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- 🤖 Drone wars, Counterfeit-GPT, and Airbnb founder weighs in on the impact of A.I.
🤖 Drone wars, Counterfeit-GPT, and Airbnb founder weighs in on the impact of A.I.
3/16/23
Neon Pulse Team
March 16, 2023
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
Here's what we have for you today:
Hunting drones
Counterfeit-GPT
Airbnb founder weighs in on A.I.
Drone Hunting 101
While drones have become a fun way to capture photos and videos, they’ve also become a legitimate threat on and off the battlefield, with many militaries and terrorist groups turning consumer drones into weapon delivery systems.
Explosives have been attached to basic consumer drones in order to attack high value targets from military bases to energy infrastructure, yet a new company is looking to harness the power of A.I. in order to shield critical infrastructure from these types of threats.
Anduril Industries is a defense-tech company started by Oculius founder Palmer Luckey that has developed an autonomous drone defense shield in which “rogue drones are identified, tracked, and disabled in any environment, day or night.”
Anduril Sentry Tower
By monitoring data from the companies ground based sentry towers and air based patrol drones, the company’s Lattice OS uses technologies like computer vision, sensor fusion, and artificial intelligence to detect, track, and classify “every object of interest” in an operator's vicinity.
Anduril Anvil Drone
The system continually scans the skies for potential threats, immediately responding to incoming attacks by launching the company’s “anvil” drones, which intercept the incoming drones by knocking them out of the sky.
“It never falls asleep. It never blinks. It never gets hungry. It never takes a bathroom break. It just sits there, watching,” said a company representative.
For Anduril, which produces a number of military drones in addition to its drone defense systems, business is booming, with the company recently closing a $1.4 billion dollar fundraising round and announcing the opening of a new 180,000 square foot facility to keep up with demand.
You can check out a demo of the drone hunting system in action on YouTube here.
Counterfeit-GPT
Taking advantage of the mass hype and popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT product, a number of nefarious developers have begun launching spyware disguised as ChatGPT Google Chrome extensions.
One such product, Quick access to ChatGPT, was only available on Google’s Chrome Store from March 3 to March 9, yet was downloaded over 2,000 times each day during that period.
And while the extension did indeed provide access to ChatGPT, Cybersecurity company Guardio found that the extension was aggressively harvesting the users Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter data.
Making the situation worse, not only was Quick access to ChatGPT able to access users’ Facebook account details, the extension automatically installed a malicious Facebook app on users’ accounts which allowed the tool to request all available user permissions.
These types of scams have become pervasive in the wake of ChatGPT’s popularity, so be sure to steer clear of any ChatGPT products that are not explicitly released by the OpenAI team.
Airbnb founder on A.I.
Last week Airbnb founder Brian Chesky shared his thoughts on A.I. at Morgan Stanley's Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:
"Who knows what's going to happen, but what appears to be true is that we're experiencing a platform shift," he said. "This platform shift is probably larger than mobile. It's probably akin to the Internet. Some would argue that it's larger than the Internet, akin to the Industrial Revolution."
"So, let's ask the question, which companies got left behind by the internet, and which companies kind of rode the internet? I think the best way to understand A.I. is actually so simple, it's just culture," Chesky continued.
"The companies that will ride A.I. are the companies with innovative cultures, and the companies that will get left behind are the same companies that were talking about crypto and the metaverse last year," he said.
"If a company talked about crypto last year and they talk about A.I. now, they probably don't understand either," he added.
Shots fired.
As to how Chesky see’s the new technology impacting Airbnb, A.I. could completely revolutionize how we use the platform:
"I actually have this vision that our app one day is less like a store, and more like the most powerful travel concierge you could ever imagine."
Now if we could just get rid of those cleaning fees…
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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