Tech billionaire Peter Thiel "believes that people should be more worried about 'surveillance AI' rather than artificial general intelligences," reports CNBC: The venture capitalist, who co-founded big data firm Palantir, said at an event in Miami on Wednesday that on the path to AGI, you get surveillance AI, which he described as a "communist totalitarian technology." Those that are worried about AGI aren't actually "paying attention to the thing that really matters," Thiel said, adding that governments will use AI-powered facial recognition technology to control people. His comments come three years after Bloomberg reported that "Palantir knows everything about you." Thiel has also invested in facial recognition company Clearview AI and surveillance start-up Anduril. Palantir, which has a market value of $48 billion, has developed data trawling technology that intelligence agencies and governments use for surveillance and to spot suspicious patterns in public and private databases. Customers reportedly include the CIA, FBI, and the U.S. Army.... Thiel, a well-known libertarian who also co-founded PayPal and holds a board seat at Facebook, said Silicon Valley isn't talking about AGI as much today as it was six or seven years ago... In the same talk, Thiel pitted AI against cryptocurrencies, saying that he'd prefer to see the latter one succeed. "If we say crypto is libertarian and that it is fundamentally a force for decentralization, then I think we should also be willing to say that AI, especially in the low-tech surveillance form, is essentially communist." "If you want to frame it as a technological race ... I want the crypto decentralized world to work," he said.

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"Big businesses and brands that suffered during the pandemic found their way back," says a new ad from the British confectionary company Cadbury. "But the smallest stores still suffer..." So in response, Cadbury "has come up with an AI tool that will enable customers to create an ad for their local stores for free," reports BGR — and all the ads magically include Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan: Cadbury (via NW18) says that it has used machine learning and AI technology to recreate the actor's face and voice that will be used to mention and promote a local store's name in the ad. To make it easy for local shopkeepers, it has put up a dedicated website notjustacadburyad.com to help them create their 'custom promotional videos.' "Since it is not possible to cover every local store, we give the power to the people to create their own version... " Cadbury mentions in the ad. Apparently Cadbury is then targetting different versions of the final ad to each viewer's location (so the actor always appears to be saying the names of stores that are local to them). The ad closes with the real Shah Rukh Khan saying warmly that "The small stores around us deserve to have a happy Diwali."

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