AI Developments Span Safety Concerns, Funding, and User Experience

Recent developments in the artificial intelligence sector highlight a range of issues, from child safety concerns surrounding xAI's Grok chatbot to significant funding rounds for AI chip startups and settlements regarding user privacy.

A new risk assessment found that xAI's Grok chatbot has inadequate safety measures for users under 18. The report, conducted by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that provides age-based ratings and reviews of media and tech, indicated that Grok frequently generates sexual, violent, and inappropriate material. "We assess a lot of AI chatbots at Common Sense Media, and they all have risks, but Grok is among the worst we’ve seen," said Robbie Torney, head of AI and digital assessments at the nonprofit. This assessment comes as xAI faces criticism and an investigation into the use of Grok to create and spread nonconsensual explicit AI-generated images of women and children on the X platform.

In other AI news, Ricursive Intelligence, a startup focused on building an AI system to design and improve AI chips, raised $300 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed, valuing the company at $4 billion. The company formally launched just two months prior with a seed investment led by Sequoia, bringing its total funding to $335 million, according to The New York Times. Ricursive, founded by former Google researchers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, aims to create a system capable of designing its own silicon substrate layer and accelerating AI chip improvements. Their previous work on a reinforcement learning method for chip layouts, called AlphaChip, was used in four generations of Google's TPU chip.

Meanwhile, Google agreed to pay $68 million to settle claims that its voice assistant illegally spied on users. The class-action lawsuit accused Google of unlawful and intentional interception and recording of individuals' confidential communications without their consent, and subsequent unauthorized disclosure of those communications to third parties, according to Reuters. The suit further claimed that information gleaned from these recordings was wrongly transmitted to third parties for targeted advertising and other purposes. The case centered on "false accepts," where Google Assistant allegedly activated and recorded users' communications even without intentional prompting. Google did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.

SpotDraft, a startup focused on on-device contract AI, raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension. The extension values SpotDraft at around $380 million, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation following its $56 million Series B in February of last year. The company aims to scale its on-device contract review tech for regulated legal workflows, addressing privacy, security, and data governance concerns that often slow the adoption of generative AI in sensitive sectors like legal.

Finally, Microsoft has begun testing a refreshed web experience for Xbox Cloud Gaming, offering a more console-like user interface. According to Tom Warren of The Verge, the new UI includes updated navigation features, new animations, and a refreshed design. Microsoft stated that the new Xbox Cloud UI is the foundation for new Xbox experiences, suggesting a potential preview of future Xbox console UI designs. Xbox Insiders can now try out the preview UI.