Happy Tuesday!

Here’s what we got for ya:

• Italy bans ChatGPT 🇮🇹

• BloombergGPT 🗞️

• Midjourney stops free trials 💳

Italy bans ChatGPT 🇮🇹

Remember when China banned ChatGPT in February?

Italy is joining the party, becoming the first Western country to crack down on ChatGPT.

The Italian Data Protection Authority, Garante per la protezione dei Dati Personali (Garante), temporarily banned OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Garante plans to investigate how OpenAI processes users’ data, and whether it violates the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws.

The recent data breach at OpenAI that allowed users to view the titles of conversations others were having with ChatGPT is of interest to Garante. Worries over age restrictions and misinformation will also be looked at.

Italy isn’t the only European country establishing new regulations for AI. Last week, the U.K. published a white paper that called for regulators to make “tailored, context-specific approaches that suit the way AI is actually being used in their sectors.”

Many expect the EU to crack down even harder on AI, especially with the proposed European AI Act, which is designed to restrict the use of AI in education, law enforcement, and the judicial system.

So far, the U.S. hasn’t proposed any formal legislation regarding AI.

What do you think of the regulatory landscape surrounding AI?

BloombergGPT 🗞️

Bloomberg recently released a research paper detailing their very own LLM.

BloombergGPT is a 50-billion parameter large language model, that’s been trained specifically on financial data. The researchers at Bloomberg combined finance data with general-purpose datasets to achieve competitive financial benchmarks and general-purpose LLM benchmarks.

Here’s how the LLM performs:

On Finance-Specific tasks it significantly outperformed a variety of popular financial LLMs.

On General-Purpose tasks it didn’t do badly, however, GPT-3 outperformed it.

BloombergGPT will be used to support a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks in the financial industry.

Check out the paper here.

Midjourney stops free trials 💳

Last week, we talked about the release and capabilities of Midjourney V5.

Now, Midjourney is back in the spotlight, this time halting free trials of its service.

😭

Midjourney CEO and founder David Holz recently announced the change stating “extraordinary demand and trial abuse” was the reason why.

“We think the culprit was probably a viral how-to video in China,” Holz stated in an email. “This happened at the same time as a temporary GPU shortage. The two things came together and it was bringing down the service for paid users.”

Many users thought fabricated pictures such as Donald Trump being arrested or the Pope wearing a 🔥 jacket were to blame.

However, these pictures were created using Midjourney V5, which isn’t available using the free trial.

“Moderation is hard and we’ll be shipping improved systems soon. We’re taking lots of feedback and ideas from experts and the community and are trying to be really thoughtful,” Holz told The Verge.

What do you think of the restrictions placed by Midjourney?

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