the exuberance of the generative AI market, they only have to look the startup Mistral AI. The French company has just closed a massive funding deal of $415 million in a Series A round that values the company at around $2 billion.
The company, which released its first model called Mistral 7B in September, also announced that it is opening its commercial platform this week.
Its 7B model with 7.3 billion parameters outperforms bigger offerings, including Meta’s Llama 2 13B.
Mistral 7B was released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded and used anywhere. This is where the difference with many other models lie, notably that developers can download it on their own servers in their own organizations. In addition to the Mistral 7B model (“Mistral-tiny”), developers will be able to access the new Mistral 8x7B model (“Mistral-small”), through its developer platform, which has just been released in beta. It also has a third model, Mistral-medium, which is available on Mistral’s developer platform.
Mistral AI raised a $112 million seed round less than six months ago to set up a European rival to OpenAI, an impressive feat given that the company was only founded at the end of 2022.
“Since the creation of Mistral AI in May, we have been pursuing a clear trajectory: that of creating a European champion with a global vocation in generative artificial intelligence, based on an open, responsible and decentralized approach to technology,” Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement issued to the Bloomberg news service.
However, there is more: Mistral AI is also collaborating with Google Cloud to distribute its LLM. The announcement, which was made in the middle of this week, also means that Mistral AI will use Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure, to test, build and scale up its models. As the next few months unfold, it may be that Mistral AI becomes Google’s answer to Microsoft with OpenAI. There is a long way to go, but as we have seen already, a year, or even six months, is a long time in generative AI.
Google Upgrades Workspace eSignature Offering
Finally this week, Google is rolling out eSignature support to all Workspace individual subscribers. This will enable solo entrepreneurs and micro-enterprises to offer their customers digital signatures on any of their documents.
While it is designed for important business documents like contracts for those working in Google Workspace, users can request signatures from users that are not signed up to Google workplace tools especially in Google Docs and Drive, according to a post about the updates.
The release is no surprise given that Google started offering eSignatures during the summer, but only to beta testers. This announcement moves the process forward by offering this capability to anyone. Since the summer release, it has also improved the eSignature tool by offering:
- Audit trails of all documents signed
- The ability to request signatures for more than one person
- Request signatures from people that do not use Gmail
- Sign documents that are contained in Google drive, although this is still only in beta.
In the coming months it will also enable users to reuse a PDF file as a contract template as well as the offering users the ability to create custom fields.
According to a Google post about the release, Google Workspace editions can apply to beta test eSignature. It is available to Google Workspace Individual Subscribers since December 7th.