Lifeboat Foundation

The day is fast approaching when generative AI won’t only write and create images in a convincingly human-like style, but compose music and sounds that pass for a professional’s work, too. This morning, Meta announced AudioCraft, a framework to generate what it describes as “high-quality,” “realistic” audio and music from short text descriptions, or prompts. It’s not Meta’s first foray into audio generation — the tech giant open sourced an AI-powered music generator, MusicGen, in June — but Meta claims that it’s made advances that vastly improve the quality of AI-generated sounds, such as dogs barking, cars honking and footsteps on a wooden floor.

In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Meta… More.

For a recovering gamer like me, one of the most exciting applications of generative AI is dynamic dialogue. I’m not suggesting AI replace writers — goodness forbid. But as anyone who’s sunk hundreds of hours into an RPG can tell you, scripted NPC interactions get old fast.

There are a few startups prototyping AI tech to dynamically generate dialogue. But one of the more promising is Inworld, launched in 2021 by the founding team of API.AI, which developed tools for speech recognition and natural language understanding until its acquisition by Google in 2016. (API.AI later became Dialogflow, Google’s flagship conversational AI design platform.)

Inworld claims to use “multiple” machine learning models to “mimic the full range of human communication.” That’s promising a lot in the context of games, but the startup makes the case that, by allowing developers to link its dialog-and voice-generating tools to animation and rigging systems within popular game engines, including 3D environments, it can help deliver more lifelike and immersive gaming experiences.

A study in the Lancet Oncology journal found that AI-supported breast cancer screenings saved radiologists time that could be used for more complex diagnoses.

Another day, another step closer to the normalization of build-your-own AI chatbot partners.

Per Decrypt, top-shelf Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz last week took to the developer site GitHub to lay out detailed instructions on how to build an AI companion bot from scratch. The VC outfit has a lot of money in various AI ventures, the billion-dollar AI companion startup Character. AI included; now, it seems that the folks at the firm are so enthusiastic about companion bots that they’re encouraging curious developers out there to start DIYing versions for themselves — and among several other potential use cases, it feels notable that romantic partnership was listed as use case number one.

“There are many possible use cases for these companions — romantic (AI girlfriends / boyfriends), friendship, entertainment, coaching, etc,” reads the description, noting elsewhere that the “project is purely intended to be a developer tutorial and starter stack for those curious on how chatbots are built.”

A model of human cortical development could be used to instruct novel computational learning approaches. Alysson Muotri, Phd, Sujeeth Bharadwaj, PhD, Weiwei Yang, and Gabrial Silva, MSc, PhD, discuss the promise, the problems, and the potential when biology and artificial intelligence meet. Recorded on 10/14/2021. [3/2022] [Show ID: 37556]

00:00 Start.
00:17 Introduction — Alysson Muotri, PhD, UC San Diego.
11:51 An Information Theoretic Approach to Learning — Sujeeth Bharadwaj, PhD, Microsoft.
30:44 An Alternate Approach to Collectively Solving Intelligence: Machine Learning to Artificial Intelligence — Weiwei Yang, Microsoft.
47:54 Organoids May Have Just the Right Amount of Complexity to Make Sense of the Brain — Gabriel Silva, MSc, PhD, UC San Diego.

Continue reading “Brain Organoids and Robotics / AI — Sanford Stem Cell Symposium” »

Meta’s new Twitter competitor, Threads, is looking for ways to keep users interested after more than half of the people who signed up for the text-based platform stopped actively using the app, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees in a company town hall yesterday. Threads launched on July 5 and signed up over 100 million users in less than five days, buoyed by user frustration with Elon Musk-owned Twitter.

“Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” Zuckerberg told employees yesterday, according to Reuters, which listened to audio of the event.

Third-party data suggests that Threads may have lost many more than half of its active users. Daily active users for Threads on Android dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23, web analytics company SimilarWeb reported.

MySpace gave us co-founder Tom right off the bat: join the social network and you started with at least one friend, even if he never interacted with you. Now social platforms like Snapchat and Facebook are using generative artificial intelligence to give us smarter and more engaging friends.

When Facebook parent company Meta reported financial results last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he saw the AI friend as an assistant or coach that “can help you interact with businesses.” Facebook’s AI chatbots will reportedly offer a range of personalities and capabilities, presumably in the hope that at least one will appeal to most if not all Facebook users.

According to Financial Times reporting, Zuckerberg is “spending all his energy and time” on this: a massive shift from the metaverse and virtual reality, his previous idée fixe.

It’s no secret that AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have a strong tendency to make stuff up. They’re just as good at inventing facts as they are assisting you with work — and when they mix up the two, disaster can strike.

Whether the people creating AI can fix that issue remains up for debate, the Associated Press reports. Some experts, including executives who are marketing these tools, argue that these chatbots are doomed to forever cook up falsehoods, despite their makers’ best efforts.

“I don’t think that there’s any model today that doesn’t suffer from some hallucination,” Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, maker of the AI chatbot Claude 2, told the AP.

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As humanity navigates through the complexities of the modern world, it faces an array of threats that could potentially jeopardize its very existence. These threats range from immediate concerns to those that loom ominously on the horizon. This article aims to rank the greatest threats to human existence in order of their perceived impact, from smallest to largest: