Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon’s Alexa business is laying off “several hundred” employees, including those on its recently launched artificial general intelligence team, Business Insider has learned.

On Friday, Amazon’s VP of Alexa and Fire TV Daniel Rausch told his team about the layoffs, saying it’s intended to shift the company’s resources to focus on generative AI.

“As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI. These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated,” Rausch wrote in the email, obtained by BI.

During the company’s second quarter earnings call in July, Musk had said that combining the two could provide a cyber body that is incredibly capable.

One question has relentlessly followed ChatGPT in its trajectory to superstar status in the field of artificial intelligence: Has it met the Turing test of generating output indistinguishable from human response?

Two researchers at the University of California at San Diego say it comes close, but not quite.

ChatGPT may be smart, quick and impressive. It does a good job at exhibiting apparent intelligence. It sounds humanlike in conversations with people and can even display humor, emulate the phraseology of teenagers, and pass exams for law school.

Some neural nets can work well using both bits and qubits.

The machine-learning model takes less than a minute to predict future weather worldwide more precisely than other approaches.

‘Neural networks today are about as similar to a brain as an airplane is to a bird.’ — Kwabena Boahen, PhD, professor of bioengineering and of electrical engineering One problem, as Boahen sees it, is that AI relies on a “synaptocentric” mode of computing, in that half of the nodes — lines of binary…

Do nerve cells hold the key to an epic advance in computing?

By John Sanford

Continue reading “Mind in the machine” »

face_with_colon_three Basically although some or all coding jobs could be absorbed I remain positive because now everyone be a god now when infinite computation comes out and also infinite agi.

Jay Hack, an AI researcher with a background in natural language processing and computer vision, came to the realization several years ago that large language models (LLMs) — think OpenAI’s GPT-4 or ChatGPT — have the potential to make developers more productive by translating natural language requests into code.

After working at Palantir as a machine learning engineer and building and selling Mira, an AI-powered shopping startup for cosmetics, Hack began experimenting with LLMs to execute pull requests — the process of merging new code changes with main project repositories. With the help of a small team, Hack slowly expanded these experiments into a platform, Codegen, that attempts to automate as many mundane, repetitive software engineering tasks as possible leveraging LLMs.

Continue reading “Codegen raises new cash to automate software engineering tasks” »

AGI is one of the most disputed concepts in tech. These researchers want to fix that.

In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review, Nadella shares his view of the platform shift for developers.

In San Francisco last week, everyone’s favorite surprise visitor was Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.