The eccentric pro-tech movement known as “Effective Accelerationism” wants to unshackle powerful A.I., and party along the way.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,002
Spotify slashes staff to move faster into AI — and Wall Street loves it
Spotify made a name for itself in the audio-streaming business through its hyper-personalized user experience, thanks to artificial intelligence and a team of 9,800 staffers at the end of 2022.
But after three rounds of layoffs in one year: 590 positions in January, 200 in June, and another 1,500 this week, Spotify’s investments into AI to boost margins for its podcasting and audiobook divisions look like a complete overhaul in strategy that Wall Street seems confident can work.
“Spotify is leveraging AI across its platform, launching AI DJ, simulating a traditional radio experience, in 50 additional markets and rolling out AI Voice Translation for podcasts,” said Justin Patterson, equity research analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, in a research note. “Coupled with audiobooks rolling out to Premium Subscribers, we believe Spotify has several opportunities to drive engagement and eventually stronger monetization.”
Shares of parent company Spotify Technology SA are up more than 30% over the last six months and up more than 135% year to date.
IHMC’s Nadia: A task-ready humanoid robot with a boxing edge
In the exercise, an engineer equipped with a set of virtual reality (VR) goggles is orchestrating the robot’s actions.
Advanced proposition.
Nadia, a cutting-edge humanoid robot, is engineered with a focus on achieving a remarkable power-to-weight ratio and extensive range of motion. This is made possible by leveraging innovative mechanisms and advanced composite materials.
The robot draws its namesake from the renowned gymnast Nadia Comăneci, reflecting the ambitious aim of replicating human range of motion. Funding for Nadia’s development is derived from various sources, encompassing support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), NASA Johnson Space Center, and TARDEC. This diverse funding base underscores the broad interest and recognition of Nadia’s potential applications across military, space exploration, and technological research domains, according to IHMC.
Sydney researchers debut new lego-style chip with enhanced bandwidth
“This architecture means Australia could develop its own sovereign chip manufacturing without exclusively relying on international foundries for the value-add process.”
Researchers at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have introduced a compact silicon semiconductor chip that seamlessly integrates electronics with photonic components. The innovation promises to significantly expand radio-frequency (RF) bandwidth and the ability to accurately control information flowing within the chip.
The chip, built using cutting-edge silicon photonics technology, boasts integration capabilities for diverse systems on semiconductors less than 5 millimeters wide. Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Ben Eggleton described the process as akin to assembling Lego building blocks, where new materials are integrated through advanced packaging of electronic ‘chiplets’, in a statement.
Lego-style components in chips aren’t new, however. In 2022, researchers at MIT designed a Lego-like reconfigurable AI chip that consisted of alternating layers of sensing and processing elements allowing the chip’s layers to communicate optically.
StripedHyena: A new architecture for next-generation generative AI?
GPT-4 and other models rely on transformers. With StripedHyena, researchers present an alternative to the widely used architecture.
With StripedHyena, the Together AI team presents a family of language models with 7 billion parameters. What makes it special: StripedHyena uses a new set of AI architectures that aim to improve training and inference performance compared to the widely used transformer architecture, used for example in GPT-4.
The release includes StripedHyena-Hessian-7B (SH 7B), a base model, and StripedHyena-Nous-7B (SH-N 7B), a chat model. These models are designed to be faster, more memory efficient, and capable of processing very long contexts of up to 128,000 tokens. Researchers from HazyResearch, hessian. AI, Nous Research, MILA, HuggingFace, and the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) were involved.
OpenChat framework aims to optimize open-source language models
Researchers from Tsinghua University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and 01.AI have developed a new framework called OpenChat to improve open-source language models with mixed data quality.
Open-source language models such as LLaMA and LLaMA2, which allow anyone to inspect and understand the program code, are often refined and optimized using special techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT).
However, these techniques assume that all data used is of the same quality. In practice, however, a data set typically consists of a mixture of optimal and relatively poor data. This can hurt the performance of language models.
Using hierarchical generative models to enhance the motor control of autonomous robots
To best move in their surrounding environment and tackle everyday tasks, robots should be able to perform complex motions, effectively coordinating the movement of individual limbs. Roboticists and computer scientists have thus been trying to develop computational techniques that can artificially replicate the process through which humans plan, execute, and coordinate the movements of different body parts.
A research group based at Intel Labs (Germany), University College London (UCL, UK), and VERSES Research Lab (US) recently set out to explore the motor control of autonomous robots using hierarchical generative models, computational techniques that organize variables in data into different levels or hierarchies, to then mimic specific processes.
Their paper, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, demonstrates the effectiveness of these models for enabling human-inspired motor control in autonomous robots.