Lifeboat Foundation

Tech startup Sanctuary AI has unveiled a general-purpose robot designed to perform many workplace tasks currently handled by people — working with humans or without them.

The challenge: Robots have worked alongside people for decades, and traditionally, they’ve been incredibly specialized — a bot on a General Motors’ assembly line, for example, might move pieces of metal from one place to another over and over again.

Continue reading “A general-purpose robot is entering the workforce” »

Med-PaLM 2 welcomes the next phase of healthcare data analysis and insight generation.

“Siri was very playful. And that was by design,” he declares with a wide grin and a laugh almost like a proud dad.

“Now it’s used roughly a billion times a day. That’s a lot of use. It’s on 2 billion devices. It is absolutely woven into everyday life.”

But what Mr Gruber and long-time colleagues working on artificial intelligence (AI) have seen in the past 18 months has scared them.

Caryn Marjorie created an AI version of herself to combat loneliness. Now she’s working hard to stop it from engaging in sexually explicit dialogue.

“We’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice.”

Neeva, which for a while looked like one of the startups with a real chance to challenge the supremacy of Google Search, announced on Saturday that it is shutting down its search engine. The company says it’s pivoting to AI — and may be acquired by Snowflake, The Information.

“Building search engines is hard,” Neeva co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown.

Continue reading “Neeva, the would-be Google competitor, is shutting down its search engine” »

“There’s no kind of a priori right of this technology to upend our world, our lives and displace our own capabilities. I want technology to augment us, not displace us.”

But the technology that’s enabled Grammarly to expand its core offering could also disrupt it.

Fresh to the CEO role, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury talks about AI legislation, Grammarly’s Russia ban and trying to leverage disruptive technologies.

Continue reading “Grammarly’s New CEO On Why ChatGPT Won’t Kill His Business” »

Summary.

As businesses and governments race to make sense of the impacts of new, powerful AI systems, governments around the world are jostling to take the lead on regulation. Business leaders should be focused on who is likely to win this race, moreso than the questions of how or even when AI will be regulated. Whether Congress, the European Commission, China, or even U.S. states or courts take the lead will determine both the speed and trajectory of AI’s transformation of the global economy, potentially protecting some industries or limiting the ability of all companies to use the technology to interact directly with consumers.

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Plus: The open-source AI boom is built on Big Tech’s handouts. How long will it last?

Last week Google revealed it is going all in on generative AI. At its annual I/O conference, the company announced it plans to embed AI tools into virtually all of its products, from Google Docs to coding and online search. (Read my story here.)

Google’s announcement is a huge deal. Billions of people will now get access to powerful, cutting-edge AI models to help them do all sorts of tasks, from generating text to answering queries to writing and debugging code. As MIT Technology Review’s editor in chief, Mat Honan, writes in his analysis of I/O, it is clear AI is now Google’s core product.

Until now, there has been no easy way to compare the quality of open-source models. An e-sports-inspired system could help.

The Large Model System Organization (LMSYS), which is behind the open-source model Vicuna, has launched the benchmark platform “Chatbot Arena” to compare the performance of large language models. Different models compete against each other in anonymous, randomly selected duels. Users then rate the performance of the models by voting for their preferred answer.