TALLAHASSEE, FLA. – A possible hack attack of a state agency now has law enforcement involved and some frustrated. The Florida Department of Health called it a potential cyber incident in an email on Wednesday, leading to temporary outages of the online system handling vital certificates. Funeral directors, like Mario Hearns from Gregg Mason Funeral Home, expressed concern over delays in providing death certificates due to the system being down. FDOH manages critical patient information, raising security concerns amid this potential breach. The extent of the incident remains unclear as investigations continue.

SYDNEY, July 4, 2024 – Top-secret Australian military intelligence will be stored on a custom cloud server built by US tech giant Amazon, Canberra announced Thursday. The US$1.3 billion deal involves Amazon Web Services designing a top secret cloud for the country’s military and intelligence agencies, enhancing collaboration with the United States. According to Australian spy boss Rachel Noble, the cloud will support the country’s Redspice intelligence program, focusing on countering cyber attacks. Amazon plans to construct three data centers across Australia.

Microsoft’s research team has unveiled VALL-E 2, a new AI system for speech synthesis capable of generating human-level performance voices with just a few seconds of audio that were indistinguishable from the source.

(VALL-E 2 is) the latest advancement in neural codec language models that marks a milestone in zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), achieving human parity for the first time, the research paper reads. The system builds on its predecessor, VALL-E, introduced in early 2023. Neural codec language models represent speech as sequences of code.

What sets VALL-E 2 apart from other voice cloning techniques is its Repetition Aware Sampling method and adaptive switching between sampling techniques, the team said. The strategies improve consistency and tackle the most common issues in traditional generative voice.

VALL-E 2 consistently synthesizes high-quality speech, even for sentences that are traditionally challenging due to their complexity or repetitive phrases, the researchers wrote, pointing out that the technology could help generate speech for people who lose the ability to talk.

As impressive as it is, however, the tool will not be made available to the public.

Currently, we have no plans to incorporate VALL-E 2 into a product or expand access to the public, Microsoft said in its ethics statement, noting that such tools bring risks like voice imitation without consent and the use of convincing AI voices in scams and other criminal activities.

The research team emphasized that there is a need for a standard method to digitally mark AI generations, recognizing that detecting AI-generated content with high accuracy still remains a challenge.

If the model is generalized to unseen speakers in the real world, it should include a protocol to ensure that the speaker approves the use of their voice and a synthesized speech detection model, they wrote.

That said, VALL-E 2’s results are very accurate compared to other tools. In a series of tests carried out by the research team, VALL-E 2 outperformed human benchmarks in robustness, naturalness, and similarity of generated speech.

VALL-E-2 was able to achieve these results with just 3 seconds of audio. The research team noted, however, that using 10-second speech samples resulted in even better quality.

Microsoft is not the only AI company that has demonstrated cutting-edge AI models without releasing them. Meta’s Voicebox and OpenAI’s Voice Engine are two impressive voice cloners that also face similar restrictions.

There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time, a Meta AI spokesperson told Decrypt last year.

Also, OpenAI explained that it’s trying to first tackle the security issue before launching its synthetic voices model.

In line with our approach to AI safety and our voluntary commitments, we are choosing to preview but not widely release this technology at this time, OpenAI explained in an official blog post.

This call for ethical guidelines is spreading throughout the AI community, especially as regulators start to raise concerns about the impact of generative AI in our everyday lives.

AI firms want India to fast-track compute infra

At present, companies like Yotta, which procures GPUs from Nvidia, are providing chips on a subscription model at an hourly rate of $2.5. Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and software companies like AMD, Nvidia, Ola Krutrim, Reliance Jio, Microsoft, People + AI, and Yotta have urged the government to expedite creating compute infrastructure in the country as well as focus on sovereignty in AI systems.

This assumes significance as the government is looking to create a compute infrastructure through procurement of graphic processing units (GPUs) for startups that are looking for a variety of these chips to train their models. In absence of any funding support from venture capitals, currently a lot of startups are not getting access to the right compute infra.

At present, companies like Yotta, which procures GPUs from Nvidia, are providing chips on a subscription model at an hourly rate of $2.5.

Comments from Aggarwal assume significance as the government is looking to procure 10,000 GPUs to create compute infrastructure in the country in a public-private partnership mode.

The cost or the capex for procuring GPUs for the government is expected to be around Rs 4,000 crore. Industry executives point that moving fast on the procurement of GPUs can help the government to realize the use cases, the need for more GPUs and varieties, and pivot on the need fast. India needs to be the intelligence capital. To achieve that, we know the algorithm and we know how to source compute, said Vishal Dhupar, MD, South Asia, Nvidia.

According to Dhupar, the country is ready to have sovereignty in the AI infrastructure once it is able to bring the elements of skillsets, technology awareness among people, and the country’s digital experience, together with the infrastructure.

Sovereignty is crucial for India to not get affected by any constraints on the usage of AI models or tech from countries like the US, etc, in case of geopolitical conflicts. Through the IndiaAI mission, the government is looking to develop its own fundamental large-language model trained on Indian datasets.

Anil Nanduri, head of AI acceleration office, Intel, said, Today, the whole AI ecosystem is importing models from the West and trying to collaborate it in the domestic world. So, it’s more of an application model.

According to Nanduri, for India AI models, there is a need to have unique datasets. The same will also have the potential of exports if the cost model is set right.

Currently, most LLMs are trained on the western culture and preferences, and that also increases the cost for Indian startups when they try to leverage it for their own services owing to the difference in data sets the models are trained on.

Mohit Sewak, who handles AI research and developer relationship for Nvidia South Asia, said the country needs multimodal AI models that can consider diverse India cultures.

Yotta Data Services, which is a Hiranandani group company, has been providing startups with Nvidia GPUs. The company is currently witnessing 70% demand for GPUs on subscriptions from global companies and 30% from India, said co-founder, MD, and CEO Sunil Gupta.

Gupta expects the demand from Indian startups and enterprises for GPUs will increase going forward, and the government along with the private sector need to create the compute capacities.

Tanuj Bhojwani, head of People + AI said, the government needs to know on how it’s going to spend the first Rs 1,000 crore on the AI mission.

According to Bhojwani, for sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and self-determination are key. We want people of India to have the benefits of using AI, especially it will be applied in education, in healthcare, etc. And if there is somebody else, who can put a stop to that, that is what you should be predicting against first, Bhojwani said.

Huawei’s Seeds for the Future Program Boosts African Tech Empowerment

Today in Essaouira, Huawei celebrated its Seeds for the Future 2024 initiative, an event aimed at strengthening and empowering youth technological capabilities and skills. The program serves as a hub for youth, with the goal of empowering their technological skills and capabilities, promoting digitalization across Africa, and preparing the next generation of digital leaders. Training sessions encompass a range of topics including AI, 5G, cloud computing, and innovative project development to address community challenges. The program also focuses on fostering knowledge sharing, propelling industry advancement, and inspiring youth to use their technological skills for social good. With participants from 15 African countries, Seeds for the Future by Huawei provides a platform for global collaboration and cross-cultural exchanges, emphasizing the importance of digital technology in creating innovative solutions and opportunities for Africa’s youth.