Happy Monday!

In Today’s Email:

• Global Illumination 🤝 OpenAI

• Anthropic secures more funding 💸

• Can AI-generated art be copyrighted? 🖨️

Global Illumination 🤝 OpenAI

OpenAI recently acquired Global Illumination.

Global Illumination is an AI design studio founded by former Meta employees: Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon, and Joey Flinn. The entire team has joined OpenAI to work on core products such as ChatGPT. The company has pioneered AI to craft innovative tools and immersive digital experiences.

The company has a solid track record, before joining OpenAI the team designed and built early products on Instagram and Facebook. They also worked on significant products at Youtube, Google, Pixar, Riot Games, and other notable companies.

This is an interesting move for OpenAI, as they pivot into product design. We are eager to see how the Global Illumination team contributes to OpenAI and its various products.

Anthropic secures more funding 💸

Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, just secured another $100 million in funding.

SK Telecom, the biggest mobile carrier in South Korea, is behind the funding. The company participated in the Series C round through its venture capital arm, SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC). The investment is expected to close in the third quarter of this year according to Chung Suk-Geun, chief AI global officer at SKT.

The two companies are planning to co-develop a multilingual LLM customized for telecommunication companies. “SKT has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry,” said Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. “We’re excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry knowledge to build an LLM that is customized for telcos.”

Anthropic’s flagship AI system, Claude, currently allows corporations to manage tasks, automate workflows, search & generate answers, and process text in natural conversation. According to SKT, Claude’s use cases for the telco industry will include “industry-specific customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer applications.”

Can AI-generated art be copyrighted? 🖨️

The heated debate is gaining traction from a US Federal Judge.

According to DC District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, human beings are “an essential part of a valid copyright claim.” This comes as she was overseeing a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after its refusal to copyright Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image he made.

The art was created by Thaler’s own program, the Creativity Machine algorithm. He had tried multiple times to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine.” This would list Thaler as the artwork’s owner and the author as the creator of the work.

Thaler sued the Office last year, claiming its denial was not in accordance with the law. Although Judge Howell shot it down, she did acknowledge that humanity is “approaching new frontiers in copyright.” It’ll be interesting to see how US legislation handles more lawsuits regarding AI-generated art and copyright come to fruition.

That’s it for today, we’ll see you back here on Wednesday!