Monthly Archives: May 2023

By Philip van Doorn

Robert Stimpson of Oak Associates Funds has tips for investors on what to look for if they want to invest in tech companies with staying power.

When investors think of technology stocks, they might automatically gravitate toward "the next big thing," or to the giant companies that dominate the S&P 500 . But Robert Stimson, chief investment officer of Oak Associates Funds, makes a case for diversification through exposure to smaller innovators which he believes are "overlooked in this environment."

The River Oak Discovery Fund invests in tech-oriented companies with market capitalizations of $5 billion or less, with an average of about $2 billion. It has a five-star rating, the highest, from Morningstar, despite having what the investment information firm considers "above average" annual expenses of 1.19% of assets under management. The fund is ranked in the 6th percentile among 546 funds in Morningstar's "Small Blend" category for five-year performance and in the 13th percentile among 374 funds for 10-year performance. The performance comparisons are net of expenses.

The Black Oak Emerging Technologies Fund has more of a midcap focus, with some small-cap stocks and follows a similar strategy to that of RIVSX. But with no restriction on the size of companies this fund invests in, "we don't have to sell stocks," Stimpson said. So long-term holdings of this fund include Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM). This fund is rated three stars within Morningstar's "Technology" category and has a lower expense ratio of 1.03%.

Both funds are concentrated. The River Oak Discovery Fund held 34 stocks and the Black Oak Emerging Technologies Fund held 35 stocks as of March 31. Lists of both funds' largest holdings are below.

During an Interview, Stimpson, who co-manages both funds, said that when investing in the small-cap technology space, he and colleagues identify companies that are "focused on niches.

"I want a company that knows who they are, what they do and do it well, rather than a small company trying to growing into the next Microsoft, Google or Salesforce," he said.

More about giant companies dominating stock indexes:This twist on a traditional S&P 500 stock fund can lower your risk and still beat the market overall

Stimpson said Oak Associates pays close attention to what corporate management teams say during earnings calls and in presentations, preferring comments related to improving sales and operations with a market niche, rather than expressions of grand visions for exponential growth.

That type of narrow focus can support higher valuations over time, Stimpson said. "They have better execution, a better ability to fend-off competition and they are quality acquisition candidates."

All of those factors can be important to investors, considering how easily tech giants such as Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) or Google holding company Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL)(GOOGL) can begin to compete with smaller innovative companies because they can afford to make such large investments, he said.

Simpson went further, saying that when running screens for "quality" metrics, such as improving free cash flow yields, the Oak Associates team also looks for "shareholder friendly practices." For example, a company may be repurchasing shares. But are the buybacks lowering the share count significantly (which boosts earnings per share) or are they merely mitigating the dilution caused by the shoveling of new shares to executives as part of their compensation?

Finally, Simpson cautioned investors not to get caught up in tech-focused hype.

"When I talk to our clients, I get questions about AI and ChatGPT and how to play it. People get focused on a new great tech innovation," he said. "You can replace ChatGPT with bitcoin, metaverse or 3-D printing."

"I caution everyone that until there is revenue, earnings and a product, the hype can be more dangerous than an opportunity."

Two examples

These companies are held by theRiver Oak Discovery Fund and the Black Oak Emerging Technologies Fund.

Cirrus Logic Inc. (CRUS) is the largest holding of the River Oak Discovery Fund. Stimpson calls the company "a derivative play on the success of Apple."

"They are focused on the chips that go into mobile and [vehicles]," as well as the needs of their customers, including Apple, "rather than problem areas of the chip sector, such as memory or PCs. They are not talking about chips for AI, for example," Stimpson said.

Cirrus focuses on systems and related software used in audio systems..

Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc. (KLIC) makes equipment, tools and related software used by a variety of manufacturers of computer chips and integrated electronic devices.

Stimpson likes the company as a long-term play on the worldwide disruption in semiconductor manufacturing and supply, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. "All chip companies learned that any supply disruption in Southeast Asia is a problem. Over time, the opportunities for semiconductor equipment makers are very good. There will be more plants in more locations, so more equipment," he said.

He said KLICK was in a "protected" position, with returns on equity of about 20% and free cash flow yields of about 10%.

Top holdings of the funds

Here are the largest 10 holdings of the River Oak Discovery Fund as of March 31:

Click on the tickers for more about each company.

Click here for Tomi Kilgore's detailed guide to the wealth of information available for free on the MarketWatch quote page.

Here are the largest 10 holdings of the Black Oak Emerging Technology Fund as of March 31:

-Philip van Doorn

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

05-17-23 0740ET

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Tech-stock picks that are small and focused: This fund invests in ... - Morningstar

Collage by Sadhana Saxena.

Synopsis

13 mins read, May 18, 2023, 04:00 AM IST

Amazon tried it. So did Ola. Multiple deep-pocketed companies have tried to enter the food-delivery business, but none has succeeded in challenging the Zomato-Swiggy duopoly.Now, a real challenger seems to have emerged in the form of Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a government initiative that looks to unbundle e-commerce and make it interoperable.Since the beginning of the month, ONDC has been a buzzword on social media with consumers

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Swiggy-Zomato vs. ONDC: will food-tech giants use a secret weapon to protect their turf? - Economic Times

(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. plans to invest $12.7 billion in cloud infrastructure in India by 2030, joining other global tech giants in betting on growth in the South Asian nations digital economy.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The US companys cloud business, which has data centers in the Mumbai and Hyderabad regions, already invested $3.7 billion in India from 2016 to 2022, it said in a statement Thursday. The fresh outlay will include spending in construction, server computers and telecommunications infrastructure.

Global tech companies from Apple Inc. to Netflix Inc. are expanding in the worlds most populous country with services such as video streaming and online retailing, while Wall Street banks and global insurers have long operated tech centers in the country. Such businesses are accelerating the growth of Indias cloud-services market, which researcher IDC sees growing at an average rate of 23% a year to reach $13 billion in 2026.

To fuel its web services business, Amazon said it has trained more than 4 million people in India with cloud skills since 2017 and invested in six utility-scale renewable energy projects.

--With assistance from Saritha Rai.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.

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Amazon to Invest $12.7 Billion in India Cloud Services by 2030 - Yahoo Finance

NEW YORK, May 12 (C-Fam) UN Member States met with tech giants and UN officials this week to discuss a new global technology agreement to regulate artificial intelligence, privacy, as well as online content moderation and censorship.

We see the digital space usedand misusedto attack individuals and groups, and to spread hate speech and damaging disinformation, without consequences or accountability, undermining the fundaments of our society and the social contract, said Volker Trk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights during the discussion about the human rights implications of the Global Digital Compact on Monday.

Disinformation and hate speech are not internationally defined. The terms are easily politicized by governments to silence opponents. Western countries, for example, label any criticism of the homosexual/trans agenda as hate speech. Similarly, Islamic countries label anti-Islamic sentiment as hate speech.

The High Commissioners concern for disinformation and hate speech was echoed by Western countries and tech giants represented in the discussion, including Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

The European Unions representative called for a human rights-based digital transformation and supported the creation of global regulation to target hate speech and disinformation to achieve this.

Speaking for Google, Shahla Naimi, emphasized the work of Google to combat hate speech and eliminate toxicity online. She said the Global Digital Compact should build on existing voluntary initiatives of the tech industry to develop global regulation to moderate content online.

Other tech platforms also echoed this approach. The only discordant note among the tech industry came from the Wikipedia Foundation. Top-down content moderation is inconsistent with a community-led model, said Richard Gaines their representative.

Unlike social media companies, which have developed a centralized content moderation model with a team of employees who review posts that are flagged as inaccurate or dangerous, Wikipedia moderates its pages through a debate among its contributors. Contributors to the project debate the merits of every Wikipedia article and modify them accordingly. Wikipedia employees are only called to intervene when debate breaks down. Conservatives, however, has complained that the organization of editors coalesce from the far left.

The top-down system criticized by Wikipedias representatives has been exploited by political parties and governments to silence and suppress opponents, as in the case of the Twitter Files in the United States. The Twitter Files revealed a complex regime where federal government agencies directed Twitter employees to monitor and censor critics of Joe Biden and the federal government. Since the revelation of the Twitter Files, Twitters owner Elon Musk has adopted a community-led moderation regime similar to Wikipedia.

The Secretary-Generals Envoy on Technology, Amandeep Singh Gill, said the Global Digital Compact explained how the development of technology standards in the Global Digital Compact would become guideposts for the tech industry. Even though these standards will not be binding, he stressed, they will be important as for tech companies and developers in the design phase of new products and services.

The envoy suggested that countries not get hung up on which human rights obligations to emphasize in the Global Digital Compact and focus instead on instilling a human-centric focus and preserving human agency in the technologies of the future. This perspective, he said, could help solve eventual conflicts about which human rights to emphasize by working on common ethical standards regardless of their political take on human rights.

View online at: https://c-fam.org/friday_fax/tech-giants-and-un-bureaucrats-discuss-plan-to-censor-speech/

2023 C-Fam (Center for Family & Human Rights).Permission granted for unlimited use. Credit required.www.c-fam.org

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Tech Giants and UN Bureaucrats Discuss Plan to Censor Speech - C-Fam

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Race Against The Clock

Netflix held its first-ever upfront virtually this week over concerns about the ongoing writers strike. But the streamer also has other problems on its hands.

Advertisers are frustrated not just with Netflixs limited ad targeting but also with the fact that its ad-supported subscriber base is still too small, WSJ reports.

According to analytics firm Antenna, only 19% of Netflix subscribers were watching the ad-supported tier three months after it launched, compared with 36% for Disney. Even though the two have a similar number of AVOD subscribers now, Netflix has slower momentum in getting subscribers to sign up for ads and its feeling the pressure.

Last month, Netflix announced more titles with ads, increased the number of concurrent streams allowed and spruced up the video quality of its ad-supported streams. Netflix is also taking its time enforcing anti-password sharing in an effort to slow subscriber churn.

But are advertisers buying in? Only time will tell.

Consent Decree

Attention, consent management platforms.

Later this year, Google will introduce a new policy mandating that publishers in the EU and UK exclusively use Google-approved CMPs with sell-side products, including Google AdSense, Ad Manager and AdMob.

To get Googles seal of approval, CMPs must be in compliance with the recently finalized Transparency & Consent Framework 2.2. Google will soon release a list of approved CMPs.

The TCF was designed to facilitate publisher compliance with GDPR, but the framework has faced challenges.

Last year, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties claimed that the TCF violates GDPR because its mechanism for conveying whether a user has opted into data collection between publishers and downstream partners could not be reliably audited by third parties.

IAB Europe, which oversees the TCF, then took steps to improve auditing and to raise the bar for CMP compliance in version 2.2. It also submitted an action plan with the Belgian Data Protection Authority to bring the TCF into greater compliance with GDPR.

The Belgian DPA approved the plan in January, but it still faces challenges from the Belgian Market Court and the EUs Court of Justice.

Kick The Habit

The ad industry is addicted to growth at any cost, according to tech industry PR consultant Ed Zitron, who gave a fiery presentation at AdExchangers Programmatic IO conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

Zitron pulled no punches, faulting Big Tech companies, such as Meta, Google and Amazon, for their obsession with endless revenue growth, which has led to terrible, janky user experiences.

But in the end, those tech giants will pay the piper, too.

None of these companies have built sustainable business models, according to Zitron, who declared that at some point, Facebook will run out of humans to acquire as data sources.

But all is not lost. I believe we can turn things around, Zitron said.

Instead of staying hooked on hypergrowth, tech companies can focus on growing at a slower, more reasonable pace and connecting honestly with customers. Otherwise, Zitron said, users will hold companies responsible for hurting them and thats pretty bad for the bottom line.

But Wait, Theres More!

The New York Times debuts its own audio app. [TechCrunch]

During testimony before Congress, OpenAI founder Sam Altman dodges answering questions about how developers sued his company for stealing their code. [Slate]

Black creators say that their relationships with social media platforms remain strained over creator programs. [Digiday]

Warner Bros. Discovery shares how it plans to sell ads on Max, the streaming service that combines content from HBO Max and Discovery+. [Ad Age]

Youre Hired!

Ad exchange Emodo hires Yahoo alum Rajeev Tyagi as chief of product. [release]

Verizon CMO Diego Scotti will step down after nine years, with Rima Quresh, EVP and chief strategy officer, to serve as interim CMO. [WSJ]

Read more:

Netflix Scrambles To Market Its Ad-Supported Tier; Googles ... - AdExchanger

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of "real space invaders" threatening the earth.

Midjourney

A majority of Americans believe that the rise of artificial intelligence technology could put humanity's future in jeopardy, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Wednesday. The poll found that over two-thirds of respondents are anxious about the adverse effects of AI, while 61 percent consider it a potential threat to civilization.

The online poll, conducted from May 9 to May 15, sampled the opinions of 4,415 US adults. It has a credibility interval (a measure of accuracy) of plus or minus two percentage points.

The poll results come amid the expansion of generative AI use in education, government, medicine, and business, triggered in part by the explosive growth of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which is reportedly the fastest-growing software application of all time. The application's success has set off a technology hype race among tech giants such as Microsoft and Google, which stand to benefit from having something new and buzzy to potentially increase their share prices.

Fears about AI, justified or not, have been rumbling through the public discourse lately due to high-profile events such as the "AI pause" letter and Geoffery Hinton resigning from Google. In a recent high-profile case of AI apprehension, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before US Congress on Tuesday, expressing his concerns about the potential misuse of AI technology and calling for regulation that, according to critics, may help his firm retain its technological lead and suppress competition.

Lawmakers seem to share some of these concerns, with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) observing, "There's no way to put this genie in the bottle. Globally, this is exploding," Reuters reported.

This negative scare messaging seems to be having an impact. Americans' fears over AI's potential for harm far outweigh optimism about its benefits, with those predicting adverse outcomes outnumbering those who don't by three to one. "According to the data, 61% of respondents believe that AI poses risks to humanity, while only 22% disagreed, and 17% remained unsure," wroteReuters.

The poll also revealed a political divide in perceptions of AI, with 70 percent of Donald Trump voters expressing greater concern about AI versus 60 percent of Joe Biden voters. Regarding religious beliefs, evangelical Christians were more likely to "strongly agree" that AI poses risks to human civilization, at 32 percent, compared to 24 percent of non-evangelical Christians.

Reuters reached out to Landon Klein, director of US policy of the Future of Life Institute, which authored the open letter that asked for a six-month pause in AI research of systems "more powerful" than GPT-4. "It's telling such a broad swatch of Americans worry about the negative effects of AI," Klein said. "We view the current moment similar to the beginning of the nuclear era, and we have the benefit of public perception that is consistent with the need to take action."

Meanwhile, another group of AI researchers led by Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, and Margaret Mitchell (three authors of a widely cited critical paper on large language models) say that while AI systems are indeed potentially harmful, the prevalent worry about AI-powered apocalypse is misguided. They prefer to focus instead on "transparency, accountability, and preventing exploitative labor practices."

Another issue with the poll is that AI is a nebulous term that often means different things to different people. Almost all Americans now use "AI" (and software tools once considered "AI") in our everyday lives without much notice or fanfare, and it's unclear if the Reuters/Ipsos poll made any attempt to make that type of distinction for its respondents. We did not have access to the poll methodology or raw poll results at press time.

Along those lines, Reuters quoted Ion Stoica, a UC Berkeley professor and co-founder of AI company Anyscale, pointing out this potential contradiction. "Americans may not realize how pervasive AI already is in their daily lives, both at home and at work," he said.

Read more:

Poll: 61% of Americans say AI threatens humanitys future - Ars Technica

What will artificial intelligence with Chinese characteristics look like? The past month or so has given us a better idea.

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding (ticker: BABA) and facial-recognition pioneer SenseTime Group (0020.Hong Kong) joined search champion Baidu (BIDU) in releasing generative AI products, albeit in limited distribution. The Beijing government laid out draft regulations giving AI developers a green light, so long as their training data sets are truthful, accurate, and objectivequite a conundrum for the industry to bear in mind.

Investors arent looking for a Chinese equivalent to OpenAI, the proto-garage company that upended the U.S. tech establishment by unveiling ChatGPT half a year ago. In China, the establishment wins.

Retail investors have gone wild for domestically listed stocks with a whiff of AI, such as Cambricon Technologies (688256.China), whose shares have more than tripled this year.

The pros from abroad are staying away. The current leading companies are the ones who can afford to be successful in AI, says Sharukh Malik, a portfolio manager for Asian equities at Guinness Asset Management.

Markets were underwhelmed by Baidus Ernie bot. The companys shares have slumped 6% since its March 6 release. Baidu nevertheless retains some first-mover advantage, says Charlie Chai, vice head of research at 86 Research in Shanghai. Baidu has been investing in AI for the past decade, with hundreds of Ph.Ds, he says.

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Its in-house Kunlun semiconductors are also the best among Chinas internet elite, which could be important as the U.S. squeezes chip exports to China.

The competition looks stiff, however. Tencent Holdings (700.Hong Kong), which dominates Chinese social media and online gaming, and TikTok parent ByteDance, are expected in the artificial intelligence ring soon, leveraging their enormous data troves and customer bases.

All the first-tier players could end up as winners in their own focus area, says Vivian Lin Thurston, an emerging markets portfolio manager at William Blair.

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Theyll have to deal with the government first. Beijings AI push is a sort of ad hoc rehabilitation for Chinas Big Tech, which was in the regulatory doghouse for the past two years. But the industry will have to leap forward Beijings way.

The U.S. model is to learn from all the data sets, so the system can argue one way or another, says Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis.

That wont be the Chinese model. The new regs make technology companies potentially liable if their bots produce answers that officials consider wrong, Chai says. This will slow down releases as companies very carefully test their products, he adds. No kidding.

Would-be Chinese AI champions need to keep an eye on Washington, too.

The semis challenge is very real, say AB Bernstein analysts, led by Robin Zhu. Advanced AI systems largely depend on microchips from a single U.S. designer,

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All these obstacles will slow, but not stop, Chinese companies march into AI. Patel estimates they are two years, at most, off OpenAIs pace. Baidus product is not as good as ChatGPT, but its pretty good, he says.

Two years is too long, in tech time, to place bets on any horse race between the Chinese giants, Guinness Malik says. I would give it a year to see whos the most competent, he says.

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But the training laps will be worth watching.

Email: editors@barrons.com

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China Is in the AI Game. How Alibaba and Baidu Will Have to Play by Beijings Rules. - Barron's

Writing and distributing press releases is time consuming and expensive.

"It's about $5,000 every time, with some additional fees," said Lesley Klein, senior vice president of strategy and brand marketing at the travel company Priceline. "I also think about the business cost hours and hours of laborious drafting, editing, reviewing, and alignment across all levels of the organization."

That cost also makes it difficult for smaller businesses that don't have the same resources as big companies like Priceline to draft and distribute press releases.

PR tech startup EZ Newswire launched in beta on Wednesday to remove these challenges and give smaller businesses the ability to cheaply write and distribute press releases. The company hopes to massively disrupt the press release distribution space and steal share from its two legacy stalwarts: PR Newswire, owned by PR tech giant Cision, and Business Wire, owned by Berkshire Hathaway.

Users input information like what type of company they have and they key details they want to cover. Then, EZ Newswire uses a combination of its own algorithm and OpenAI's large language model to automatically write press releases, said company cofounders and co-CEOs Caitlin Kelly and Neel Shah.

ChatGPT alone isn't good enough to write press releases in its own yet, said Klein.

"ChatGPT is okay for some things, but isn't there yet in terms of delivering a practical document with the sophistication and pragmatic application that we'd need in a press release," Klein added.

While Priceline has only demoed the EZ Newswire product, Klein said it would be part of its beta, and that she has more faith in its output because it was "built by someone with years of practical and operational comms experience."

Press release generation is a free part of EZ Newswire's service. The company instead makes its money by offering targeted distribution of press releases and in the autumn plans to release metrics that show how many people actually saw the release.

"The legacy players throw this content in the basement of their sites, where these press releases are barely seen," said Kelly. Metrics from the legacy distribution companies are usually the total visitors of the entire site, not the people who saw the specific release, said both Kelly and Priceline's Klein.

"Those total potential audience members are very misleading," said Shah.

EZ Newswire will send press releases to websites where the news is actually relevant, so a release from an automobile manufacturer would go to a site that's devoted to automotive coverage.

At launch, EZ Newswire hosts the press releases on its own site, and has a partnership with the Associated Press to distribute them. It is hoping to expand from there, by adding one to two new publishers a month to its distribution network, Shah said.

Instead of thousands of dollars per release, EZ Newswire charges its users in tiers: $25, $100, or $125. Publishers get the largest cut of that fee, though Shah wouldn't specify how much since it varies across publishers.

Around 2,500 companies, including PR agencies, small businesses, and larger brands like Alibaba and industry products company 3M, have used the pre-beta version of the product. Shah hopes to have 10,000 customers over the next six months.

EZ Newswire, which has seven employees, raised a $1 million pre-seed round in 2020, from investors like MediaLink Vice Chairman Wenda Harris Millard, Madison Park Ventures principal and former Hearst president Cathie Black, and Forbes Vice Chairman Mike Perlis.

The company plans to raise between $5 million to $10 million in additional funding this summer, said Shah.

In making press release generation and distribution accessible to both big and small businesses, EZ Newswire hopes to blow wide the market around press release distribution. Shah believes that market is worth between $2 billion to $3 billion, but sees an opportunity for its value to increase since, currently, only large companies are willing to pay high rates to distribute press releases.

"Our contention is that by removing that exclusivity and building a product that any company can use, we'll greatly expand that user set," Shah said.

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A New PR Tech Company Just Launched That Uses OpenAI to Take ... - Business Insider

1Password customers are finally gaining partial access to the passwordless future weve been promised. Starting from June 6th this year, anyone with a 1Password account will be able to use it to save and manage their passkeys a biometric-based login technology that allows users to ditch passwords in favor of their devices own authentication. To access the open beta, youll need to download the 1Password beta browser extension for Safari, Firefox, or Chromium-based browsers (which include Chrome, Edge, Arc, and Brave). Support for passkeys on mobile is still in development and unavailable at this time.

You wont be able to replace your 1Password master password with a passkey right away, either; Steve Won, 1Passwords chief product officer has informed The Verge that this feature will arrive sometime in July 2023.

The technology behind passkeys was developed by the FIDO Alliance, whose members include tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Using public key cryptography, users can sign into apps and services using their devices own authentication, such as a laptop with Windows Hello, an Android phone with fingerprint sensor, or an iPhone with Face ID. Passkeys can therefore replace passwords and verification systems like 2FA or SMS entirely, providing better protection against hacking and phishing attacks as theres no fixed login or transmitted code to be stolen.

Only a handful of sites and apps currently support passkey login technology. Image: 1Password

Unlike ecosystem-based offerings like Apples passkey support (which relies on the iCloud Keychain to sync passkeys across Apple devices) or Google Password Manager, 1Password supports multiple platforms and devices with its Universal Sign On cross-platform syncing which can be more convenient for some. The 1Password open beta for passkeys will also allow users to share their passkeys with trusted friends and family members.

Ive been testing out some of 1Passwords passkey integrations for a few weeks already as part of a closed beta. Aside from the obvious security benefits, passkeys are a real blessing if you have a habit of resetting your passwords and forgetting to update them within your password manager.

Its going to take a while for passkey support to be widely adopted, so 1Password isnt dropping support for traditional passwords any time soon. The password management service initially said that passkey support would arrive by early 2023 when it announced the feature in November 2022. The June launch isnt terribly late, though other companies have already launched their own passkey integrations, including rival password manager Dashlane.

1Password has created a directory of websites, apps, and services which now includes Google accounts that already allow users to sign in using passkeys, with an option to vote on where support should be added next. 1Password obviously cant strong-arm the likes of Netflix, YouTube, or Steam to roll out their own passkey support, but its a good prompt for these companies to see where there may be demand.

Update: May 16th 2:05 PM ET: Article has been updated to confirm that the ability to replace a 1Password master password with a passkey is not rolling out as part of the June 6th open beta.

Read more from the original source:

1Password is launching passkey management next month - The Verge

The open-source AI boom, driven by tech giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, is under threat as these companies reconsider their commitment to open development. In a leaked memo from Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, he reveals that the open-source free-for-all jeopardizes Big Techs AI dominance. While open-source AI models fuel innovation, their existence relies on big firms with substantial resources. Models like LLaMA, released by Meta AI, and BERT from Google, form the basis for many open-source projects. Now the attitude towards open development is changing. OpenAI has already reversed its open policy due to competition fears, and Meta might follow suit. This could result in the next generation of AI breakthroughs being controlled by the wealthiest AI labs, putting the open-source AI community at risk.

In recent years, open-source AI has flourished, with tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon contributing to its growth. These companies have shared their AI technologies, such as Amazons Alexa, Googles TensorFlow, and Microsofts Computation Network Tool Kit. Open-source AI enables more scrutiny, troubleshooting, and bug-fixing, which is essential for AI systems that learn, adapt, and make decisions. Furthermore, it encourages innovation, allowing successful entrepreneurs to be easily integrated into the larger parent company.

Organizations like EleutherAI have also benefited from the open-source approach. EleutherAI relies on OpenAIs openness to reverse-engineer GPT-3 and create their own models. The availability of open-source AI models has allowed millions of people to access, develop, and experiment with these technologies, driving creativity and innovation worldwide.

However, the open-source AI boom faces challenges. Building large language models from scratch is expensive and complicated, with only a few organizations capable of pretraining them[1]. Moreover, as AI becomes a critical competitive advantage, companies with vast research capabilities might reconsider their commitment to open development. This shift is exemplified by OpenAIs reversal of its open policy due to competition fears.

With AI models becoming increasingly competitive and valuable, tech giants like Google and Meta could decide to close their doors to open development. While open-source AI has undoubtedly driven progress in the field, its future hangs in the balance. If tech giants withdraw their support, the open-source AI community might struggle to maintain its growth and innovation.

Despite these concerns, some companies are still advocating for open-source AI. Hugging Face, for example, unveiled the first open-source alternative to ChatGPT, called HuggingChat. Moreover, LunaSec, a company that utilizes OpenAIs products, hopes to transition to open-source alternatives eventually. These efforts show that there is still a strong belief in the benefits of open-source AI and the need to maintain a diverse ecosystem of AI development.

As AI continues to progress rapidly, the decisions made by major tech companies will play a crucial role in shaping the future of open-source AI. Balancing the need for innovation and collaboration with the desire for competitive advantage will be a critical challenge in determining the trajectory of the AI landscape.

Read more:

From collaboration to control: The shifting landscape of open-source AI - Innovation Origins