The Tech Company Brief by HackerNoon: Tech giants rally against election fraud

All of Big Tech may have finally agreed on something, and that something is preventing generative artificial intelligence from bamboozling voters. You see, 2024 is an important year: it’s the year that millions of people around the globe vote for who will govern them next. The big one is, of course, the 2024 US Presidential Elections which would see incumbent Joe Biden take on former commander-in-chief Donald Trump. However, voters will also be coming out in other major regions including Mexico, the United Kingdom, and even India.

All in all, experts say that countries representing 41% of the world’s population will hold elections this year — a record number. So, what does this have to do with big tech and generative AI? Well.. while democratic forces campaign to convince voters to bring them into power, some bad actors or (even political opponents) may be tempted to harness the power of the machines to tip the scales in favor of one candidate or the other.

Deep fakes, like the ones made of Obama, were already pretty damn good half a decade ago. And the recent Taylor Swift debacle is just a grim reminder of how far generative AI has come since then. It is this destructive potential of generative AI that has big tech banding together to better help voters, lest they interact with AI-generated video, audio, or text without even realizing it!

Last week at the Munich Security Conference, big tech’s poster children who traditionally compete against each other, said they’d be working together to prevent the misuse of AI during elections taking place this year. Nevermind the fact that they’ll be continuing to build more powerful AI in the background. (In fact, OpenAI has now launched an AI model that turns text into video!)

Remember that time when people from all over the world penned a letter to OpenAI to ask it to stop development of a more powerful ChatGPT? Yeah… that’s now in the past because OpenAI and its backer Microsoft are going to be working with competitor(s) Google, Meta and Amazon to “detect and counter” harmful AI content through educational campaigns and by tracking the source of misleading election-related content, including audio, video, and images that provide false information to voters.

One of the signatories to the pledge is Elon Musk’s X, which is interesting because the world’s richest man is developing his own AI company on the side and has been a vocal critic of OpenAI ever since he was ousted from the company.

TikTok and Snap also lent their name to the pledge which included up-and-coming AI startups Anthropic and Inflection in the list of signatories – the former backed by Amazon and Google and the latter by Microsoft and Nvidia.

All in all, 20 tech companies, arguably the ones that matter, signed the Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections (it’s a mouthful, we know!).

Politics. Who would’ve thought that’s where AI would have the most impact?

Microsoft, Meta’s Instagram, and Google dominated the top three positions on HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankings this week.

Microsoft takes first step to blur lines between consoles

Is it us or are the current generation of gaming consoles from Sony and Microsoft middling at best? More and more it feels like the Playstation 5 and the Xbox Series S/X offer very little in terms of value when considering things like exclusives and features. In fact, Sony has already flagged that the Playstation 5 is at the tailend of its lifecycle, and Microsoft’s Series S/X? Well.. what can we even say about the console that has sold even worsethan the original Xbox?

To make up for the slack, Microsoft has decided tocross over some of its exclusives onto the Playstation and Nintendo Switch. Which games, you ask? We don’t know yet, but it’s likely we will find out in the coming months.

This wouldn’t necessarily be the first time a first-party console game crosses over to another platform. In fact, we have some great examples of Sony exclusives being ported to PC for major success, like God of War, certain Persona games, Last of Us Part 1, and even some Uncharted games! But games crossing over to a rival’s console? That’s a little unheard of; however, it could be the trend moving forward as consumers become platform-agnostic and seek more flexibility with the hardware they purchase.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said as much recently when he noted that exclusivity across the video game industry will shrink further in the next five to 10 years. To us, that sounds like buying a console is no longer going to limit consumers to a single ecosystem and the hardware could become cheap stand-ins for PCs.

So, now that the first domino has fallen, will we see Halo on the Playstation? Demon’s Souls on Xbox? We certainly hope so! Or better yet, games just releasing everywhere. And we mean everywhere.

Nvidia inches closer to $2 trillion valuation

What a phenomenal 12 to 16 months it has been for Nvidia, the company selling the *literal* virtual shovel during the ongoing AI gold rush.

Not only has the success of ChatGPT turned the company from profitable to mega profitable, but demand for its hardware has never been higher as more and more organizations try to build their own AI models to compete with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that due to the overwhelming interest in Nvidia and its stock, the company’s valuation has ballooned so high that not only is it now the third most valuable US company in the world, it is now more valuable than Amazon, Google, and even Meta.

With a market capitalization of nearly $1.8 trillion, it is only a matter of time before Nvidia reaches the $2 trillion mark because it doesn’t look like the stock is going to come down anytime soon. Funnily, it hasn’t even been a full year since Nvidia hit a trillion dollars in valuation, which means that it’s very, very likely that it would hit $2 trillion before the twelve-month anniversary of when it entered the trillionaire club.

Not only is Nvidia a valuable company overall, it is also one of the most valuable chipmakers in the world, way ahead of competitors AMD, Intel and/or Arm Holdings who combined are around $600 billion in market capitalization. Ouch!

Nonetheless, investors are slowly piling on companies that are either competing against Nvidia or are subject to its interest, presumably because it’s just so much more expensive to buy Nvidia stocks at the moment than it was a year or so ago.

It will be great to see where Team Green heads next.

In Other News..

UK Minister Expects Stablecoin and Staking Legislation Within Six Months — via CoinDesk

The women in AI making a difference — via TechCrunch

The EU opens formal probe into TikTok over protection of children — via CNN

Neuralink’s first human patient able to control mouse through thinking, Musk says — via Reuters

Quantum computers move closer to the assembly line — via Axios

Nintendo shares fall nearly 6% after report that the Switch 2 will be delayed until 2025 — via CNBC

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And that’s a wrap! Don’t forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y’all next week. PEACE!

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon

*All rankings are current as of Monday. To see how the rankings have changed, please visit HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankings page.

This article was originally published by Sheharyar Khan on HackerNoon.