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AI giants accused of scraping over 170,000 YouTube video subtitles

Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce are some of the companies that have been named in a report by Proof News, which claimed the tech giants scraped YouTube videos without consent in order to train their AI offerings. They claimed it found subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos that were pulled from over 48,000 channels, and also shared a tool so that the public could see if any of their own videos had been used for AI training.

Popular content creators such as Marques Brownlee and PewDiePie were among those whose videos from 2020 or before were part of the registry, along with one video posted by The Hindu. Anthropic and Salesforce confirmed using training datasets that included the scraped video subtitles, but would not accept that they committed any wrong, per the outlet’s report.

UK regulators to probe Microsoft’s hiring strategy

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) regulator is investigating Microsoft over its hiring of staff from the Inflection AI startup, as well as its partnership with the same, as more regulators worldwide look into AI company acquisitions and the movement of talent within the segment. Microsoft this year hired Mustafa Suleyman as the head of its AI unit; Suleyman is the co-founder of Google DeepMind and was also involved with Inflection.

Microsoft acknowledged the proceedings, but said that its hiring practices were healthy for competition and that it should not be treated as a merger. The UK regulator has time until September 11, when it will decide whether to investigate more seriously. The report comes days after Microsoft in the U.S. decided not take a seat on Apple’s board due to antitrust concerns.

Elon Musk to shift base to Texas

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is moving the headquarters of SpaceX and X to Texas as he shifts more of his business interests out of California. The move came as Musk criticised California governor Gavin Newsom for signing a law that would not allow schools to make it mandatory for staff members to tell students’ parents about their gender identification changes. Musk, who has been accused of promoting transphobic rhetoric, claimed the law would make it necessary for companies and families to leave the state.

Musk said SpaceX would be moved from Hawthorne, California to the Starbase in Texas. Meanwhile, there are plans to move X from San Francisco to Austin. The billionaire said that he also moved his residence to Texas. His EV company Tesla shifted its corporate headquarters out of California and to Austin in 2021.