This year has seen remarkable developments in artificial intelligence, an inflection point for quantum computing, progress in aging research, a number of exciting discoveries in astronomy, a potentially revolutionary new material, and many more breakthroughs.
These were our top 20 most viewed blogs of 2022, in reverse order. See you in 2023!
Artificial intelligence is all over the news. When ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new chatbot, was released last month it seemed, finally, to match the hype that generative A.I. has been promising for years—an easy-to-use machine intelligence for the general public.
Wild predictions soon followed: The death of search engines, the end of homework, the hollowing-out of creative professions.
For the creative professions, the rise of generative A.I. feels like an existential threat. But a familiar technology, invented 184 years ago, can show us how to adapt and thrive in a new reality.
2022 has been an interesting year with incredible developments, both positive and negative in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Many international leaders have consistently expressed concerns on the hopes or horrors that AI can unleash if humans are not careful in applying ethical AI practices, and also fundamentally thinking harder about the use cases and the societal impacts that AI could have on human civilization.
According to a Gartner study, the revenue from AI in 2022 will reach $62 billion. This is an increase of roughly a 21.3% increase from 2021. Despite the dynamics of the market, AI is continuing to evolve, grow and many outstanding AI innovations are advancing the betterment of human kind — giving us much hope.
The method can be used on any time-sensitive natural disaster.
In 2011, northeast Japan was struck by a devastating tsunami that claimed the lives of about 18,500 people. Since then, the nation has been focused on preventing a similar outcome in the future.
“The main advantage of our method is the speed of predictions, which is crucial for early warning,” explained Iyan Mulia, the work’s lead and a scientist at RIKEN.
Kurosuke/iStock.
Now, new research out of the RIKEN Prediction Science Laboratory has used machine learning to accurately predict tsunami impacts in less than one second, according to a press release by the institution published on Monday.
The intelligent robot ‘evolves’ inside the pipe, without stopping water distribution.
At a time when a significant proportion of people face scarcity of drinking water, a staggering 32 billion m3 of clean water is lost a year due to faulty distribution networks around the world. This is where technologies like ACWA Robotics’ Pathfinder autonomous robot become a much-relevant product for utilities. The system can navigate at the heart of the water supply network without disrupting water distribution to users to provide actionable data.
ACWA
According to a UN report, worldwide water demand is expected to exceed supply by 40 per cent by 2030, and waste of water in the supply chain is something that cities cannot afford anymore.
This must count toward daily workout goals for his best friend.
Chinese robotics manufacturer, Unitree, has a four-legged robotic dog offering. What makes the dog super special is that it can do push-ups. Robotic dogs are the hottest new thing available in the market, and just like their natural counterparts, this quadruped buddy also wants to be man’s best friend. For this, the dog, or its manufacturer, will make sure it does everything to help you out, and if doing push-ups is what it takes, then that’s what it will be trained to do.
Unitree’s robotic dog, Go1, does not boast bright colors and only has a silvery metallic appearance.
Unitree/Twitter.
Robotic dogs are the hottest new thing available in the market, and just like their natural counterparts, this quadruped buddy also wants to be man’s best friend. For this, the dog, or its manufacturer, will make sure it does everything to help you out, and if doing push-ups is what it takes, then that’s what it will be trained to do.
Chinese tech companies rush to match Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, but roadblocks lie ahead.
The gigantic technological.
The gigantic technological leap that machine learning models have shown in the last few months is getting everyone excited about the future of AI — but also nervous about its uncomfortable consequences. After text-to-image tools from Stability AI and OpenAI became the talk of the town, ChatGPT’s ability to hold intelligent conversations is the new obsession in sectors across the board.
In China, where the tech community has always watched progress in the West closely, entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors are looking for ways to make their dent in the generative AI space. Tech firms are devising tools built on open source models to attract consumer and enterprise customers. Individuals are cashing in on AI-generated content. Regulators have responded quickly to define how text, image, and video synthesis should be used. Meanwhile, U.S. tech sanctions are raising concerns about China’s ability to keep up with AI advancement.
As generative AI takes the world by storm towards the end of 2022, let’s take a look at how this explosive technology is shaking out in China.
It’s a demonstration of what’s possible with today’s AI — and the outstanding challenges.
Generative AI is coming.
Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid, combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat videos.
Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2 and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library. QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says that he’s building the service to help creators meet the “ever-growing” demand from their fans.
“By providing creators with tools to quickly and easily produce quality content, QuickVid helps creators increase their content output, reducing the risk of burnout,” Habib told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our goal is to empower your favorite creator to keep up with the demands of their audience by leveraging advancements in AI.”
The first open source equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has arrived, but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all.
This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems including Meta’s Make-A-Video, released PaLM + RLHF, a text-generating model that behaves similarly to ChatGPT. The system combines PaLM, a large language model from Google, and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback — RLHF, for short — to create a system that can accomplish pretty much any task that ChatGPT can, including drafting emails and suggesting computer code.
But PaLM + RLHF isn’t pre-trained. That is to say, the system hasn’t been trained on the example data from the web necessary for it to actually work. Downloading PaLM + RLHF won’t magically install a ChatGPT-like experience — that would require compiling gigabytes of text from which the model can learn and finding hardware beefy enough to handle the training workload.