THE BIG STORY

A Warning on Children and Social Media

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, citing what he called the worst youth mental health crisis in recent memory, this week issued an advisory about social media’s impact on children, STAT News reports.

His warning of “a profound risk of harm” comes only weeks after the release of a health advisory on teens and social media use from the American Psychological Association, which noted the increased risk of anxiety and depression among adolescents who are exposed to discrimination and bullying online.

Murthy said policymakers need to develop age restrictions and safety standards for social media, including a higher standard of data privacy for children.

Recent research indicates that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes, such as symptoms of depression and anxiety.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Is ChatGPT Already Outdated?

ChatGPT is just six months old, but already it soon could be obsolete, The Atlantic writes. Language-only models are now giving way to multimodal models that can also process images, audio, and even sensory data from robots. The new approach might reflect a more human understanding of intelligence.

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CODE

The Disruptive Power of Open Source

The open-source software revolution is shaping developments across fields like AI, social media and private communications, Politico’s Digital Future Daily reports. With their decentralizing features, open-source tools have the potential to disrupt not just Silicon Valley’s business model but also regulatory rules in the U.S. and abroad.

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MARKETING

Most CMOs See Marketing Budget Gap

Seventy-one percent of CMOs believe they lack the budget needed to properly execute their marketing strategy, according to Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey shared with Marketing Dive. Marketing budgets account for 9.1 percent of total company revenue this year, falling slightly from 9.5 percent in 2022.

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SPONSORED

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QUICK HITS

• Adobe this week added a new tool to its Photoshop beta called "Generative Fill," which uses cloud-based image synthesis to fill selected areas of an image with new AI-generated content based on a text description.
• With its hand forced by antitrust regulators, Meta will sell Giphy to Shutterstock for around $53 million in cash—roughly $350 million less than it paid to buy Giphy in 2020.
• Anthropic, the prominent generative AI startup co-founded by OpenAI veterans, has raised $450 million in a Series C funding round from investors including Google.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"We had massive flooding that took out bridges and roads, ... but they’re focusing on banning an entertainment app."

‍—Christian W. Poole, a 20-year-old from Montana who has 418,500 followers on TikTok, which the state banned this week
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