... Today’s large language models (LLMs) have learnt to recognise patterns but don’t understand the underlying concepts. They will therefore always produce silly errors, says Marcus. ...
We don’t do very much to adapt to AI (or climate change) because we can’t quite believe upheaval until it arrives....
Even tech optimists find themselves caught out. Meta’s head of AI, Yann LeCun, told world leaders on February 13 that a text-to-video generating AI service was not possible: “Basically we don’t know how to do this.” A few days later, OpenAI revealed its text-to-video model, Sora. If you loudly say that AI will never be able to do something, there’s the chance that someone in Silicon Valley is laughing. ...
Like crypto, AI has identifiable flaws. LLMs such as OpenAI’s can’t digest all human knowledge. They are trained on sets of available data — words, images and audio, but not the direct interaction with the physical world. Even if you pump in more data, can you address the limitations? ...
“The burden of proof lies with the people making the extraordinary claims . . . No one is saying AI is hype, we’re saying that your claims of AI are hype.” ...
Gary Marcus suggests performance may get worse: LLMs produce untrustworthy output, which is then sucked back into other LLMs. The models become permanently contaminated. Scientific journals’ peer-review processes will be overwhelmed, “leading to a precipitous drop in reputation”, Marcus wrote recently. ...
(Rasenberger adds that ChatGPT and others would face restrictions on how they used copyrighted data: they would not, for example, be able to provide text in the style of a certain author.) ...
Recently scepticism has got a bad name, because of how easily its followers have veered into conspiracism: doubting credible information about climate, vaccines and Ukraine. AI scepticism has so far avoided this fate. ...
See the full story here: https://www.ft.com/content/648228e7-11eb-4e1a-b0d5-e65a638e6135
... Right now, everyone’s searching for “the iPhone of AI,” but we’re not getting that anytime soon. We might not get it ever, for that matter, because the promise of AI is that it doesn’t require a certain kind of perfected interface — it doesn’t require any interface at all. What we’re going to get instead are the Razr, the Chocolate, the Treo, the Pearl, the N-Gage, and the Sidekick of AI. It’s going to be chaos, and it’s going to be great.
See the full story here; https://www.theverge.com/24117865/ai-gadget-era-humane-rabbit-brilliant-meta
“This is not real audio/video of Drake or Queen Elizabeth II. All video and speech was computer generated to help others learn about math, physics, and engineering,” @onlocklearning writes in the caption for a video of the rapper and the late monarch explaining trigonometry.
And according to the comments on the platform, it appears that these celebrity deepfakes are genuinely helping young viewers understand mathematical theories.
“I learned something in one minute [that] my teacher would have taken a whole class or two to teach us,” a TikTok user comments. ...
“They may pay attention to these for a very short period of time, but the question is how much do they really learn from these? Does this really promote deep learning?”
See the full story here: https://petapixel.com/2024/04/02/a-deepfake-taylor-swift-is-teaching-math-to-kids-on-tiktok/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Researchers from The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology’s ICFO–Institut de Ciències Fotòniques have developed the first ever semi-transparent image sensor.
This sensor comprises an 8×8 array of semi-transparent photodetectors and electrodes disposed on a fully transparent substrate. Each pixel in the array is of size 60 x 140 μm and has an optical transparency of 85-95 percent, according to the study.
These photodetectors capture light while allowing a considerable portion of it to pass through— a necessary trait for applications where transparency is essential, such as in smart displays on AR and VR devices.
Additionally, this sensor sports a design that balances light capture with visibility, making it suitable for applications requiring both sensing capabilities and transparency. ...
See the full story here: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/first-semi-transparent-image-sensor
Big tech has substantial influence over the direction of R&D in the US. According to the National Science Foundation and the Congressional Research Service, US business R&D spending dwarfs domestic Federal or state government spending on research and development. ...
Of course, business R&D spending focuses mainly on development–76 percent versus 14 percent on applied research and seven percent on basic research. ...
Private sector R&D is quite concentrated in a handful of companies with dominant market shares and capitalizations. From a tech perspective, these companies might claim to be on the bleeding edge of innovation, but are all protecting cash cow legacy stacks and a legacy architecture mindset. The innovations they’re promoting in any given year are the bright and shiny objects, the VR goggles, the smart watches, the cars and the rockets. Meanwhile, what could be substantive improvement in infrastructure receives a fraction of their investment. Public sector R&D hasn’t been filling in these gaps. ...
I hope the US, which has seemed to be relatively leaderless on the R&D front over the past decade, can emulate more visionary European efforts like this one from the Swiss in the near future.
See the full story here: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/rd-misdirection-and-the-circuitous-us-path-to-artificial-general-intelligence/
Talent agency WME has inked a partnership with Loti, a Seattle-based firm that specializes in software used to flag unauthorized content posted on the internet that includes clients’ likenesses. The company, which has 25 employees, then quickly sends requests to online platforms to have those infringing photos and videos removed.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. ...
Loti co-founder Luke Arrigoni launched the startup about a year and a half ago. He previously ran an artificial intelligence firm called Arricor AI and before that was a data scientist at Creative Artists Agency, WME’s main rival.
Arrigoni said Loti began working with WME about four or five months ago. WME clients give Loti a few photos of themselves from different angles. They also record short audio clips that are then used to help identify unauthorized content. Loti’s software searches the web and reports back to the clients about these unauthorized images and sends takedown requests to the platforms.
“There’s this kind of growing feeling that this is an impossible problem,” Arrigoni said. “There’s this almost adage now where people say, ‘Once it’s on the internet, it’s on the internet forever.’ Our whole company dispels that myth.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2024-04-02/wme-loti-deepfakes-artificial-intelligence
Apple researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can understand ambiguous references to on-screen entities as well as conversational and background context, enabling more natural interactions with voice assistants, according to a paper published on Friday.
The system, called ReALM (Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), leverages large language models to convert the complex task of reference resolution — including understanding references to visual elements on a screen — into a pure language modeling problem. This allows ReALM to achieve substantial performance gains compared to existing methods. ...
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/ai/apple-researchers-develop-ai-that-can-see-and-understand-screen-context/
On Tuesday, the Artist Rights Alliance (ARA) announced an open letter critical of AI signed by over 200 musical artists, including Pearl Jam, Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, and the estate of Frank Sinatra. In the letter, the artists call on AI developers, technology companies, platforms, and digital music services to stop using AI to "infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists." A tweet from the ARA added that AI poses an "existential threat" to their art. ...
In considering AI's potential impact on music, it's instructive to remember historical instances where tech innovations initially sparked concern among artists. For instance, the introduction of synthesizers in the 1960s and 1970s and the advent of digital sampling in the 1980s both faced scrutiny and fear from parts of the music community, but the music industry eventually adjusted.
While we've seen fear of the unknown related to AI going around quite a bit for the past year, it's possible that AI tools will be integrated into the music production process like any other music production tool or technique that came before. It's also possible that even if that kind of integration comes to pass, some artists will still get hurt along the way—and the ARA wants to speak out about it before the technology progresses further. ...
See the full story here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/billie-eilish-pearl-jam-200-artists-say-ai-poses-existential-threat-to-their-livelihoods/?mc_cid=913213710c&mc_eid=116e9f337b
... Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
Instead, Amazon is moving towards Dash Carts, a scanner and screen that’s embedded in your shopping cart, allowing you to checkout as you shop. These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self check out counters from now on, for people who aren’t Amazon members. ...
See the full story here: https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
... Perhaps the most striking findings in this year’s report relate to the changing nature of social media, partly characterised by declining engagement with traditional networks such as Facebook and the rise of TikTok and a range of other video-led networks. Yet despite this growing fragmentation of channels, and despite evidence that public disquiet about misinformation and algorithms is at near record highs, our dependence on these intermediaries continues to grow. Our data show, more clearly than ever, how this shift is strongly influenced by habits of the youngest generations, who have grown up with social media and nowadays often pay more attention to influencers or celebrities than they do to journalists, even when it comes to news. ...
Facebook remains one of the most-used social networks overall, but its influence on journalism is declining as it shifts its focus away from news. It also faces new challenges from established networks such as YouTube and vibrant youth-focused networks such as TikTok. The Chinese-owned social network reaches 44% of 18–24s across markets and 20% for news. It is growing fastest in parts of Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. ...
Despite hopes that the internet could widen democratic debate, we find fewer people are now participating in online news than in the recent past. Aggregated across markets, only around a fifth (22%) are now active participators, with around half (47%) not participating in news at all. In the UK and United States, the proportion of active participators have fallen by more than 10 percentage points since 2016. Across countries we find that this group tends to be male, better educated, and more partisan in their political views. ...
Meanwhile, the proportion of news consumers who say they avoid news, often or sometimes, remains close to all-time highs at 36% across markets. We find that this group splits between (a) those who are trying to periodically avoid all sources of news and (b) those that are trying to specifically restrict their news usage at particular times or for certain topics. News avoiders are more likely to say they are interested in positive or solutions-based journalism and less interested in the big stories of the day. ...
News podcasting continues to resonate with educated and younger audiences but remains a minority activity overall. Around a third (34%) access a podcast monthly, with 12% accessing a show relating to news and current affairs. Our research finds that deep dive podcasts, inspired by The Daily from the New York Times, along with extended chat shows, such as The Joe Rogan Experience, are the most widely consumed across markets. We also identify the growing popularity of video-led or hybrid news podcasts. ...
See the full story here: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2023/dnr-executive-summary
