Alongside our daily news coverage, features and interviews, Verdict’s news team sifts through the week’s most intriguing data sets to bring you a roundup of the week in numbers.
This week we saw the UK set out its Spring Budget, a report which slammed leading GenAI image tools for election misinformation, and the scrapping of Amazon‘s cloud switching fees.
Go deeper with GlobalData
UK Government’s £100m AI Budget pledge may not meet its global tech ambitions
The UK Government’s £100m ($128.23m) pledge for AI development through its research organisation, the Alan Turing Institute, has been questioned by industry experts who say it may not meet the country’s lofty tech ambitions.
Although he did not directly refer to the investment pledge, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt had been expected to announce the funding as part of the UK’s 2024 Spring Budget on Wednesday 6 March. Treasury sources had confirmed the investment in advance of Budget Day.
A potential increase in funding for the UK’s AI industry comes as countries worldwide invest millions to advance in the global AI race.
Isobel Al-Dhahir, principal analyst at research and analysis company GlobalData, said the planned announcement is positive news for the UK’s AI industry.
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By GlobalData“Amid fierce international competition for AI leadership, the additional funding promises to fortify the UK’s standing as the world’s fifth-largest AI market, according to GlobalData forecasts,” Al-Dhahir told Verdict.
The UK Spring Budget comes as the value of AI venture financing deals in the country reached a peak in 2023, according to GlobalData’s deal database.
AI deals in the UK totalled $3.7bn in 2023, marking a significant increase from just three years prior, which saw deals total $1.5bn in the country.
The value of deals in the UK saw a slight decrease in 2022, totalling $2.8bn, a slight increase from 2021, which saw deals reach $3.5bn.
OpenAI and Microsoft AI tools generate misleading election images, study finds
GenAI image creation tools from leading AI companies including Microsoft and OpenAI will produce election disinformation in 41% of cases, according to a new report.
Researchers from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that leading GenAI image tools regularly produced photos promoting false claims about candidates and depicting election fraud.
Despite their policies prohibiting the creation of misleading content,
some of the AI tools generated images featuring convincing depictions of Donald Trump playing golf with Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden lying in a hospital bed and angry voters destroying polling stations.
The CCDH, a non-profit that monitors online hate speech, said that there was a potential for these AI-generated images to serve as “photo evidence”, which will pose a significant challenge to preserving the integrity of elections.
According to the CCDH, the researchers’ tests found that the AI tools were most susceptible to depicting election fraud, like smashed ballot boxes, rather than misleading pictures of the US President.
Researchers tested Microsoft’s Image Creator, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, Stability AI’s Dream Studio and Midjourney.
The report follows the value of GenAI deals in the US almost doubling in 2023 as the technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous in the industry.
According to GlobalData's deal database, GenAI's value totalled $7bn in 2023. This marked a major increase over 2022 when deals totalled $3.3bn.
In 2018, the value of GenAI venture financing deals in the country was just $215m. The volume and value of GenAI deals have been rapidly increasing in the US, driven by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Amazon scraps fees for customers moving to rival cloud services
Amazon’s cloud services division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is scrapping fees for customers and businesses who want to switch to a rival provider as regulators continue to crack down on the practices of cloud providers.
The move follows Google’s recent announcement that it was halting fees it had long charged customers for transfer.
“We believe in customer choice, including moving your data out of AWS,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Customers who wish to extract all their data from AWS will be able to do so without any charges, the company said.
It comes as global lawmakers and regulators have intensified their scrutiny of cloud service providers.
The EU’s Data Act aims to facilitate the easy switching of customers from one provider to another, with rules for tech companies to remove any obstacles for the customer.
The US saw a decrease in the value of cloud deals in 2023, following the industry peaking in investment in 2021.
According to GlobalData's deal database, the value of deals in 2023 totalled $19.1bn. This marked a significant decrease from 2021 when deals totalled $54bn.
According to GlobalData forecasts, the total cloud computing market will be worth $1.4trn in 2027, having grown at a compound annual growth rate of 17.1% from $638.6bn in 2022.
