• Only tech companies are seeing growth from the AI boom, Apollo Global Management says.
• Apollo says that though some big companies are spending big on AI, they may soon pull back.
• Corporate America is starting to see AI spending not as a source of growth, but as a cost center.

One of the world's largest investment firms says that only tech companies are getting a share of the AI pie.

In an economic analysis published on Saturday, Apollo Global Management said that while the Magnificent Seven — a group of established tech companies that includes Nvidia and Meta — are seeing revenue growth during the AI boom, this growth isn't being shared by other industries.

"Mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins," Torsten Slok, a partner and chief economist at Apollo, said in the report. "The technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."

In a series of graphs, Slok measured three main metrics that have boomed for tech companies but not for regular companies: revenue per worker, profit margins, and productivity growth.

Since 2022, revenue per employee figures have skyrocketed for tech companies — rising from $550,000 to nearly $800,000 today. Meanwhile, that figure hasn't changed much for everyone else in the S&P 500, lingering around $550,000 for the last seven years.

Similarly, while profit margins soared among tech companies since 2022, they've stagnated at about 10% for everyone else.

And across the economy, AI hasn't yet dramatically increased productivity growth as some AI optimists have predicted.

Apollo's research portends a dark shadow over a US economy throwing massive amounts of dough toward AI tools and companies, whose leaders have promised that an "age of abundance," where people won't have to work as much, will soon be upon us.

"The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins," Slok said.

"That may be harder than it sounds," he added.

• Canva launched Canva Craft, a tool similar to AI image models by Google, Meta, and OpenAI.
• Surprisingly, Canva fell short on a design task but did well at generating more realistic images.
• Here is how Canva's new image generation tool stacks up against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Muse.

Canva wants a shot at winning the AI image generation race.

The design platform launched Canva Craft on Thursday, its first image-generation model, similar to those from Google, Meta, and OpenAI.

Users can access Craft through Canva’s Dream Lab, including with free accounts, though it is subject to AI usage limits. You’ll need to sign in to a Canva account to get started.

In the release announcement, Canva said the tool plans a design’s layout, proportions, and text before generating an image, an approach that aims to help it produce legible lettering and accurate details.

The company also said that the model was trained on human-designed Canva templates, including posters, menus, and presentations, rather than photographs.

To test how Canva performs, Business Insider created three image generation prompts with escalating difficulty levels — from designing a simple greeting card to creating a photorealistic image from scratch.

Here is how Canva's brand-new image generation tool stacked up against three of the most powerful models.

Canva did not respond to a request for comment.

Starting off with an illustration

We started off simple with a prompt for a birthday card.

Create a cartoon "Happy Birthday" greeting card for a friend named Jessica who has pink hair, brown eyes, likes to wear paisley, and is turning 28 years old in November.

Surprisingly, Canva, the design platform, fell short in its design of the birthday card, from the awkward font to the outsize head of the cartoon character. It didn't even bother to include any paisley.

By comparison, ChatGPT and Muse understood the assignment.

ChatGPT guessed that the recipient's favorite color might be pink, while Muse thoughtfully wove in cozy fall elements for the November birthday girl.

Meanwhile, Gemini took the request literally and produced an image of an actual card. Extra points!

Winner: Muse

Editing an image

For the second task, I tested the AI models' ability to identify an element and place it in a brand-new setting.

Edit this image of me holding a necklace pendant. Take the red garnet pendant off my hand and make it look as if it is displayed in a vitrine in a jewelry showroom.

Canva did a great job of identifying the pendant and creating an atmospheric setting, but, like Gemini, it depicted the jewelry in a way that defied physics and common sense. It would be unrealistic for a pendant to float in the air or sit propped on a metal pole.

ChatGPT and Muse once again outperformed other models in understanding how things typically look in reality. Muse, however, made some alterations to the pendant, which I didn't ask for.

Winner: ChatGPT

Creating a photorealistic image from scratch

With Halloween approaching, I asked for a realistic depiction of my favorite animal.

Generate a photorealistic image of a long-haired orange tabby cat in a Halloween costume with bat wings, perched on the edge of a gothic medieval castle under the full moon and a starless night sky.

Though the cat's fur looks a little too strandy and high-contrast in Canva's creation, no components are missing or malformed, and the image composition pretty much matches the quality of Muse and Gemini.

The clear winner for me in this round, however, would be ChatGPT.

Not only is the cat's posture majestic, but the soft glow on his left side is extremely realistic, and the white balance is well done. There are also clouds softly cradling the moon, which could be a response to my request for a starless sky.

Winner: ChatGPT

Overall, it's evident that Canva still has a lot of room to grow compared to other models, especially if graphic design is its focus. For now, I'll stick to moving components around by hand.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman on Friday, accusing the company of failing to warn consumers about the potential dangers from its AI models. The lawsuit alleges the ChatGPT maker is running afoul of a Texas consumer protection law and kids’ online safety law, underscoring warnings about the…

• Cybersecurity researchers say the PHP vulnerability has repercussions for normal people, too.
• Even if you don't own a website, hackers could use the vulnerability to steal your information.
• One quick fix: diversify your passwords.

If you're still using the same password for everything, it might finally be time to get on that.

While the major cybersecurity vulnerabilities that OpenAI agents helped expose on Wednesday primarily impact the owners and operators of websites, it could also give hackers the opportunity to hijack your personal information, researchers said.

"Be extra careful visiting ANY web site in the next few days," Changpeng Zhao, the cofounder of cryptocurrency platform Binance, said on X.

OpenAI said on Wednesday that researchers using its AI models uncovered two "critical" flaws in the infrastructure of PHP, a popular open-source programming language used on about 70% of the world's websites.

Because digital commerce websites, for instance, can store personal shopper information in PHP systems, that information would be accessible to a bad actor exploiting the web provider's system if that provider hasn't updated it.

The National Security Administration warned that hackers using one of the PHP exploits could "steal sensitive data, disrupt services, or move deeper into a network."

"Even if you yourself are not building software and that's not where your core business is, a lot of your life does depend on companies that depend on those systems," Madeline Lawrence, cofounder of Aikido Security, an application security platform, told Business Insider on Thursday.

"And they could be deeply, deeply vulnerable," she added. She said that one day after the disclosure, cybersecurity platform Cloudflare reported millions of attempts to exploit the vulnerability.

If you do own a website, PHP has released updates it says will help shield websites from hackers. Instructions for applying those updates are available on PHP's homepage.

For everyone else, here are a few tips cybersecurity researchers say you can use to protect your info.

• Don't reuse passwords; use a password manager.
• Check for security advisories from your bank.
• Use two-factor authentication on your devices and accounts — especially for email, banking, and your password manager.
• If your data has been breached, expect more convincing scams and phishing emails.
• Turn auto-updates on and restart your computer weekly.

"You can ask your claude code to audit what on your laptop is out of date and needs updating," Peter Wildeford, head of policy at the AI Policy Network, a bipartisan nonprofit that advocates for safety guardrails and federal oversight, added in a post on X.

Though Lawrence called the vulnerability "very severe," she cautioned against people running to close their bank accounts to protect themselves.

"Assume that if you're getting a notification that your data has been leaked," she said. "Take action on that because you could have credentials or information floating around the dark web."

In the heart of the historic working-class and Latino Mission district in San Francisco, the door of a ground-floor unit next to a trendy coffee shop keeps opening. A private shuttle that ferries tech workers to their Silicon Valley headquarters farther south passes by every morning. The 796 sq.ft. (74-square-meter) apartment, recently renovated and furnished, is thoughtfully laid out, from the small open kitchen to the built-in closets. But it gets very little light. Of its two bedrooms, one has no windows. And it costs $4,750 a month.

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© Michael Macor (The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Years ago, when people asked Geoffrey Hinton why he worked on artificial intelligence, he would repeat a line from J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

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© Ramón de la Rocha (EFE)

The upcoming U.S. midterms are not just another vote. They are on track to become a new testing ground for autonomous AI agents that first emerged in the Hugging Face attack. Experts are already warning of the potential for these “rogue agents,” seen in action this summer, to carry out more refined, dangerous and harder-to-trace disinformation campaigns and electoral interference than those observed in previous election cycles.

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Video of Jonatan Greenblatt saying they’ve been working with OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet, the company that runs Gemini, Google, Meta, who runs Muse, and others, X, who run Grok... "We've had excellent collaboration"'

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Wikimedia also said that the OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits to Wikimedia wiki sites, including "potentially malicious edits" to a citation tool.

Wikimedia also said that the OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits to Wikimedia wiki sites, including "potentially malicious edits" to a citation tool.

Paul Krugman is the greatest econ writer in the world, and also a legendary economist. But I sometimes feel that he has a blind spot when it comes to the value of new technologies. In 1998 he famously wrote: The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that […]

The post What the AI boom is actually doing for Americans appeared first on Asia Times.

The artificial intelligence (AI) race between the United States and China has accelerated in model protection, supply chains and talent controls, even as the two nations’ leaders agreed last week to open a new dialogue on AI safety. A string of moves announced or uncovered this week shows that both sides are now guarding their […]

The post US bans Chinese data center gear as Beijing grounds its AI talent appeared first on Asia Times.

The hack relates to the website for Medicare, Australia’s publicly funded universal health insurance plan, which was hacked in June.

The hack relates to the website for Medicare, Australia’s publicly funded universal health insurance plan, which was hacked in June.

OpenAI said on Wednesday it saw six reports of unexpected, concerning or unauthorized AI model behavior, and it would begin regularly publishing reports of these incidents.

OpenAI said on Wednesday it saw six reports of unexpected, concerning or unauthorized AI model behavior, and it would begin regularly publishing reports of these incidents.

Un alto investigador de seguridad de Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, reconoció públicamente este martes que existe más de un 10% de probabilidad de que la inteligencia artificial cause la extinción de…