OpenAI’s Generative Video Tech Is Described as ‘Eye-Popping’
... In an interview with The New York Times, Open AI researchers Tim Brooks and Bill Peebles said Sora is not being publicly released, but will be shared “with a small group of academics and other outside researchers who will ‘red team’ it, a term for looking for ways it can be misused.”
OpenAI says on the Sora page it is “also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals.” ...
NYT also registers concerns, such as it becoming “a quick and inexpensive way of creating online disinformation, making it even harder to tell what’s real on the Internet.” ...
OpenAI chose the name Sora, Japanese for “sky,” because it evokes limitless potential. Ensuring that potential will be used for good is the challenge. University of Washington Professor Oren Etzioni, who is also the founder of the non-profit True Media, tells NYT he is “absolutely terrified that this kind of thing will sway a narrowly contested election.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/openais-generative-video-tech-is-described-as-eye-popping/
10 Future-proof careers for Gen Z: Professions unlikely to be disrupted by AI
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For Gen Z, who are charting their career paths in an era of unprecedented technological change, here are ten professions that are unlikely to be significantly affected by AI:
1. Psychiatrists: The complexities of the human mind and emotions necessitate the nuanced understanding and empathetic approach that psychiatrists provide, making this profession less susceptible to automation.
2. Therapists: Similarly, therapists offer personalized support and guidance tailored to individual needs, which AI cannot replicate in its entirety.
3. Medical Caregivers: Roles such as nurses and caregivers require not only technical skills but also empathy and human connection, qualities that are difficult for AI to emulate convincingly.
4. AI Researchers and Engineers: Ironically, professionals directly involved in the development of AI technologies are likely to remain in demand as the field continues to evolve and expand.
5. Fiction Writers: Creativity and imagination are fundamental to the art of storytelling, making fiction writers relatively immune to AI encroachment in the realm of literature and entertainment.
6. Teachers: Despite the integration of technology in education, the role of teachers in facilitating learning, fostering critical thinking, and providing mentorship remains indispensable.
7. Criminal Defense Attorneys: Legal proceedings involve complex human interactions, interpretation of laws, and advocacy skills, areas where human expertise continues to be essential.
8. Computer Scientists and Engineers: While AI may automate certain aspects of coding and software development, the creativity and problem-solving abilities of computer scientists and engineers ensure their relevance in shaping future technologies.
9. Scientists: Scientific inquiry and discovery rely on human curiosity, intuition, and ingenuity, aspects that are challenging for AI to replicate entirely.
10. Managers (Actually Leaders): Effective leadership involves not only making decisions but also inspiring and guiding teams, navigating complex interpersonal dynamics, and fostering organizational culture, aspects that are deeply rooted in human experience.
See the full article here: https://nairobinews.nation.africa/10-future-proof-careers-for-gen-z-professions-unlikely-to-be-disrupted-by-ai/#google_vignette
Why artificial general intelligence lies beyond deep learning
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Robust decisioning
One potential solution involves adopting a robust decision approach. The AV sensors would gather real-time data to assess the appropriateness of various decisions — such as accelerating, changing lanes, braking — within a specific traffic scenario.
If critical factors raise doubts about the algorithmic rote response, the system then assesses the vulnerability of alternative decisions in the given context. ...
... As AI evolves, we may need to depart from the deep learning paradigm and emphasize the importance of decision context to advance towards AGI. Deep learning has been successful in many applications but has drawbacks for realizing AGI.
DMDU methods may provide the initial framework to pivot the contemporary AI paradigm towards robust, decision-driven AI methods that can handle uncertainties in the real world.
Swaptik Chowdhury is a Ph.D. student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy researcher at nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
Steven Popper is an adjunct senior economist at the RAND Corporation and professor of decision sciences at Tecnológico de Monterrey.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/ai/why-artificial-general-intelligence-lies-beyond-deep-learning/
“We could very quickly find ourselves in a world where reality is controlled by tech corporations”
... According to Lanier, the important question is what will happen when humans take off their headsets: "And so another urgent question is whether people can enjoy the storied reality of finitude after coming down from the high of fake infinity. Can being merely human suffice? Can the everyday miracle of the real world be appreciated enough? Or will the future of culture only be viral? Will all markets become Ponzi-like fantasies? Will people reject physics forever, the moment we have technology that’s good enough to allow us to pretend it’s gone?” ...
"Today we can still take solace in the fact that we are able to disconnect from the phone and the computer. You can decide to leave Twitter, because there is a reality beyond the phone screen that is full of bots, fake news and manipulations. But in the future reality may be controlled by corporations and political parties. Imagine a country that has a minority of people it doesn't like, a persecuted minority. It can promise some corporation that it will give them a tax break in exchange for designing a reality that suits it." ...
"So this is something I constantly think about: why do I build what I build realistically? Is it just because I have a technical attraction to it? Because it's not good, and we have to overcome it. I also think that artists, designers, technical people, should strive not to imitate reality in a distorted way, but to do fantastic things. This field was created so that we can see things that are a little beyond.
"Already today, people intuitively understand these problems, even people who do not understand anything in the field, both because of the aesthetics of augmented reality and because of the way it is placed in front of our faces. And this aesthetic is symbolic, it signals to us that we are losing a little grip on reality, because it is being hidden from us, because we are being locked in a bubble."
See the full story here: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bt94yd5a0
TikTok is now on Apple Vision Pro, ready to take over your view and eat up your gestures
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In January, Ahmad Zahran, Product Leader at TikTok, revealed that a Vision Pro app was in the works, saying his team had “designed a new TikTok experience for the Apple Vision Pro”. Its reimagined interface takes you out of TikTok in Safari – which used to be the only way to access the platform on the Vision Pro – and into a new app version that’s designed for the Vision Pro’s visionOS platform and takes full advantage of the headset’s visual layout.
Similar to the design of its iOS and Android apps, TikTok for visionOS has a vertical layout and includes the usual ‘Like’, ‘Comment’, ‘Share’, and ‘Favorite’ icons. What sets TikTok’s visionOS app apart from its iOS and Android versions is its expanded interface designed for the Vision Pro’s widescreen view. ...
When you tap the icons in the navigation bar they appear as floating panes to the right of your ‘For You’ page without interrupting the main video display, giving you a better view of comment sections and creator profiles. Better yet, the app is also compatible with Vision Pro’s Shared Space tool, allowing you to move TikTok to a different space in your headset view so that you can open other apps. ...
There is one thing missing from the TikTok Vision Pro app: the ability to capture and create new videos.
TikTok has also beaten Netflix and YouTube to the punch by arriving on the Vision Pro. While Netflix has no plans to launch a Vision Pro app right now, YouTube recently announced the app Juno – a service that lets you browse YouTube videos specifically for Apple’s ‘latest and greatest device’. ...
See the full story here: https://www.techradar.com/computing/virtual-reality-augmented-reality/tiktok-is-now-on-apple-vision-pro-ready-to-take-over-your-view-and-eat-up-your-gestures
The AI insiders who want the controversial technology to be developed faster
"I don't know how to say this in a polite way, but Beff is evil," says German-American AI entrepreneur, Connor Leahy.
The long-haired 28-year-old is talking both about and to his opponent in a YouTube debate, who goes by the pseudonym Beff Jezos, or just "Beff".
He's the founder of a controversial movement known as "e/acc", short for "effective accelerationism".
They're wrestling for control of the AI steering wheel, and their stated goal is to hit the gas as hard as possible. In fact, their motto is "accelerate or die".
The e/acc movement is full of AI industry insiders — including top engineers, investors, and executives.
They're waging a war against the AI safety movement, and anyone arguing to slow down — the "doomers" and "decels" (short for decelerationists). Beff's debate opponent Connor Leahy is just one of them. ...
... they tend to have an unshakeable faith in free markets, and somewhat counterintuitively, a deep distrust of big tech companies.
Instead, they argue for decentralised control of important technology — especially AI. ...
A statement of e/acc's principles on its own website, states: "If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilisation as we know it would never have emerged."
"Stop fighting the thermodynamic will of the Universe."
E/acc sees itself as the antidote to an AI safety movement that's run amok. ...
It turned out the real Beff Jezos was a brilliant Quantum AI computing scientist.
He's only in his early 30s, but he'd already held leadership roles at two cutting-edge companies owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet. ...
"You get rewarded for polarisation … and so even though we started a movement that is literally trying to polarise the tech ecosystem, at the end of the day, it's so that we can have a conversation and find an optimum together." ...
"Part of e/acc is to appreciate this principle in a way that's not just centred on humanity, but kind of broader.
"Because we cherish this beautiful state of matter we're in, we kind of feel a responsibility to scale it in order to preserve it, because the options are to grow or die." ...
"If we play our cards right, maybe the future, even the near future, will be unimaginably good."
Delays to that future, for Haodong, constitute a special form of cruelty. ...
Both movements are full of people working in tech, who have always believed in it as a force for good.
The question that separates the e/accs from the doomers is whether AI might be a special case — the first exception to the rule within our lifetimes. ...
See the full story here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-18/ai-insiders-eacc-movement-speeding-up-tech/103464258
Forget Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – the big impact is already here and it’s called AI agents
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The Rabbit r1 was a big hit at the CES show this year. It’s affordably priced, it allowed direct access to an AI engine. But the focus on the device may have missed the real bombshell that Rabbit r1 dropped.
In the video, CEO Jesse Lyu teaches the AI to book a vacation, but he’s not visiting the web-sites, nor is he clicking on any web pages. The “controller” that oversees the interaction of agents and websites is doing all the work. More than that, it’s learning from this interaction how to do this series of tasks to achieve a particular result. After its first training, he is able to just say, “plan a trip” with a few comments and it executest the planning and comes back with appropriate options.
Think about that. There is no need for interfaces or APIs. There is no need for the user to have standalone apps. Once trained on a similar task, the AI system (not the device) is able to learn to do everything necessary – including operating a browser or even a computer – on its own, without intervention, to achieve a specific outcome. Once it’s learned that task, it can adapt it and even modify it. ...
You might remember the scandal that happened when a company called Cambridge Analytics collected Facebook data and claimed they could use likes and dislikes to predict everything from your voting preferences to your sexual preferences. That’s going to seem “so 2016” when you consider that we might all have an agent that no longer has to predict – it will know what you are going to do.
That creates a huge dilemma in terms of privacy. Where will that be stored? Who will “own” it and control it? ...
For those not familiar with it, Metcalfe’s law, simply stated, says that the value of a network is the square of its nodes. Or to put it simply, once you get a critical mass of users in any platform, it becomes really hard for anyone else to compete. ...
How strong is Metcalfe’s law. It is so strong that even Elon Musk has not been able to totally kill X/Twitter. Millions have left for other platforms, but even so, few have actually deleted their Twitter account and totally moved on. Despite many new startups trying to supplant Twitter, as of yet, no-one has. The value of their network is still dwarfed by Twitter.
X/Twitter may lose enough money to destroy itself, but it hasn’t lost enough people. That’s the power of Metcalfe’s law. ...
See the full story here: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/forget-artificial-general-intelligence-agi-the-big-impact-is-already-here-and-its-called-ai-agents/558707
Meta’s new AI model learns by watching videos
Meta’s AI researchers have released a new model that’s trained in a similar way to today’s large language models, but instead of learning from written words, it learns from video.
LLMs are normally trained on thousands of sentences or phrases where some of the words are masked, forcing the model to find the best words to fill in the blanks. In doing so they pick up a rudimentary sense of the world. Yann LeCun, who leads Meta’s FAIR (foundational AI research) group, has proposed that if AI models could use the same masking technique, but on video footage, they could learn more quickly. ...
The embodiment of LeCun’s theory is a research model called Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA). It learns by processing unlabeled video and figuring out what probably happened in a certain part of the screen during the few seconds it was blacked out. ...
Meta’s next step after V-JEPA is to add audio to the video, which would give the model a whole new dimension of data to learn from—just like a child watching a muted TV then turning the sound up. ...
See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91029951/meta-v-jepa-yann-lecun
HOW GENERATIVE AI COULD ENABLE A NEW ERA OF FILMMAKING
1. Video generation: Generative video tools, such as Runway’s Gen-2and Pika, that use video diffusion models are capable of synthesizing novel video, creating short, soundless animations from text prompts, images or video.
2. Neural radiance fields (NeRFs): .... To create a NeRF, a neural network is trained on a simple recorded video from any camera or just a partial set of 2D images, meaning they don’t need to show all perspectives, sides or angles of the object or scene. The network is then able to generate a high-fidelity 3D representation of an object or scene by inferring unseen viewpoints, even those not captured in training data provided to the model. ...
3. Video avatars: Generative AI tools developed by Synthesia, Soul Machines and HeyGen can create entirely synthetic, photorealistic avatars that combine deepfake video and synthetic speech to precisely replicate a specific person’s appearance, voice, expressions and mannerisms. These unique personal AI avatars have been variously referred to as digital humans, twins, doubles or clones. ...
See the full story here: https://variety.com/vip/how-generative-ai-could-enable-a-new-era-filmmaking-1235898355/
Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows ’emergent abilities’
Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. ...
Here are examples of tricky text mentioned in the paper:
- Compound nouns: The Beckhams decided to rent a charming stone-built quaint countryside holiday cottage.
- Emotions: “Oh my gosh! Are we really going to the Maldives? That’s unbelievable!” Jennie squealed, bouncing on her toes with uncontained glee.
- Foreign words: “Mr. Henry, renowned for his mise en place, orchestrated a seven-course meal, each dish a pièce de résistance.
- Paralinguistics (i.e. readable non-words): “Shh, Lucy, shhh, we mustn’t wake your baby brother,” Tom whispered, as they tiptoed past the nursery.
- Punctuations: She received an odd text from her brother: ’Emergency @ home; call ASAP! Mom & Dad are worried…#familymatters.’
- Questions: But the Brexit question remains: After all the trials and tribulations, will the ministers find the answers in time?
- Syntactic complexities: The movie that De Moya who was recently awarded the lifetime achievement award starred in 2022 was a box-office hit, despite the mixed reviews.
PhilNote: in text-to-voice it also produces natural inflections.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/14/largest-text-to-speech-ai-model-yet-shows-emergent-abilities/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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