Lifeboat Foundation

Will someone please tell us who the hell owns AI.com and what they’re doing with it?

The domain, which used to direct to ChatGPT, now redirects users to xAI, an AI company owned by Elon Musk. Separate from X Corp, xAI claims on its website that it “will work closely with X,” the social media company formerly known as Twitter — including using posts on X as training for its large language model.

The high-value AI.com domain name changed hands in 2021, sat idle for a while, and then suddenly started redirecting to ChatGPT in February. For ChatGPT users, it was a helpful shortcut if they didn’t have the site bookmarked and couldn’t quite remember the precise URL for the chatbot (chat.openai.com, for the record).

Plus: The race to find a better way to label AI.

Earlier this year, when I realized how ridiculously easy generative AI has made it to manipulate people’s images, I maxed out the privacy settings on my social media accounts and swapped my Facebook and Twitter profile pictures for illustrations of myself.

The revelation came after playing around with Stable Diffusion–based image editing software and various deepfake apps. With a headshot plucked from Twitter and a few clicks and text prompts, I was able to generate deepfake porn videos of myself and edit the clothes out of my photo. As a female journalist, I’ve experienced more than my fair share of online abuse. I was trying to see how much… More.

Andy Jassy used Thursday’s earnings call to underscore just how much the company is investing in artificial intelligence.

“Every single one” of Amazon’s businesses has “multiple generative AI initiatives going right now,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call on Thursday. The company offers infrastructure and services via AWS that can help power many generative artificial intelligence applications, which Jassy did discuss on the call, but he also stressed just how important AI is across the company as a whole.

Here’s more from Jassy about those generative AI initiatives:

Continue reading “‘Every single’ Amazon team is working on generative AI, says CEO” »

What you get, starting out in this video, is that algorithms impact our lives in, as CSAIL grad student Sandeep Silwal puts it, “silent ways”

Silwal uses a simple example – maps – in discussing what he calls the “marriage of provable algorithm design and machine learning.”

Lots of people, he notes, want to move from the area around MIT, south across the Charles to Fenway Park, to see the Red Sox.

Continue reading “Algorithms Can Learn, And They Probably Should: Saving Resources For The Future” »

Meta has released AudioCraft, a new open-source generative AI framework that can produce music from simple text prompts. AudioCraft is based on a dynamic framework that enables high-quality, realistic audio and music generation from text-based user inputs. It aims to revolutionize music generation by empowering professional musicians to explore new compositions, indie game developers to enhance their virtual worlds with sound effects, and small business owners to add soundtracks to their Instagram posts, all with ease.

AudioCraft is based on a dynamic framework that enables high-quality, realistic audio and music generation from text-based user inputs. It aims to revolutionize music generation by empowering professional musicians to explore new compositions, indie game developers to enhance their virtual worlds with sound effects, and small business owners to add soundtracks to their Instagram posts, all with ease.

AudioCraft is a collection of three robust models: MusicGen, AudioGen and EnCodec. While MusicGen uses text-based user inputs to generate music, AudioGen performs a similar role for ambient sounds. Both are trained with Meta-owned and specifically licensed music and public sound effects, respectively. A recent release from the company offers an improved version of EnCodec. This decoder allows for high-quality music generation with fewer artifacts, based on the pre-trained AudioGen and all AudioCraft model weights and code.

Apple spent $22.61 billion on research and development through 2023, and CEO Tim Cook confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that part of that expenditure is because the company is working on generative AI.

Google Assistant has been our go-to assistant for years, and now a new directive from Google might make it better than ever with Bard integration.

Scientists at Purdue University are propelling the future of robotics and autonomous systems forward with their patent-pending method that improves typical machine vision and perception.

Zubin Jacob, the Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and research scientist Fanglin Bao have developed HADAR, or heat-assisted detection and ranging. Their research was featured on the cover of the July 26 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Jacob said it is expected that one in 10 vehicles will be automated and that there will be 20 million robot helpers that serve people by 2030.

In the fascinating landscape tech realm, quantum computing stock opportunities could prove to be incredibly lucrative over time. The notion of quantum computing, born over two decades ago, is now gaining solid traction on The Street. Moreover, the technology, rooted in the mysteries of quantum mechanics, aims to boost computing speeds significantly.

The advancements in quantum computing are impossible to ignore, with continuous improvements and decreasing development costs. Moreover, the sector’s convergence with cloud computing opens doors for broader accessibility among researchers and software developers.

Furthermore, as the digital economy and artificial intelligence sectors grow, global spending on cloud computing is expected to reach a whopping $1 trillion annually within the next decade. Quantum computing appears to be on the cusp of becoming a game-changer, and it might be the most opportune time to load up on affordable quantum computing stocks.