Blockchain, the technology underpinning bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, for years has been viewed by some companies as a way to drive industry-transforming projects, among them the tracking of assets through complex supply chains.
So far, that hasn’t happened.
The latest effort to run aground was that of A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S and International Business Machines Corp., which hoped to follow shipments via the blockchain. Last month, Maersk said the project would be discontinued. Another big effort, Walmart Inc.’s attempt to track groceries on the blockchain, continues, but slowly. ...
Others have tried with mixed results.
In 2018, Walmart partnered with IBM to start tracking its produce items through blockchain. The effort began with leafy greens, and in the four years since has added just one more item: green bell peppers.
Walmart said it took time to get buy-in from suppliers who found the onboarding process daunting. Many didn’t have digital record-keeping systems and had to make large upfront investments before they could start using blockchain, Walmart said. ...
PhilNote: China and US are attacking deep fakes from opposite directions; China will ONLY allow synthetic audio and visual creations that utilize an official, detectable watermark and prosecute sources that don't comply. US wants to use watermark detection to stop unauthorized use of audio and likenesses for hate speech, porn, and fake quotes and attributions.
'Deep synthesis service providers' otherwise free to create AI-generated humans in line with socialist values
China's Cyberspace Administration has issued guidelines on how to do deepfakes the right way. ...
Deepfakes use artificial intelligence to create realistic depictions – usually videos – of humans saying and/or doing things they didn't say and/or do. They're controversial outside China for their potential to mislead audiences and create trouble for the people depicted.
Beijing clearly also has worries about the technique as the Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has issued regulations that prohibit their creation without the subject's permission, or to depict or utter anything that could be considered as counter to the national interest. Anything counter to socialist values falls under that description, as does any form of "Illegal and harmful information" or using AI-generated humans in an attempt to deceive or slander.
But the rules also suggest China expects synthetic humans will be widely used. For instance, they allow use of deepfakes in applications such as chatbots. In such scenarios, deepfakes must be flagged as digital creations.
The document also envisages that deepfakes will be used by online publishers, which must take into account China's myriad other rules about acceptable online content. ...
Blippar, the leading technology and content platform specializing in augmented reality (AR), announced the expansion of Blippbuilder, its no-code AR creation platform, which now enables creators to build augmented reality experiences for AR headsets, starting with Magic Leap 2 and beta testing Meta Quest Pro.
Forging new frontiers, Blippar’s 200,000+ creators are able to create interactive AR experiences that can now also be experienced on mixed-reality headwear devices. Blippar has initially chosen to enable consumption across Magic Leap and Meta headsets to ensure that the broadest possible spectrum of consumers can engage with experiences developed using its expansive AR creation platform - from enterprise customers and professionals, to students, gamers and those with AR headsets for daily use. ...
... on Monday, December 5th, its AI Research Group, a team of fifteen of the world’s leading Computational Neuroscientists and AI Ph.D.’s, in association with Universities across Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, The Netherlands, and the USA, published a landmark research “white” paper describing their novel approach to the design and development of the next generation of AI known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) intelligent agents with human-level intelligence that can learn, adapt and act in the world. The paper, entitled “Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles,” presents a vision and roadmap for AI based on a field of research called Active Inference. KOSM, the network operating system from VERSES, uses the Active Inference framework as the foundation for its AI decision-making and planning capabilities. ...
... Overall, participants agreed that the better the AR authoring tool, the less L&D professionals should worry about AR technical skills. More attention should be focused on design, such as whether to develop content for learning or supporting job performance. ...
While most use cases about mobile AR are in training, mobile AR has great potential in performance support. L&D professionals need to continue developing skills and knowledge to adopt the new technology well. Meanwhile, more studies are needed to help them adopt mobile AR efficiently and effectively.
...What Beamery has developed is a much more nuanced approach that makes use of graph data models and AI to create contextual understanding. For example, he noted that it’s important to understand what a company does and what job titles mean inside of a specific company.
By having a contextual understanding, S. Saidov said that it’s also possible to better identify potential candidates that might otherwise not be found.
“We identify the types of people that are going to be easily trained or are trainable, even if that skill set doesn’t exist today,” he said. ...
“We never say ‘hire this person,’” S. Saidov said. “Everything that we do is about providing explainability. For example, here are career paths you could have or, even if you’re a recruiter, showing parameters that you could consider to help you evaluate people.”
On December 2, senior media executives gathered on Zoom to answer questions from USC students about industry trends, company strategies and career direction. The students had submitted winning pitches in the ETC@USC Future of Themed Experiences Challenge and their reward was time with the media executives. The questions ranged from “Do you need to learn to code to break into entertainment technology?” to “What are some visionary directions you see your company investing in over the next 4-5 years?” Video of the discussions, along with the lists of questions, students, and executives, is available online.
Today, I want to tell you about Dramatron, an AI language model created by DeepMind that can generate theatrical scripts. You can describe your idea for a movie or TV show and the system can generate a title, character descriptions, and dialogue. Researchers are thinking of it as a "co-writing" tool, which is how we should be thinking of all of these large language models – until they get good enough to work autonomously.
During the development of Dramatron and through discussions with industry professionals, we made several important observations:
Dramatron is a co-writing system that has only been used in collaboration with human writers, and was not conceived or evaluated to be used autonomously.
Dramatron’s top-down hierarchical story generation structure does not correspond to every writer's writing process.
The output of a language model may include elements of the text used to train the language model. One possible mitigation is for the human co-writer to search for substrings from outputs to help to identify plagiarism.
Dramatron may reproduce biases and stereotypes found in the corpus, and may generate offensive text. One possible mitigation is to use the Perspective API for estimating toxicity scores of the language outputs, and filtering generations based on the Perspective API analysis.
... Paul Kedrosky isn't an educator per se. He's an economist, venture capitalist and MIT fellow who calls himself a "frustrated normal with a penchant for thinking about risks and unintended consequences in complex systems." But he is among those who are suddenly worried about our collective future, tweeting yesterday: "[S]hame on OpenAI for launching this pocket nuclear bomb without restrictions into an unprepared society." Wrote Kedrosky, "I obviously feel ChatGPT (and its ilk) should be withdrawn immediately. And, if ever re-introduced, only with tight restrictions."
We talked with him yesterday about some of his concerns, and why he thinks OpenAI is driving what he believes is the "most disruptive change the U.S. economy has seen in 100 years," and not in a good way. ...
Some might say, 'Well, did you feel the same way when automation arrived in auto plants and auto workers were put out of work? Because this is a kind of broader phenomenon.' But this is very different. These specific learning technologies are self catalyzing; they're learning from the requests. So robots in a manufacturing plant, while disruptive and creating incredible economic consequences for the people working there, didn't then turn around and start absorbing everything going inside the factory, moving across sector by sector, whereas that's exactly not only what we can expect but what you should expect. ...
But the lesson of the last five years in particular has been these changes can take a long time. Free trade, for example, is one of those incredibly disruptive, economy-wide experiences, and we all told ourselves as economists looking at this that the economy will adapt, and people in general will benefit from lower prices. What no one anticipated was that someone would organize all the angry people and elect Donald Trump. So there's this idea that we can anticipate and predict what the consequences will be, but [we can't]. ...
