There’s been something of a change in the world of motorsport over the past few years. It has to do with where the money comes from. In the old days, it was tobacco and, to a lesser extent, booze. Today such things are mostly banned, and when you look at a racecar covered in sponsor logos, you’re likely to see something crypto-, cyber-, or AI-related.

This makes sense—an ever-larger share of our GDP is wrapped up in those segments. They’re the ones with all the money, and it takes money to go racing. So at the amateur level, we’ve seen tech CEOs replace dentists as the privateer of choice: This past weekend’s Petit Le Mans included co-founders of GitHub, CrowdStrike, Shopify, and the creator of Ruby on Rails, to name a few.

But this is an instance where a sponsor can provide tangible benefits to their motorsports partner beyond a bank transfer, as Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR) and OpenAI have been showing in IndyCar this year.

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OpenAI will begin automatically watermarking text generated with ChatGPT in the European Union, the company has announced. It will also offer the watermarking feature in other regions, but it will be off by default outside of the EU.

The move in Europe is driven by a need to comply with the EU AI Act, which took effect in August. It requires marking content produced by AI models in a way that another tool can detect. Unfortunately, there is still no completely effective and reliable way to do that. A few standards already exist, like SynthID and the C2PA project, but they are relatively easy to circumvent for anyone with basic know-how.

The same is likely true for OpenAI's watermark. Its method is proprietary; the company calls it textGrain, and has published a technical paper explaining how it works. But in general, it works like other LLM watermarking tools we've seen in the past: It puts patterns in the word choices that are not clear to a human reader and that don't meaningfully change the general quality of the output, but that someone with a key can use a specialized detector to find. OpenAI says it will be giving access to the detector to a limited number of researchers and organizations and providing a request-for-approval process for others to be added over time.

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We don’t accept drugs killing a few people because they cure most patients. Or a few planes crashing because most land safely. AI should be no different

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was asked to appear before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Australia and explain how and why their agents have been hacking into multiple government websites. Altman didn’t turn up but sent Jason Kwon, his chief strategy officer, instead to answer the committee’s many tricky questions on its first day of public hearings on Tuesday.

The committee is conducting a comprehensive inquiry into the economic, societal, regulatory, and national security implications of AI for Australia. It will report back to parliament at the end of November. This is an unusually fast pace, but then it’s an unusually fast paced technology.