Mozilla awards $50,000 cash prize to the makers of anti-AI watermarks

Mozilla awards $50,000 cash prize to the makers of anti-AI watermarks

Mozilla has announced the winners of its Responsible AI Challenge, a competition where it invited developers who want to build responsible AI solutions "that are ambitious but also ethical and holistic." The top prize winner to grab the $50,000 cash prize is Sanative AI which offers anti-AI watermarks to safeguard images and artwork from being used as training data for AI models.

The organization picked a total of three winners "after weeks of reviewing hundreds of competitive consumer technology and generative AI projects," it said. The applications were vetted by a panel of judges who were AI academics, developers, and entrepreneurs. Mozilla said the competition had a variety of participants, from seasoned entrepreneurs to the ones who were in the early stages of their product.

The second cash prize of $30,000 has been awarded to Kwanele Chat Bot which aims to reduce violence against women by helping them with ways to "access help fast and ensure the collection of admissible evidence." The third winner who got $20,00 in prize money is Nolano, a language model that allows large language models to run on personal devices such as laptops and smartphones.

Mozilla said the winners will also get mentorship from industry leaders and access to Mozilla communities and resources. While there have been market-disrupting systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, the tech industry has started to question the unknown consequences of AI development. Especially when AI systems are inching closer to mimicking the human thought process. Earlier this year, an open letter was signed by more than 1,100 signatories urging AI labs to pause training of their models for some time.

Microsoft, which is a prominent backer of OpenAI, recently talked about its plans to build and regulate responsible AI products. This came after the company laid off its Ethics and Society team as part of a reorganization. Google, which has been after ChatGPT with its Bard AI, has been vocal about responsible AI as well. During the Google I/O 2023 developer conference, the company dedicated an entire section of its keynote to talk about responsible AI.