📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: Encyclopedia Britannica Hits OpenAI With Scary Lawsuit

Writers are often cautioned not to hit readers over the head with the dictionary. But what if it’s the dictionary that’s throwing blows?

On Friday, Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster struck back against the large language models plundering its tomes of knowledge and sued OpenAI for allegedly using its copyrighted reference materials to train its AI models “at massive scale,” after filing a similar suit against Perplexity.AI last year.

In the complaint, which Reuters reported on Monday, Britannica claimed that OpenAI unlawfully copied nearly 100,000 of its online articles and encyclopedia and dictionary entries to teach its GPT family of models. ChatGPT will even produce “near-verbatim” copies of its entries and dictionary definitions, it alleged providing several examples, something that is commonly observed across many chatbots.

But more than that, OpenAI “cannibalized” Britannica’s web traffic by showing ChatGPT users an AI-generated summary of its content, Britannica said, hurting its bottom line. 

This argument echoes those raised by journalism outlets and other online sites, which find their traffic being suffocated as more people use AI chatbots instead of a traditional search engine.

“ChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users’ queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica],” the encyclopedia maker said in the complaint.

Citing a key piece of US trademark law called the Lanham Act, Britannica further accuses OpenAI of violating its trademarks when ChatGPT hallucinates made-up answers and wrongly attributes them to Britannica, which it also says gives the false impression that the usage of its content is approved or sponsored by the encyclopedia.

The complaint joins several other major lawsuits that authors, publishers, and news agencies have filed against AI companies, most of which are still ongoing. Depending on the outcome, they could have seismic implications for how generative AI companies operate. But as it stands, whether it constitutes infringement to use copyrighted content to train AI models, even without permission or compensation, is an open ended question —and one frustrated by the fact that AI developers are rarely transparent about where they’re sourcing training material for their models. 

One of the most major suits that’s come to a conclusion so far was by a group of authors against Anthropic. Anthropic, it was revealed, pirated millions of digital books to train its Claude chatbot and scanned and shredded millions of more physical ones. The judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of the texts to train its AI was “transformative,” but said its use of pirated copies was illegal. Anthropic agreed to settle with the authors for $1.5 billion.

More on AI: Panicked OpenAI Execs Cutting Projects as Walls Close In

The post Encyclopedia Britannica Hits OpenAI With Scary Lawsuit appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it batt

Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot, the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees.

The new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the center of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to complete complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to convince investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products rather than render them obsolete.

"Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce."

From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up

Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you know, a little tricycle, and the new Slackbot is like, you know, a Porsche."

The original Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering simple notifications. The new version runs on an entirely different architecture built around a large language model and sophisticated search capabilities that can access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations.

"It's two different things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly simple. The new Slackbot is brand new — it's based around an LLM and a very robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines, third-party enterprise data."

Salesforce chose to retain the Slackbot brand despite the fundamental technical overhaul. "People know what Slackbot is, and so we wanted to carry that forward," Harris said.

Why Anthropic's Claude powers the new Slackbot — and which AI models could come next

The new Slackbot runs on Claude, Anthropic's large language model, a choice driven partly by compliance requirements. Slack's commercial service operates under FedRAMP Moderate certification to serve U.S. federal government customers, and Harris said Anthropic was "the only provider that could give us a compliant LLM" when Slack began building the new system.

But that exclusivity won't last. "We are, this year, going to support additional providers," Harris said. "We have a great relationship with Google. Gemini is incredible — performance is great, cost is great. So we're going to use Gemini for some things." He added that OpenAI remains a possibility as well.

Harris echoed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's view that large language models are becoming commoditized: "You've heard Marc talk about LLMs are commodities, that they're democratized. I call them CPUs."

On the sensitive question of training data, Harris was unequivocal: Salesforce does not train any models on customer data. "Models don't have any sort of security," he explained. "If we trained it on some confidential conversation that you and I have, I don't want Carolyn to know — if I train it into the LLM, there is no way for me to say you get to see the answer, but Carolyn doesn't."

Inside Salesforce's internal experiment: 80,000 employees tested Slackbot with striking results

Salesforce has been testing the new Slackbot internally for months, rolling it out to all 80,000 employees. According to Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, the results have been striking: "It's the fastest adopted product in Salesforce history."

Internal data shows that two-thirds of Salesforce employees have tried the new Slackbot, with 80% of those users continuing to use it regularly. Internal satisfaction rates reached 96% — the highest for any AI feature Slack has shipped. Employees report saving between two and 20 hours per week.

The adoption happened largely organically. "I think it was about five days, and a Canvas was developed by our employees called 'The Most Stealable Slackbot Prompts,'" Gavin said. "People just started adding to it organically. I think it's up to 250-plus prompts that are in this Canvas right now."

Kate Crotty, a principal UX researcher at Salesforce, found that 73% of internal adoption was driven by social sharing rather than top-down mandates. "Everybody is there to help each other learn and communicate hacks," she said.

How Slackbot transforms scattered enterprise data into executive-ready insights

During a product demonstration, Amy Bauer, Slack's product experience designer, showed how Slackbot can synthesize information across multiple sources. In one example, she asked Slackbot to analyze customer feedback from a pilot program, upload an image of a usage dashboard, and have Slackbot correlate the qualitative and quantitative data.

"This is where Slackbot really earns its keep for me," Bauer explained. "What it's doing is not just simply reading the image — it's actually looking at the image and comparing it to the insight it just generated for me."

Slackbot can then query Salesforce to find enterprise accounts with open deals that might be good candidates for early access, creating what Bauer called "a really great justification and plan to move forward." Finally, it can synthesize all that information into a Canvas — Slack's collaborative document format — and find calendar availability among stakeholders to schedule a review meeting.

"Up until this point, we have been working in a one-to-one capacity with Slackbot," Bauer said. "But one of the benefits that I can do now is take this insight and have it generate this into a Canvas, a shared workspace where I can iterate on it, refine it with Slackbot, or share it out with my team."

Rob Seaman, Slack's chief product officer, said the Canvas creation demonstrates where the product is heading: "This is making a tool call internally to Slack Canvas to actually write, effectively, a shared document. But it signals where we're going with Slackbot — we're eventually going to be adding in additional third-party tool calls."

MrBeast's company became a Slackbot guinea pig—and employees say they're saving 90 minutes a day

Among Salesforce's pilot customers is Beast Industries, the parent company of YouTube star MrBeast. Luis Madrigal, the company's chief information officer, joined the launch announcement to describe his experience.

"As somebody who has rolled out enterprise technologies for over two decades now, this was practically one of the easiest," Madrigal …

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com