Using artificial intelligence (AI) to combine data from full-body x-ray images and associated genomic data from more than 30,000 UK Biobank participants, a study by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and New York Genome Center has helped to illuminate the genetic basis of human skeletal proportions, from shoulder width to leg length.
The findings also provide new insights into the evolution of the human skeletal form and its role in musculoskeletal disease, providing a window into our evolutionary past, and potentially allowing doctors to one day better predict patients’ risks of developing conditions such as back pain or arthritis in later life. The study also demonstrates the utility of using population-scale imaging data from biobanks to understand both disease-related and normal physical variation among humans.
“Our research is a powerful demonstration of the impact of AI in medicine, particularly when it comes to analyzing and quantifying imaging data, as well as integrating this information with health records and genetics rapidly and at large scale,” said Vagheesh Narasimhan, PhD, an assistant professor of integrative biology as well as statistics and data science, who led the multidisciplinary team of researchers, to provide the genetic map of skeletal proportions.
Top players in the development of artificial intelligence, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, have agreed to new safeguards for the fast-moving technology, Joe Biden announced on Friday.
Among the guidelines brokered by the Biden administration are watermarks for AI content to make it easier to identify and third-party testing of the technology that will try to spot dangerous flaws.
In the 1990 fantasy drama — Truly, Madly, Deeply, lead character Nina, (Juliet Stevenson), is grieving the recent death of her boyfriend Jamie (Alan Rickman). Sensing her profound sadness, Jamie returns as a ghost to help her process her loss. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that his reappearance forces her to question her memory of him and, in turn, accept that maybe he wasn’t as perfect as she’d remembered. Here in 2023, a new wave of AI-based “grief tech” offers us all the chance to spend time with loved ones after their death — in varying forms. But unlike Jamie (who benevolently misleads Nina), we’re being asked to let artificial intelligence serve up a version of those we survive. What could possibly go wrong?
While generative tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney are dominating the AI conversation, we’re broadly ignoring the larger ethical questions around topics like grief and mourning. The Pope in a puffa is cool, after all, but thinking about your loved ones after death? Not so much. If you believe generative AI avatars for the dead are still a way out, you’d be wrong. At least one company is offering digital immortality already — and it’s as costly as it is eerie.
Re;memory, for example, is a service offered by Deepbrain AI — a company whose main business includes those “virtual assistant” type interactive screens along with AI news anchors. The Korean firm took its experience with marrying chatbots and generative AI video to its ultimate, macabre conclusion. For just $10,000 dollars and a few hours in a studio, you can create an avatar of yourself that your family can visit (an additional cost) at an offsite facility. Deepbrain is based in Korea, and Korean mourning traditions include “Jesa”, an annual visit to the departed’s resting place.
Superconductors—found in MRI machines, nuclear fusion reactors and magnetic-levitation trains—work by conducting electricity with no resistance at temperatures near absolute zero, or −459.67°F.
The search for a conventional superconductor that can function at room temperature has been ongoing for roughly a century, but research has sped up dramatically in the last decade because of new advances in machine learning (ML) using supercomputers such as Expanse at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.
Most recently, Huan Tran, a senior research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) School of Materials Science and Engineering, has worked on Expanse with Professor Tuoc Vu from Hanoi University of Science and Technology (Vietnam) to create an artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) approach to help identify new candidates for potential superconductors in a much faster and reliable way.
Presenting the new open-source artificial intelligence model LLaMA V2 from Meta which challenges the likes of GPT-4 and Google’s AI offerings, plus Stability AI’s Doodle allows users to transform simple doodles into stunning high-resolution AI images.
Will journalists and reporters soon run out of jobs?
Google is meeting with organizations under the Murdoch-owned News Corp umbrella — The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal — to pitch them its AI tool, which can produce and write news stories.
The tool’s name is reportedly Genesis, and it is being pitched by Google to enhance journalism productivity, according to an exclusive report by The New York Times.
The supercomputer is part of the larger constellation of inter-connected supercomputers with a combined capacity of 36 exaFLOPS.
Abu Dhabi-based technology holding group G42 has unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Condor Galaxy-1 (CG-1), which has 54 million cores and a processing capacity of four exaflops, a press release said. The supercomputer is located in Santa Clara, California, and will be operated by Cerebras, a US-based AI firm under US laws.
As artificial intelligence (AI) technology takes center stage, there is a strong demand for supercomputers to help businesses train their own models. Companies like Microsoft have offered to build the extremely expensive infrastructure and rent it out for companies to work on them.
The most basic version of Unitree Go2 costs $1,600.
Robotic dogs have been made very accessible today by big players like Boston Dynamics and Unitree. You can order a robodog today, and it will be at your doorstep by October.
People have entered their robodogs in competitions with real dogs, which (alas) they could not win. And on the other hand, robodogs are also employed in heavy industries to carry out tasks like doing train inspections and fixing things.
July 20 (Reuters) — Cerebras Systems on Thursday said that it has signed an approximately $100 million deal to deliver the first of what could be up to nine artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputers in a partnership with United Arab Emirates-based technology group G42.
The deal comes as cloud computing providers around the world are searching for alternatives to chips from Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), the market leader in AI computing whose products are in short supply, thanks to the surging popularity of ChatGPT and other services. Cerebras is one of several startups looking to challenge Nvidia.
Silicon Valley-based Cerebras said that G42 has agreed to purchase three of what it calls its Condor Galaxy systems, all of which it will build in the U.S. to speed up the roll out. The first one will come online this year, with two more coming in early 2024.
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Panpsychism is the idea that there is an element of consciousness in everything in the universe. The theory goes like this: You’re conscious. Ben Goertzel is conscious. And his hat is conscious too. What if consciousness isn’t about the brain at all, but it’s as inherent to our universe as space-time?“Now, panpsychism, to me, is not even that interesting, it’s almost obvious — it’s just the foundation, the beginning for thinking about consciousness… ” says Goertzel. It’s what comes after that excites him, like the emerging technology that will let us connect our minds to bricks, hats, earthworms, other humans, and super AGIs like Sophia, and perhaps glimpse at the fabric of consciousness. Goertzel believes brain-brain interfacing and brain-computer interfacing will unfold in the coming decades, and it’s by that means that we may finally crack the nut of consciousness to discover whether panpsychism makes any sense, and to learn why humans are so differently conscious than, for example, his hat.
Ben Goertzel is CEO and chief scientist at SingularityNET, a project dedicated to creating benevolent decentralized artificial general intelligence. He is also chief scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings and robotics firm Hanson Robotics; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation. His latest book is AGI Revolution: An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence.
TRANSCRIPT:
BEN GOERTZEL: Consciousness is one of these great vexing and confusing words and concepts, which intelligent people take different positions on and could argue about forever. My own perspective on consciousness is rooted in what you could call a sort of panpsychism, by which I mean the idea that consciousness is in essence a property eminent in existence, as much as space and time are. I mean everything that we see around us somehow is situated in time and in space, in our space-time continuum; panpsychism is the idea that everything around us and within us has some element of consciousness to it also, so that it’s not really meaningful to think of: ‘Here’s this non-conscious matter and then there’s this thing called consciousness, which is attached to some matter and not to others.’ Now panpsychism to me is not even that interesting, it’s almost obvious — it’s just the foundation, the beginning for thinking about consciousness because then you have interesting questions like why is the consciousness associated with my brain so much more self-reflective and dynamic and in some senses intense than, say, the consciousness associated with my hat? I mean, it’s a cool hat, it may be more conscious than the average hat, but in the end the brain has these complex feedback loops, the brain can model itself, the brain responds very differently to slightly different stimuli coming in and many properties of the brain seem associated with the more powerful and dynamic states of consciousness that it has relative to other things. So, if you accept panpsychism, that everything is imbued somehow with an element of consciousness, some things can still be more conscious than others and some things are differently conscious than others. And then that’s where things get interesting.
