Lifeboat Foundation

Zoom’s selling a cheaper AI package than Microsoft 365 Copilot and Google Duet AI, and soon it can plug into a new ‘modular workspace.’

At Zoomtopia 2023 today, Zoom announced Zoom Docs, a collaboration-focused “modular workspace” that integrates the company’s Zoom AI Companion for generating new content or populating a doc from other sources — you know the drill by now.

Along with the Mail and Calendar offerings launched during last year’s event, Zoom Docs is another step toward a full office suite alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, which both have started to integrate AI-powered tools of their own, dubbed Duet AI and Copilot, respectively. The company says it will be widely… More.

Continue reading “Zoom Docs launches in 2024 with built-in AI collaboration features” »

Last week at its annual CloudWorld event in Las Vegas, Oracle showed that it, too, is going full throttle on generative AI–and that it has no plans to cower to its biggest rival Amazon Web Services (AWS.)Before we get into the CloudWorld event itself, it’s important to take a tiny step back to September 14 when the company announced a new partnership with Microsoft that puts Oracle database services on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in Microsoft Azure. The new Oracle Database@Azure makes Microsoft and Oracle the only two hyperscalers to offer OCI to help simplify cloud migration, deployment and management. Especially when you consider that the partners have achieved rate card and… More.

This year at Oracle CloudWorld, the company advanced its generative AI strategy across its cloud infrastructure, apps, and platforms. Exploring this year’s announcements.

Lung cancer screening is crucial for decreasing the death count from the disease but the government can’t scan everyone’s lungs. Here is an AI that identifies people who actually need screening.

Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer type, killing over a million people annually across the globe. The disease is responsible for the highest number of cancer deaths in both men and women in the US.

In fact, the death toll from lung cancer among women and men is nearly triple that of breast cancer and prostate cancer, respectively.

A product designer spotted prompts in Spotify’s codes.

Users may soon be able to create artificial intelligence-generated Spotify playlists using prompts. Speculations are rife ever since hashtag creator and product designer Chris Messina posted pictures of code from Spotify’s backend on Threads.

It would be something like OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, but for creating a song playlist.

Continue reading “Spotify users may be able to generate AI playlists using prompts” »

The race to develop AI chips continues as Samsung’s chip manufacturing department partnered with Canadian startup Tenstorrent to produce chips and intellectual property for data centers.

The Canadian startup Tenstorrent, which builds artificial intelligence (AI) processors, among other things, revealed a new partnership with Samsung’s chip manufacturing department.

On Oct. 2, the startup announced the partnership with Samsung, saying it will use it to bring the “next generation of AI chiplets to market.” Tenstorrent manufactures chips and intellectual property (IP) for data centers.

Continue reading “Samsung to develop AI chips with Canadian startup Tenstorrent” »

Mini-brains that work and grow like their full-size counterparts could offer an alternative to animal testing, and advance the quest for personalized medicine.

ChatGPT is a hot topic at my university, where faculty members are deeply concerned about academic integrity, while administrators urge us to “embrace the benefits” of this “new frontier.” It’s a classic example of what my colleague Punya Mishra calls the “doom-hype cycle” around new technologies. Likewise, media coverage of human-AI interaction – whether paranoid or starry-eyed – tends to emphasize its newness.

In one sense, it is undeniably new. Interactions with ChatGPT can feel unprecedented, as when a tech journalist couldn’t get a chatbot to stop declaring its love for him. In my view, however, the boundary between humans and machines, in terms of the way we interact with one another, is fuzzier than most people would care to admit, and this fuzziness accounts for a good deal of the discourse swirling around ChatGPT.

When I’m asked to check a box to confirm I’m not a robot, I don’t give it a second thought – of course I’m not a robot. On the other hand, when my email client suggests a word or phrase to complete my sentence, or when my phone guesses the next word I’m about to text, I start to doubt myself. Is that what I meant to say? Would it have occurred to me if the application hadn’t suggested it? Am I part robot? These large language models have been trained on massive amounts of “natural” human language. Does this make the robots part human?

One of the most well-established and disruptive uses for a future quantum computer is the ability to crack encryption. A new algorithm could significantly lower the barrier to achieving this.

Despite all the hype around quantum computing, there are still significant question marks around what quantum computers will actually be useful for. There are hopes they could accelerate everything from optimization processes to machine learning, but how much easier and faster they’ll be remains unclear in many cases.

One thing is pretty certain though: A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could render our leading cryptographic schemes worthless. While the mathematical puzzles underpinning them are virtually unsolvable by classical computers, they would be entirely tractable for a large enough quantum computer. That’s a problem because these schemes secure most of our information online.

ChatGPT inches closer to feature parity with the seductive AI assistant from Her, thanks to an upgrade that adds voice and image recognition to the chatbot.