Lifeboat Foundation

So, you’ve seen some amazing GPT-3 demos on Twitter (if not, where have you been?). This mega machine learning model, created by OpenAI, can write it’s own op-eds, poems, articles, and even working code:

If you want to try out GPT-3 today, you’ll need to apply to be whitelisted by OpenAI. But the applications of this model seem endless – you could ostensibly use it to query a SQL database in plain English, automatically comment code, automatically generate code, write trendy article headlines, write viral Tweets, and a whole lot more.

StartX startup Buzz Solutions out of Stanford, California just introduced its AI solution to help utilities quickly spot powerline and grid faults so repairs can be made before wildfires start.

Their unique platform uses AI and machine vision technology to analyze millions of images of powerlines and towers from drones, helicopters, and aircraft to find dangerous faults and flaws as well as overgrown vegetation, in and around the grid infrastructure to help utilities identify problem areas and repair them before a fire starts.

This system can do the analysis at half the cost and in a fraction of the time compared to humans, hours to days not months to years.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Platform Detects Power Grid Flaws And Wildfire Dangers Better And Faster Than Humans” »

“‘Aurora will enable us to explore new frontiers in artificial intelligence and machine learning,’ said Narayanan ‘Bobby’ Kasthuri, assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago and researcher at Argonne. ‘This will be the first time scientists have had a machine powerful enough to match the kind of computations the brain can do.’”

Super computer Aurora will help map the human brain at “quintillion—or one billion billion—calculations per second, 50 times quicker than today’s most powerful supercomputers.”

Note: the article discusses implications beyond neuroscience.

Continue reading “New Argonne supercomputer, built for next-gen AI, will be most powerful in U.S.” »

In a new paper, DeepMind describes an AI algorithm that was able to discover a critical programming rule in deep reinforcement learning from scratch.

❤️ Check out Weights & Biases and sign up for a free demo here: https://www.wandb.com/papers

Their instrumentation of this paper is available here:
https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/stargan/reports/Cute-Animals-and…zoxNzcwODQ

Continue reading “This AI Creates Dogs From Cats…And More!” »

Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots.

Microsoft helps police surveil and patrol communities through its own offerings and a network of partnerships — while its PR efforts obscure this.

Continue reading “The Microsoft Police State: Mass Surveillance, Facial Recognition, and the Azure Cloud” »

Researchers have developed an automated machine learning system they say can detect social media posts involved in coordinated political influence campaigns—such as Russia’s alleged efforts to sway the results of the 2016 elections in the United States—regardless of platform and based only on the content of the posts.

Read more in Science Advances.

We study how easy it is to distinguish influence operations from organic social media activity by assessing the performance of a platform-agnostic machine learning approach. Our method uses public activity to detect content that is part of coordinated influence operations based on human-interpretable features derived solely from content. We test this method on publicly available Twitter data on Chinese, Russian, and Venezuelan troll activity targeting the United States, as well as the Reddit dataset of Russian influence efforts. To assess how well content-based features distinguish these influence operations from random samples of general and political American users, we train and test classifiers on a monthly basis for each campaign across five prediction tasks. Content-based features perform well across period, country, platform, and prediction task. Industrialized production of influence campaign content leaves a distinctive signal in user-generated content that allows tracking of campaigns from month to month and across different accounts.

Continue reading “Content-based features predict social media influence operations” »

Circa 2018

Warehouses are being revolutionized by AI and robotics, and British supermarket chain Ocado is at the forefront of this change. We went inside the company’s new facilities to see how technology is affecting how you shop online.

We’re going back to Mars, and we’d like you to be our virtual guest on the trip. On July 30, NASA will launch the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover on a seven-month journey to the Red Planet. After landing in Jezero Crater, the robotic astrobiologist and scientist will search for signs that microbes might have lived on Mars long ago, collect soil samples to be returned to Earth on a future mission and pave the way for human exploration beyond the Moon. Perseverance will be accompanied by a helicopter called Ingenuity, the first attempt at powered flight on another world.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic and in the interest of health and safety, NASA can’t invite you to Florida to watch the launch personally. However, there are many ways you can participate virtually: