philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

ChatGPT’s ancestor GPT-2 jammed into 1.25GB Excel sheet — LLM runs inside a spreadsheet that you can download from GitHub

[PhilNote: This 10 minute video, embedded in this story, gives a VERY CLEAR explanation, using spreadsheets, of how ChatGPT works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyeN5tXMnJ8&t=587s ]

Software developer and self-confessed spreadsheet addict Ishan Anand has jammed GPT-2 into Microsoft Excel. More astonishingly, it works – providing insight into how large language models (LLMs) work, and how the underlying Transformer architecture goes about its smart next-token prediction. "If you can understand a spreadsheet, then you can understand AI," boasts Anand. The 1.25GB spreadsheet has been made available on GitHub for anyone to download and play with.

Naturally, this spreadsheet implementation of GPT-2 is somewhat behind the LLMs available in 2024, but GPT-2 was state-of-the-art and grabbed plenty of headlines in 2019. It is important to remember that GPT-2 is not something to chat with, as it comes from before the 'chat' era.  ...

... it is still good for a demo and Anand claims that his "low-code introduction" is ideal as an LLM grounding for the likes of tech execs, marketers, product managers, AI policymakers, ethicists, as well as for developers and scientists who are new to AI. Anand asserts that this same Transformer architecture remains "the foundation for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Bard/Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and many other LLMs." ...

See the full story with explanatory 10 minute video here: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpts-ancestor-gpt-2-jammed-into-125gb-excel-sheet-llm-runs-inside-a-spreadsheet-that-you-can-download-from-github?ref=trailyn.com

AI image-generator Midjourney blocks images of Biden and Trump as election looms

... Declaring that “this moderation stuff is kind of hard,” Holz didn’t outline exactly what policy changes were being made but described the clampdown as a temporary measure to make it harder for people to abuse the tool. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Attempts by AP journalists to test Midjourney’s new policy on Wednesday by asking it to make an image of “Trump and Biden shaking hands at the beach” led to a “Banned Prompt Detected” warning. A second attempt escalated the warning to: “You have triggered an abuse alert.”

The tiny company — which has just 11 employees, according to its website — has largely kept silent in the public debate over how generative AI tools could fuel election misinformation around the world. ...

“Anybody who’s scared about fake images in 2024 is going to have a hard 2028,” Holz said Wednesday. “It will be a very different world at that point. Like, obviously you’re still going to have humans running for president in 2028, but they won’t be purely human anymore.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ai-image-generator-midjourney-blocks-images-of-biden-and-trump-as-election-looms?ref=platformer.news&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Snap, Amplified Intelligence seek to measure AR attention

Amplified Intelligence, a source for attention measurement, has partnered with Snapchat on an approach to assess how augmented reality (AR) Lenses captivate audiences. Conducted in partnership with global media agency OMD, the research initiative facilitated live analysis of in-the-moment human attention on Snapchat AR Lenses, producing the most accurate measurement to date. ...

See the full story here: https://advanced-television.com/2024/03/14/snap-amplified-intelligence-seek-to-measure-ar-attention/

How Technology Is Changing the Future of the Entertainment Industry

1. Robotics will likely take the stage. ...

... In fact, the biggest name in live entertainment, Cirque du Soleil, is currently developing a new show featuring robot performers. ...

2. The use of drones will continue to grow. ...

Already, drones have found their way into many Fourth of July celebrations, with cities around the country replacing traditional fireworks with UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) displays. ...

3. The advent of new entertainment genres. ...

Who would’ve thought playing video games would ever become a spectator sport? .... Drone soccer serves as an example, with locations cropping up all around the U.S. 

4. Job security will come into question. ...

... However, most of these jobs will be in the white-collar sector, focusing on more mundane and repetitive tasks. ...

5. Losing the competitive edge will leave companies behind. ...

However, there is one caveat: merely copying what others are doing in the space will do a company no favors. Instead, monitoring feedback to ensure the technology will attract the masses to an event is crucial. ...

See the full story here: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture-council/articles/how-technology-changing-the-future-the-entertainment-industry-1234985968/

Watch Your Step! There’s AGI Everywhere

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Ben Goertzel, the founder of SingularityNET and the person often credited with creating the term, makes a compelling case that AGI should be decentralized, relying on open-source development as well as decentralized hosting and mechanisms for interconnect A.I. systems to learn from and teach on another. 

SingularityNET’s DeAGI Manifesto states, “There is a broad desire for AGI to be ethical and beneficial for all humanity; the most straightforward way to achieve this seems to be for AGI to ‘grow up’ in the context of serving and being guided by all humanity, or as good an approximation as can be mustered.”

Having AGI manifest in part from the aggressive activities of for-profit enterprises is dicey. As Goertzel pointed out, “You get into questions [about] who owns and controls these potentially spooky and configurable human-like robot assistants … and to what extent is their fundamental motivation to help people as opposed to sell people stuff or brainwash people into some corporate government media advertising order.” ...

“We’re in the anthropocene. We’re in an era where our actions are affecting everything in our biological environment,” Blaise Aguera Y Arcas, the Noeme article author, told me. “The Earth is finite and without the kind of solidarity where we start to think about the whole thing as our body, as it were, we’re kind of screwed.”

See the full story here: https://observer.com/2024/03/organizational-artificial-general-intelligence/

Anti-AI sentiment gets big applause at SXSW 2024 as moviemaker dubs AI cheerleading as ‘terrifying bullsh**’

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“So imagine what this technology will do within this current system, within this current incentive structure. This is the same system that brought us climate change, income inequality, and the general lack of gratitude and understanding of our worth and the worth of those around us,” Kwan said.

Plus, he noted, if you are feeling anxious about AI, it’s probably because, deep down, you know you’re next. “Even if the jobs aren’t going to be lost, the value of the job will go down, right? … It will slowly be compounded and normalized until we don’t even realize it,” he said. ...

“Are you trying to use it to create the world you want to live in? Are you trying to use it to increase value in your life and focus on the things that you really care about? Or are you just trying to, like, make some money for the billionaires, you know?”  Scheinert asked the audience. “And if someone tells you, there’s no side effect. It’s totally great, ‘get on board’ — I just want to go on the record and say that’s terrifying bullshit. That’s not true. And we should be talking really deeply about how to carefully, carefully deploy this stuff,” he said.

The crowd then erupted into sustained applause. ...

“Why did we write ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ the way we did? And the answer is, we did it to save ourselves. Every story … that we make is an act of saving ourselves and our value from a system that wants to devalue us and the people that we care about,” Kwan said.

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/12/anti-ai-sentiment-gets-big-applause-at-sxsw-2024-as-storytellers-dub-ai-cheerleading-as-terrifying-bullsh

Europe’s world-first AI rules get final approval from lawmakers. Here’s what happens next

... “The AI Act has nudged the future of AI in a human-centric direction, in a direction where humans are in control of the technology and where it — the technology — helps us leverage new discoveries, economic growth, societal progress and unlock human potential," Dragos Tudorache, a Romanian lawmaker who was a co-leader of the Parliament negotiations on the draft law, said before the vote. ...

The riskier an AI application, the more scrutiny it faces. The vast majority of AI systems are expected to be low risk, such as content recommendation systems or spam filters. Companies can choose to follow voluntary requirements and codes of conduct. 

High-risk uses of AI, such as in medical devices or critical infrastructure like water or electrical networks, face tougher requirements like using high-quality data and providing clear information to users. 

Some AI uses are banned because they’re deemed to pose an unacceptable risk, like social scoring systems that govern how people behave, some types of predictive policing and emotion recognition systems in school and workplaces. ...

They added provisions for so-called generative AI models, the technology underpinning AI chatbot systems that can produce unique and seemingly lifelike responses, images and more. ...

In the U.S., President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order on AI in October that’s expected to be backed up by legislation and global agreements. In the meantime, lawmakers in at least seven U.S. states are working on their own AI legislation. 

Chinese President Xi Jinping has proposed his Global AI Governance Initiative for fair and safe use of AI, and authorities have issued “ interim measures ” for managing generative AI, which applies to text, pictures, audio, video and other content generated for people inside China.

Other countries, from Brazil to Japan, as well as global groupings like the United Nations and Group of Seven industrialized nations, are moving to draw up AI guardrails. ...

When it comes to enforcement, each EU country will set up their own AI watchdog, where citizens can file a complaint if they think they've been the victim of a violation of the rules. Meanwhile, Brussels will create an AI Office tasked with enforcing and supervising the law for general purpose AI systems. 

Violations of the AI Act could draw fines of up to 35 million euros ($38 million), or 7% of a company’s global revenue. 

See the full story here: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/europes-world-ai-rules-set-final-approval-108072010

Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media

PhilNote: this story is notable for its authors; Harvard's Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders

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There is a lot we can learn about social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade that directly applies to AI companies and technologies. These lessons can help us avoid making the same mistakes with AI that we did with social media.

In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung. This has been true for social media, and it will similarly hold true for AI. In both cases, the solution lies in limits on the technology’s use. ...

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/13/1089729/lets-not-make-the-same-mistakes-with-ai-that-we-made-with-social-media/

VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack

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A new “inception attack” in virtual reality works in a similar way. Researchers at the University of Chicago exploited a security vulnerability in Meta’s Quest VR system that allows hackers to hijack users’ headsets, steal sensitive information, and—with the help of generative AI—manipulate social interactions. 

The attack hasn’t been used in the wild yet, and the bar to executing it is high, because it requires a hacker to gain access to the VR headset user’s Wi-Fi network. However, it is highly sophisticated and leaves those targeted vulnerable to phishing, scams, and grooming, among other risks.  ...

In the attack, hackers create an app that injects malicious code into the Meta Quest VR system and then launch a clone of the VR system’s home screen and apps that looks identical to the user’s original screen. Once inside, attackers can see, record, and modify everything the person does with the headset. That includes tracking voice, gestures, keystrokes, browsing activity, and even the user’s social interactions. The attacker can even change the content of a user’s messages to other people. The research, which was shared with MIT Technology Review exclusively, is yet to be peer reviewed. ...

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/11/1089686/hack-vr-headsets-inception/?fbclid=IwAR0Z7XV3-LG30e3C5VBKLf5ERhItZgSu0CSyw8Eomb_RXU4ZtXHY6Vx5rjo

iFLYTEK, Zense Entertainment, and Chulalongkorn University Sign Memorandum of Understanding to Accelerate the Advancement of Thai Speech Recognition

... Through this partnership, the aim is to propel the development of cutting-edge Thai speech recognition technology to cover not only its multiple regional dialects but also to mark a significant milestone in the advancement of AI-driven language processing systems tailored specifically for the Thai language. The primary objective of this collaboration is to optimize iFLYTEK’s Thai speech recognition engine by incorporating Chulalongkorn University’s linguistic insights and research. This collaboration will enhance the accuracy, fluency, and usability of Thai speech recognition technology up to 95% plus accuracy. ...This initiative aligns perfectly with iFLYTEK’s commitment to delivering innovative solutions that enable seamless interaction with technology in users’ native languages covering 123 languages. ...

See the full story here: https://temanstartup.com/iflytek-zense-entertainment-and-chulalongkorn-university-sign-memorandum-of-understanding-to-accelerate-the-advancement-of-thai-speech-recognition/