OpenAI's first device will reportedly be a 'humanlike' rechargeable speaker, Former Meta employees sued the company over its alleged use of biased AI systems during layoffs, and three publishers challenged Google over AI copyright infringement

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OpenAI's first device will reportedly be a human-like rechargeable speaker.
Former Meta employees sued the company over its alleged use of biased AI systems during layoffs.
And three publishers challenged Google over AI copyright infringement. It's Wednesday, July 15th, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in the sphere of tech this morning from Engadget.
So, it has long been reported that OpenAI's first hardware product will be an AI-powered speaker. Now, a new Bloomberg report reveals more details about the upcoming device, which will apparently be rechargeable, and can easily be carried from one room to another. Now, you're supposed to be able to take it to the kitchen, for instance, you know, to help you with cooking, and then carry it back to your living room or your bedroom. The publication says the speaker is meant to be a human-like AI companion that can talk to you naturally in the way ChatGPT can, which can also control your smart home devices and play audio. The speaker will not have a screen, but Bloomberg says it will have mechanical elements that can move on their own to create an illusion that it's alive and not just an object that can follow commands. Since OpenAI wants it to be a physical manifestation of ChatGPT and feel like a real companion rather than just another smart speaker, it will use a more advanced version of GPT-Live, the model that powers the new ChatGPT voice mode OpenAI recently launched. It will be able to listen and talk at the same time and quickly process new information to be able to adapt more naturally. While in the middle of conversations. In addition, the company will equip the device with a camera and other sensors, so that it can gather more context about a user's surroundings for more personalized responses.
OpenAI acquired IO, the startup founded by ex-Apple designer Johnny Ive, for $6.5 billion last year to help design the speaker. And it's planning to release the speaker sometime next year, but it could be delayed, because Apple is asking the court for an injunction on OpenAI's hardware products. Just a few days ago, Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and two of its former employees over trade secret theft, and the company has also accused Ive's IO of being complicit. Apple accused its former employees Chang Liu and Tong Yutan of downloading dozens of confidential hardware related files, including technical specs and proprietary data for unreleased products. It also claimed that OpenAI's interview process had evolved to try to solicit additional confidential Apple information. OpenAI, Apple says, has hired more than 400 of its former employees so far.
26 former Meta employees are suing the company for allegedly using biased AI tools that disproportionately selected people who took medical leave as candidates to be laid off. That's according to a report by Reuters. All the plaintiffs in the lawsuit were impacted by Meta's most recent round of layoffs, which cut around 8,000 employees in the hopes of offsetting the company's investments in AI and data center infrastructure. Meta is accused of using a constellation of artificial intelligence systems to select which employees should be cut. It's claimed those included an internal AI assistant called Metamate, employee-trained second brain agents, AI token usage dashboards, and keystroke and activity monitoring data. The alleged goal was to identify and rank employees based on things like their performance and productivity, but also how AI native they are and how many AI tokens they use. The problem, the lawsuit claims, is that Meta's system did not take into account employees on family or medical leave, or whose disability might affect their output, despite them being in situations where they couldn't use more tokens or engage with other AI tools. The former employees are asking the court to block Meta from completing its layoffs pending an independent audit of the algorithmically-assisted selection process. Because of the terms of Meta's employment contract, the plaintiffs also intend to pursue their claims in arbitration.
A trio of publishers and one author are seeking a class-action lawsuit against Google on claims that the tech company broke copyright law by using their works to train its Gemini AI. Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier are the plaintiff companies, and writer Scott Turow is the individual behind this effort. According to the complaint, Google reproduced millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that its conduct violated copyright law. Google also stripped CMI from the copyrighted works it stole to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use. In addition to the alleged copyright infringement for training, the complaint argues that Gemini allows and sometimes even encourages the creation of copycat works, again without credit or compensation to the authors or their publishers. Now, the suit states that Google also knows that absent appropriate guardrails, Gemini will continue to produce outputs that substitute for copyrighted works on which it was trained. Yet Google has failed to implement effective guardrails. The literary world has made several attempts to make deals with the AI companies that have scraped and trained large language models off of their protected works. In fact, a group including several of the same parties already have a similar class action suit underway against Meta. But cases based on copyright infringement have not seen much success to date. A separate group of writers landed an initial settlement of $1.5 billion with Anthropic last year for a copyright infringement turned piracy case against the Claude Chatbot creator, but it was rejected by the judge overseeing the case for being nowhere near complete. Similar efforts by authors to tackle copyright infringement by Meta's AI operation fell short last year. A different pair of authors has also tried to take on Apple for unlicensed use of their creations for AI training. And that's just a sampling from the publishing world.