Good morning. It’s been a busy weekend — on Friday, a CrowdStrike update incited a historic global IT outage that grounded airplanes and shuttered businesses.

And on Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he would not be running for re-election.

And this week, the Olympics begin, and AI will be playing something of a prominent role.

Happy Monday.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter: 

• 🌴 AI for Good: Tracking and predicting deforestation

• 🛜 CrowdStrike breakdown highlights AI risks

• 📱 Meta fined $220 million for data privacy violations

• 🏅 Though it won’t be competing, this year, AI will be at the Olympics

AI for Good: Tracking and predicting deforestation 

Last year, UN-Redd collaborated with the Data Science for Social Good program in the U.K. to develop a massive predictive algorithm designed to predict future deforestation. 

The details: In February, the groups published a prototype of the model, examining the Amazon Biome as its initial test. 

• Over a three-month period, the team trained a convolutional neural network on hundreds of gigabytes of data “to learn historical deforestation patterns, and to identify areas that may be at risk of deforestation in the future.”

• The tool additionally offers insights into the causes of deforestation, which the team said is “crucial” for its success. 

Why it matters: “To prevent future deforestation, it is crucial for policymakers to know which areas are at the highest risk and to identify the drivers creating these risks. Various tools already exist to estimate future levels of deforestation. However, there is a need for improved accuracy and the ability to predict further ahead.”

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CrowdStrike breakdown highlights AI risks

On Friday, the world stuttered to something of a halt. Airlines were grounded, emergency services were faced with sweeping outages and hospital tech went offline. Travelers couldn’t check into their hotels and businesses had to scrounge up pen and paper. 

The culprit was a botched software update from IT service provider CrowdStrike, which impacted CrowdStrike’s rather broad array of Windows-based customers. 

AI researcher Gary Marcus called the global outage a “wake-up call” for the AI sector. 

The details: Marcus said that software today needs robust structural integrity — and AI isn’t going to help with that. 

• “Wake up,” he wrote. “If a single bug can take down airlines, banks, retailers, media outlets, and more, what on earth makes you think we are ready for AGI?”

• “Chasing black box AI, difficult to interpret, and difficult to debug, is not the answer. And leaving more and more code writing to generative AI, which grasps syntax but not meaning, as a new benchmark from Stephen Wolfram shows, is not the answer, either.”

The answer involves a sweeping commitment to software integrity and robustness, a push that requires thoughtful (and swift) regulation. 

“An unregulated AI industry is a recipe for disaster,” Marcus said. 

• Prodio, a provider of GPUs for inference, raised $15 million in funding led by Dragonfly Capital.

• Robinhood acquired Pluto Capital, an AI-powered investment research platform.

• The CrowdStrike outage and global software’s single-point failure problem (CNBC).

• Embraer's Eve rolls out flying taxi prototype, cash needs covered until 2027 (Reuters).

• Google is trying to steal the Ray-Ban partnership from Meta (The Verge).

• Bangladesh’s internet blackout immobilizes its booming tech industry (Rest of World).

• Don’t fall for CrowdStrike outage scams (Wired).

Meta fined $220 million for data privacy violations 

Nigeria’s competition watchdog on Friday fined Meta $220 million for data privacy violations. 

The details: Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission found, at the conclusion of a lengthy investigation, that Meta has perpetrated “abusive and invasive” practices against Nigerian consumers. 

• These practices included the appropriation of personal data without user consent and the abuse of Meta’s dominant market position “by forcing unscrupulous, exploitative and non-compliant privacy policies” on users. 

For context: This pushback against Meta’s privacy policies and data practices comes in the midst of a broader push from Meta into artificial intelligence, a push that Meta has said is built on the backbone of its consumer data. 

This push has been halted by legal action in both the European Union and Brazil, all in the midst of storms of backlash from users across Meta’s suite of social media platforms.

Though it won’t be competing, this year, AI will be at the Olympics  

The 2024 Paris Olympics begin this week, with a few events starting Wednesday and Thursday before the opening ceremony really kicks things into high gear on Friday. 

And this year, artificial intelligence has been selected, not as a competitor (yet) but as a bit of a jack-of-all assistant. 

In April, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched the Olympic AI Agenda, which was first introduced in 2012. The focus of the agenda has nothing to do with replacing athletes; it’s focused instead on supporting them in new and different ways. 

The details: When it comes to the athletes, the IOC said that AI will be used to improve judging by reducing human bias, improve training by introducing hyper-personalized training and recovery plans and even help identify new athletes by evaluating specific data points. 

• AI models, meanwhile, are known to produce heavily biased output; neither Intel nor the IOC returned comment pertaining to the ways they plan to mitigate these ingrained biases.

• The IOC also said that AI will be employed to increase efficiency, cost-savings and energy-savings across the board, resulting in a more sustainable Olympics. 

Part of this venue-wide AI integration will involve AI-powered wayfinding tech, specifically designed to help vision-impaired people find their way around the venue. It’s powered in part by lidar, which is the same technology employed by some self-driving cars, and is accessible through the cloud.

• “At the center of the Olympic AI Agenda are human beings. This means: the athletes. Because the athletes are the heart of the Olympic Movement. Unlike other sectors of society, we in sport are not confronted with the existential question of whether AI will replace human beings,” IOC President Thomas Bach said in April. 

• “In sport, the performances will always have to be delivered by the athletes. The 100 meters will always have to be run by an athlete — a human being. Therefore, we can concentrate on the potential of AI to support the athletes.”

The risks: The other side to AI and to this agenda involves an acknowledgment of the risks, something that the IOC did very briefly: “But with every opportunity comes risks. In many ways, the concept of AI stands in stark contrast to the particularly human context of Olympism.”

“The Olympic AI Agenda recognizes this concern, as well as other risks and ethical questions raised by AI in relation to data privacy, security, accountability, fairness, job displacement and environmental impact.”

While it is good to see an acknowledgment of the risks, I would love to see more attention paid to how the IOC is planning on addressing or mitigating them. 

Let’s take the issue of sustainability, for one — it’s unclear what kind of cost-benefit analysis the IOC performed here. The employment of AI tech to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions is great, but not if the cost of powering that AI tech equals or exceeds the results of its application.

It’s not clear if that is the case here.  

Beyond that, I have to wonder, yet again, why there is this rush to incorporate tech designed to mimic humans into human-centric spaces. 

Risk aside, the Olympics — to me, anyway — are about the human spirit more than they are about tech-enhanced, hyper-personalized training plans. It pains me to see instances where that human spirit, even if slightly, at first, is getting shaped or shunted by AI. 

Ancient Greece wouldn’t stand for it. 

A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

We’ll see you in the next one.

Your view on AI scams:

A quarter of you have yet to experience an AI-assisted scam, but the rest of you have faced job fraud, identity fraud and tons of scam phone calls (or you know somebody who has).

Scam phone calls:

• “It was a text from my bank followed by a phone call about a suspected Zelle transaction fraud. I was fact-checking online in real-time and caught on fairly early before they asked me to do anything, but I stayed on the call to see where they were going with it. They had a convincing script and even disclosures that they read to try to lull me into a false sense of security. Once they asked me to make a transfer, I told them I had to hang up and call back the customer service line to verify. I reported the incident to my bank who said a number of other people had fallen for a similar scam. Apparently, they can't protect your funds if you choose to transfer them to someone else, so it was a particularly insidious scam for anyone caught in it.”

Scam phone calls:

• “I've been convinced enough by text or voice calls that immediately seemed legit, or legit enough for me to go investigate the site directly or look them up online. Often, going to the site or number mentioned w/ out clicking through reveals the fraud. The whole scam falls apart once you strip away the redirection/tracker data. I've definitely been convinced enough to do my own first-level investigation though vs. just ignoring.”

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