White House A.I. director says U.S. should model Europe’s approach to regulation
Since August 2018, Lynne Parker has worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, helping steer the executive branch’s approach to research, innovation, policy, and investment in artificial intelligence. …
As the final speaker at the Fortune Brainstorm A.I. conference in Boston this week, Parker discussed this relatively new position and shared the initiative’s three main goals. “The first one is all about research. The innovations that we’re being able to take advantage of today, many of them are due to decades of investments by the federal government and research, so there’s a recognition that the advances for the next decade need to have that research underpinning as well,” she said. “A second goal is in making sure that the U.S. leads the world in the development and use of trustworthy A.I. in both the public and private sectors. That means the federal government itself, and its use of trustworthy A.I., as well as the private sector. Obviously, there are many things that need to happen for that to take place. And then the third [goal] is to make sure that we’re educating people to have the skills and the talents and the opportunities to learn about the A.I.-enabled jobs of both today and the future.” …
International cooperation is also a big issue for Parker’s initiative, as she discussed when asked to compare the U.S.’s approach to A.I. versus China’s. …
Finally, she touched on what’s been a running theme at Fortune’s Brainstorm A.I. conference—the need to make sure artificial intelligence is equitable and ethical. Right now, she said, both the private and public sectors are still figuring out the “appropriate” ways to determine what’s responsible when it comes to transparency and explainability. …
See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2021/11/10/white-house-a-i-director-regulation/
At Seattle’s Museum of Museums, a pseudo-religion generated by artificial intelligence and machine learning
When you walk up the stairs of the Museum of Museums and into the gallery, you enter a church-like atmosphere. You see shifting stained-glass windows projected on the walls and pews for sitting. You hear what sounds like Gregorian chant and a friendly (yet authoritative) voice delivering a sermon. The Word of the Future is a neural network that made all that — not the pews, and not the projector, but all the churchy media you see and hear. The images of stained-glass windows do not exist in any church in the world, but are The Word’s idea of what stained glass should look like. The Gregorian chant was never sung by human voices, but is The Word’s idea of what that kind of music should sound like. The Word of the Future is a machine intelligence. (“The Word of the Future” also happens to be the name of the exhibition.)
... “The root idea was about how religion has been a force of civilization — almost like a technology that has defined some of the ways we perceive things,” Fennell said. “If you deeply believe in, let’s say, Jesus Christ, and see a face in your toast, you might attribute that to a holy action. That would be based on the framework of your understanding. That’s an extreme example, and not at all common, but people attribute things they don’t understand to forces they can understand. They try to make sense of things.”
... The result is three rooms with a coolly sacred feeling. The main event is a dim chapel where The Word gives a sermon on mind, learning and technology while Rorschach-like blots slowly morph on the wall. In an even darker, more intimate sanctum, The Word delivers another sermon on pareidolia (seeing meaning in randomness, like figures in clouds or faces in wood grain). Between the two is a gallery/reliquary with the stained-glass windows and a variety of “holy” objects in display cases.
See the full story here: https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/visual-arts/at-seattles-museum-of-museums-a-pseudo-religion-generated-by-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning/
When is the art the artist?
Ai-Da’s drawing arm and her drawing AI algorithms were designed by Egyptians Salaheldin Al Abd and Ziad Abass.
These algorithms allow analysis of the subject Ai-Da is looking at and use the resulting data set to create the movements required for the drawing arm. Her repertoire has extended to performance art and clay modelling.
See the full story here: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/11/when-is-the-art-the-artist/
Summit Scramble is the World’s First Immersive Cross-Platform Web Game That You Can Play On Smartphones, Computers and Virtual Reality Devices
Key Features:
- Players can create and customize their own Ready Player Me avatars as their character in the game with select outfits, accessories and hairstyles.
- Summit Scramble is a free web game that can be played in AR on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets or Microsoft HoloLens, in 3D on desktop and laptop computers and in VR on the Oculus Quest/Meta Quest.
- Players can challenge their friends in real-time from anywhere around the world and play across platforms.
See the full story here: https://sports.yahoo.com/summit-scramble-world-first-immersive-174400477.html
Beeple’s ‘Human One’ Sculpture and NFT Sells for Nearly $29 Million
PhilNote: this is a true Andy Warhol / John Cage moment - it is great art because it uses the established art infrastructure and the market says it is thru the valuation.
HUMAN ONE, a 3-D video sculpture and the latest creation bythe artist known as Beeple, sold for US$28.9 million to an online bidder in Switzerland at a live Christie’s auction in New York on Tuesday evening.
The more than 7-foot-high sculpture featuring dystopian imagery that is accessed through the Ethereum blockchain drew bids from collectors on the phone with specialists in New York and Hong Kong, before ultimately selling for a hammer price of US$25 million in just over 3 minutes.
The imagery that makes up the world of this ever-exploring human in Beeple’s work is drawn randomly from a data pool of one-minute video clips set up by Winkelmann and accessed via Ethereum, Christie’s says.
The artist intends to change the imagery blanketing the four walls of the sculpture throughout his lifetime, creating a lifelong connection with the winning bidder as well as any future owners of the sculpture.
See the full story here: https://www.barrons.com/articles/beeples-human-one-video-sculpture-and-nft-sells-for-nearly-29-million-01636506472
Alibaba-backed institute achieves “another Sputnik moment” in China’s battle for AI supremacy
Chinese science and technology research institute, Damo Academy – a subsidiary of ecommerce giant Alibaba – has announced that its “Multi-Modality to Multi-Modality Multitask Mega-transformer” (M6) artificial intelligence (AI) system has increased its number of parameters from 1 trillion to 10 trillion, far exceeding the trillion-level models previously released by Google and Microsoft. According to the announcement, this makes M6 the world’s largest AI pre-training model.
According to the academy, M6 has achieved ultimate low carbon, high efficiency in AI models using 512 graphic processing units (GPU) to train a 10 trillion parameter neural network within ten days. Compared to the GPT-3, a large model released by the OpenAI research laboratory last year, M6 achieved the same parameter scale with only 1% of its energy consumption.
...The Alibaba Damo Academy (Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook) is an academically-oriented hybrid research and development facility. It was established in 2017 in Hangzhou – where Alibaba is headquartered – and operates independently from its parent company.
...It aims to create a research ecosystem in China combining cutting-edge technologies (such as quantum technology), breakthroughs in core technologies (such as AI and chips) and the application of key technologies (such as databases).
See the full story here: https://www.railway-technology.com/features/alibaba-backed-institute-achieves-another-sputnik-moment-in-chinas-battle-for-ai-supremacy/
