Hard Numbers: Aramco invests, Japan frets, Perplexity gets popular — and sued, UK sentences man in deepfake case

100 million: The venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco — called Wa’ed Ventures — is pledging $100 million to invest in artificial intelligence. AI is crucial to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 strategic plan, which aims to diversify the oil-reliant national economy. The country hosted a Global AI Summit just last month that attracted global interest. Now, even Saudi Aramco, the sixth most valuable company in the world, and the bedrock of the Saudi oil economy, is getting in on the action.

25: When surveyed, only 25% of Japanese respondents said that AI makes them nervous — the lowest mark of any of the 32 countries that Ipsos polled recently. But the country has been very slow to adopt AI or lean fully into its research. Stanford’s count of the “foundation models” for generative AI found that 182 of them originated in the United States, while none originated in Japan. The country is open to AI, but its tech sector just isn’t diving in yet.

350 million: Perplexity is an ascendant AI search engine — it fielded 350 million user queries in September alone. That’s a big uptick considering users asked only 500 million questions in all of 2023. As it’s grown, the company has come under fire from news publishers. Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, sued Perplexity last week alleging copyright violations. In response, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said he won’t pay to license content from news publishers but is discussing a revenue-sharing agreement similar to how Spotify pays musical artists.

18: In a landmark court decision, a judge in the United Kingdom sentenced a 27-year-old man to 18 years in prison for using AI to create child sexual abuse material. The man pleaded guilty to using a US-based service called Daz 3D to transform real photos of children into explicit deepfakes in violation of British law.