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The tech industry hopes that 2024 will bring far wider application of Generative AI systems but, notes an article this week in Fast Company, lawsuits over copyrights could slow everything down as legal exposure becomes a bigger factor in AI companies’ plans for how and when to release new models.

The latest case involves The New York Times versus OpenAI and Microsoft. The Times sued the tech companies for copyright infringement on December 27, opening a new front in the legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train AI large language models.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. The suit does not include an exact monetary demand but it says the defendants should be held responsible for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of The Time's uniquely valuable works." It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.

The courts have not yet addressed the question of whether AI companies are infringing on a massive scale by training their systems with a wealth of images, text and other data scraped from the Internet but the explosion of generative AI and the popularity of products from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Meta Platforms and others have led to copyright cases by writers, artists, and other copyright holders.

Tech companies warn that the lawsuits could put the brakes on the fast development of the Generative AI industry. Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz was quoted as saying in a January 2 Reuters article that "imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development.”
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

Global demand for both oil and gas is set to peak by 2030, according to the latest International Energy Agency (IEA) projections. If governments act to reach Net Zero emissions by mid-century, which is necessary to keep the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C within reach, oil and gas use would decline by more than 75% by 2050.
Yet the oil and gas sector which provides more than half of global energy supply currently account for just 1% of clean energy investment globally. “The oil and gas industry is facing a moment of truth,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, said duringt COP28 in Dubai in December. “With the world suffering the impacts of a worsening climate crisis, continuing with business as usual is neither socially nor environmentally responsible,” he said. “Oil and gas producers around the world need to make profound decisions about their future place in the global energy sector. The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals – which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.”
Synhelion, a Swiss scale-up which has developed a breakthrough method to produce renewable synthetic fuel from CO2, water, and sunlight, is proposing a way forward. It wants to license its technology to gas and oil companies and have them become the future owners and operators of green fuel production plants. “There is a huge technology overlap and spending several billion per plant is nothing new for oil and gas and the energy sector,” says Philipp Furler, CEO and Co-founder of Synhelion, which was recently named a Global Innovator by The World Economic Forum. “Oil and gas companies could be the future owners and operators of our plants but so could other players. We are open and willing to provide our technology to industry partners.”

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Writer, a San Francisco-based scale-up, bills itself as the only full-stack generative AI platform designed specifically for the enterprise. Its technology helps companies integrate generative AI into their content creation and other workflows, as well as generate insights from their internal data, with the aim of increasing productivity and driving measurable business impact across enterprise functions.
"Where to start is a huge problem for a lot of companies,” says May Habib, Writer’s CEO and Co-founder.”We can come in and tell a company what use cases to prioritize and where they can unlock the most value in the shortest amount of time.”
Writer’s customers include United Healthcare, L’Oreal, and Accenture. The scale-up has raised over $100 million in financing rounds that included venture capitalist firms and Accenture. It recently become a member of the World Economic Forum's Unicorn Community and will participate in the Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos January 15-19.
Read on to learn how Writer differentiates itself in a crowded field that includes not only OpenAI, Anthropic, A121 Labs and Mistral AI but enterprise-focused generative platforms such as Typeface.

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Estimated number of months Russian hackers remained undetected inside Ukrainian telecoms giant Kyivstar's system prior to a December cyberattack, Ukraine's cyber spy chief told Reuters in a story published this week.

The hack, one of the most dramatic since Russia's full-scale invasion nearly two years ago, knocked out services provided by Ukraine's biggest telecoms operator for some 24 million users for days. The December 12 attack wiped "almost everything", including thousands of virtual servers and PCs, Illia Vitiuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) cybersecurity department, told Reuters. It is probably the first example of a destructive cyberattack that "completely destroyed the core of a telecoms operator," he said, and should serve as a warning to the West.

Kyivstar is the biggest of Ukraine's three main telecoms operators and there are some 1.1 million Ukrainians who live in small towns and villages where there are no other providers.