... What matters here is that Google is finally showing what you can do when you have the world's information and industry-leading AI development. Microsoft and OpenAI have the best-known AI, but they've never had access to the same kind of data and knowledge graph as Google. I always assumed that was an advantage; and now, it seems, Google has finally figured that out, too. ...
In October, the White House issued a lengthy executive order on A.I., but without an enforcement mechanism, something Mr. Benifei sees as necessary. “Obviously, it’s a delicate topic,” he said. “There is a lot of concern from the business sector, I think rightly so, that we do not overregulate before we fully understand all the challenges.” But, he said, “we cannot just rely on self-regulation.” The development and use of A.I., he added, must be “enforceable and explainable to our citizens.”
Other task force members were far more reluctant to embrace such broad regulation. Questions abound, such as who is responsible if something goes wrong — the original developer? A third-party vendor? The end user? ...
Transparency is key, all agreed, and so are partnerships between government, industry and university research. “If you are not very transparent, then academia gets left behind and no researchers will come out of academia,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist at Amazon Artificial General Intelligence. ...
In addition, she said, “It’s not just about regulation. It really has to do with investment in the public sector in a deep and profound way,” noting that she has directly pleaded with Congress and President Biden to support universities in this area. Academia, she said, can serve as a trusted neutral platform in this field, but “right now we have completely starved the public sector.” ...
Runway ML, a leading AI video creation platform, has joined forces with Getty Images, the world’s premier visual content provider, to develop innovative AI video models tailored for the entertainment and advertising industries.
The collaboration of Runway ML and Getty Images aims to develop cutting-edge AI video models that will empower Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, and media companies to produce high-quality, captivating video content at an unprecedented scale. ...
Yes, this collaboration is really exciting but it has two big main problems: Not being able to appeal to a wide audience and using Art and AI in the same sentence. ...
Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny's voice quickly went viral last month. However, the songs circulating did not belong to him. ...
Chilean artist Maurico Bustos launched the trend with the song NostalgIA - a play on the Spanish abbreviation for AI. It was written and recorded by Bustos using artificial intelligence to modify Bad Bunny's vocals, producing a viral track that prompted parodies and copycat versions on TikTok.
Bad Bunny told his 20 million WhatsApp followers to leave if they liked "this shitty song that is viral on TikTok ... I don't want you on tour either." ...
... Can AI safety research shed any light on old corporate governance problems? And can the law and economics of corporate governance help us frame the new problems of AI safety? I identify five lessons — and one dire warning — on the corporate governance of AI that the corporate turmoil at OpenAI has made vivid.
1. Companies cannot rely on traditional corporate governance to protect the social good.
... Anthropic is organized as a public benefit corporation (PBC), with the specific mission to “responsibly develop and maintain advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.” ...
2. Even creative governance structures will struggle to tame the profit motive.
This phenomenon has been in full display during the OpenAI governance war. ...
In an influential paper, economists Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales argued that, in an unrestricted market for corporate control, a profit-driven buyer can easily hijack the social mission of a firm. They called this phenomenon “amoral drift.” ...
3. Independence and social responsibility do not necessarily converge.
An important concept in AI safety is the so-called “orthogonality thesis,” which posits that AI’s intelligence and its final goals are not necessarily correlated. We can have unintelligent machines that serve us well and super-intelligent machines that harm us. Intelligence alone does not guarantee against harmful behavior.
Corporate governance experts should borrow this helpful concept. ...
4. Corporate governance should try to solve for the alignment of profit and safety.
One crucial problem in AI safety is the so-called “alignment problem”: Superintelligent AI might have values and goals that are incompatible with human well-being. ...
The AI alignment problem is quite similar to the central problem of corporate governance. ...
Our most successful institutional designs, from liberal constitutions to capitalist institutions, do not depend on suppressing greed and ambition. Instead, they focus on harnessing these passions for the greater good. ...
5. AI companies’ boards must maintain a delicate balance in cognitive distance.
... This difference between how AI safety experts and outsiders interpret and understand the world is what some scholars have termed “cognitive distance.” ...
Was the drastic and sudden decision to fire Sam Altman, with little or no warning to major investors and no explanations to the public, the product of too little cognitive distance? ...
Corporate boards are complex social systems. The ideal decision-making dynamic in the boardroom should be one in which directors with different backgrounds, competences, and point of views discuss vigorously and intelligently, willing to contribute their insights but also to learn and change their minds when appropriate. Real-world boardrooms often fail to live up to this standard. ...
A Warning: Corporate Governance Cannot Handle Catastrophic Risk
... Many AI experts, however, believe that there is a small but non negligible chance that AI will be catastrophic for humanity. ...
While corporate governance might help mitigate serious risks, it is not good at handling existential risk, even when corporate decision-makers have the strongest commitment to the common good. ...
Top AI experts and commentators have already invoked a Manhattan Project for AI, in which the U.S. government would mobilize thousands of scientists and private actors, fund research that would be uneconomic for business firms, and make safety an absolute priority. ...
While good corporate governance can help in the transitional phase, the government should quickly recognize its inevitable role in AI safety and step up to the historic task.
... Under the deal, SPE will have access to the Guardian’s current and developing news stories, and to the Guardian archive, containing 200 years of history across articles, blogs, columns, videos and podcasts. ...
The Guardian picked up the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for the film Colette in 2021, following a nomination in the same category for the film Black Sheep in 2019. ...
According to Oxford University Press [OUP], which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary [OED], it is defined as style, charm, or attractiveness, and the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner.
The term is thought to be a shortened form of the word "charisma". ...
Stability AI, developer of Stable Diffusion (one of the leading visual content generators, alongside Midjourney and DALL-E), has introduced SDXL Turbo — a new AI model that demonstrates more of the latent possibilities of the common diffusion generation approach: images that update in real time as the user’s prompt updates. This feature was always a possibility even with previous diffusion models given text and images are comprehended differently across linear time, but increased efficiency of generation algorithms and the steady accretion of GPUs and TPUs in a developer’s data center makes the experience more magical.
Write “A cat…” and see a cat. Add “… in a top hat,” and see the hat materialize. Finish the sentence “A catastrophic plane crash” instead and see the image change to that, too.
In the case of SDXL Turbo, in four steps the model can produce images that humans evaluate as matching a prompt better than images that the OpenMUSE model took 26 steps to produce.
About 70 percent of humans rate a 1-step image produced by SDXL Turbo as subjectively better than a 16-step image produced by OpenMUSE, and their data shows similar advantages over their own prior models. The advantage here is clearly time and energy savings (Stability AI claims the model can produce a 512×512 image in just 207ms on an A100 GPU).
According to Stability AI’s CEO Emad Mostaque, there’s a penalty from the approach, but one with a significant upside: “Less diversity, but way faster & more variants to come which will be… interesting, particularly with upscales & more,” he posted on X. Hardcore prompt warriors may not hate this drop in diversity, given the appreach clearly enables a category of application and workflow previously impossible.
The new model introduces what Stability AI calls ‘distillation’ techniques. The company describes the approach as “Adversarial Distilled Diffusion” or ADD, noting it shares similarities with GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), which run with fewer steps and typically encode less semantic information, and are not typically prompted in natural language like our current generators.
Stability AI has published model weights and code on Hugging Face for non-commercial use, and link to a beta tool on Clipdrop so interested people can play with the model themselves.
What this means is that if you want to watch DS9 (or Voyager for that matter), you have to watch it more or less at the quality in which it was broadcast back in the ’90s. Like TNG, it was shot on film but converted to video tape at approximately 480p resolution. ...
There’s a lot more detail carried in the image that just isn’t obviously visible — so really, we aren’t adding but recovering it. ...
The version I got clocks in at around 400 megabytes per 45-minute episode, low by most standards, and while there are clearly smoothing issues, badly interpolated details, and other issues, it was still worlds ahead of the “official” version. As the quality of the source material improves in later seasons, this contributes to improved upscaling as well. Watching it let me enjoy the show without thinking too much about its format limitations; it appeared more or less as I (wrongly) remember it looking. ...
The real question, however, is why Paramount, or CBS, and anyone else sitting on properties like DS9 haven’t embraced the potential of intelligent upscaling. It’s gone from highly technical oddity to easily leveraged option, something a handful of smart people could do in a week or two. If some anonymous fan can create the value I experienced with ease (or relative ease — no doubt a fair amount of work went into it), why not professionals? ...
With many AI-related lawsuits hinging on who has the right to the intellectual property used to train large language models, a coalition of companies that includes American Express, Humana, IBM, Pfizer, UPS, and Walmart have launched the Data & Trust Alliance, a nonprofit organization with the goal of developing a series of standards “for describing the origin, history, and legal rights to data,” according to the New York Times.
