With the year 2023 almost at its end, the crypto, digital asset and AI space has seen some major changes in terms of regulations and operations. While the global crypto space is awaiting the potential approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on artificial intelligence on Monday, aiming to ensure more safety in the AI space.
Biden’s agenda aimed to cut the risks of AI as some have feared about the system being out of control.
“To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology,” said Biden about the risk of AI. “In the wrong hands AI can make it easier for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in the software that makes our society run.”
Companies such as Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META), and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) gave voluntary commitments to the government to deploy AI safely.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) reported gains of around or more than 2% in today’s trading session at the time of writing. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) shares surged around 4%.
This is in comparison to the 1% gain reported by the Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSEARCA: XLK).
Meanwhile, other players such as UiPath Inc (NYSE: PATH), and Dynatrace Inc (NYSE: DT) are also trading up at the time of writing.
In the past six months, Alphabet’s shares surged 16% while Meta Platforms saw a 25% gain and Amazon reported a 30% rise. Nvidia saw a significant 42% increase. Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund saw a marginal 8% gain in the same period.
Among notable developments surrounding these companies is Alphabet investing up to $2 billion in AI start-up Anthropic, in which Amazon also invested $4 billion. Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI engineers in 2021 to develop rival generative AI models.
In its earnings results reported last week, Meta Plataforms highlighted that AI will be its biggest investment area in 2024, focusing on engineering and computing resources.
On AI’s continued use in advertising and new use cases, CFO Susan Li said, “You’ll see that we have been increasingly testing these in our AI sandbox. As they become more mature, we’ll incorporate them into our ads manager directly.”
Apple is looking at a $1 billion investment annually in AI, a sector it initially resisted, with recent job listings indicating an increased focus on AI-driven features and products. The company also released an AI-based auto-correct feature for iOS 17 in early 2023.
UiPath’s recent quarterly earnings saw a boost led by rising demand for its AI products
In August, AI start-up company Hugging Face secured $235 million in a Series D funding round led by IBM (NYSE: IBM), Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm.
The company’s valuation has now increased to $4.5 billion. Hugging Face provides a platform where developers can freely share code, models and datasets. It also develops software tools called libraries that aid in model implementation, dataset cleaning and performance evaluation.
In the past, Elon Musk warned about the dangers of AI if the system wasn’t checked or regulated.
Musk was part of the founding of OpenAI along with Sam Altman before his departure from the group.
Produced in association with Benzinga