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Aniai is bringing a burger-cooking robot to restaurants with $12M

Aniai, a startup that has built a burger-grilling robot, Alpha Grill, said today it has raised $12 million, bringing its total raise to $15 million. The money will go toward launching its first manufacturing facility, Factory One, in South Korea. The firm will also be deploying a cloud-based AI software platform for the robot called Alpha Cloud.

Robot adoption in the restaurant business is becoming popular as it can help restaurants address their high pain points like labor shortages, and rising wage issues. Robotics enables restaurants to save 30% to 70% of labor costs, and restaurants could replace more than 80% of restaurant positions with robots, according to a research report.

“Burger chains hire six to eight kitchen staff per shift to grill burgers,” Aniai CEO Gunpil Hwang said. “Alpha Grill enables restaurants to engage only one staff member to grill burgers.”

Oracle Extends AI Across Its Stack With New GenAI Cloud Features

Oracle announced the general availability of its OCI Generative AI Service, along with several substantial enhancements to its data science and cloud offerings. Let’s take a look at what Oracle announced.

The OCI Generative AI service is a managed platform designed to incorporate large language models into various enterprise use cases. The new service supports models like Meta’s Llama 2 and Cohere’s Command 52/6B models, offering a multilingual embedding capability for more than 100 languages.

Enhancements such as LangChain integration, endpoint management, and content moderation make it easier to work with LLMs. The service also includes improved GPU cluster management with multi-endpoint support and endpoint analytics features.

Singapore Financial Data Startup Raises $6.5 Million Series A To Double Down On AI

Bluesheets, an AI-powered financial data startup based in Singapore, announced Tuesday it raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding round led by fintech-focused VC Illuminate Financial, bringing the four-year-old startup’s total funding to $12.5 million.


Participating in the round were returning investors Insignia Ventures Partners, Antler Elevate–the emerging growth fund of VC firm Antler–and 1982 Ventures. The Series A values the startup at $30 million.

“A lot of organizations are trying to implement [AI] applications, but are struggling quite a lot,” says Luca Zorzino, general partner and head of Asia at Illuminate Financial, in a video interview. “What we liked about Bluesheets is that not only have they implemented AI themselves, but they can actually form the foundational layer for more AI adoption in financial services.”

Founded in 2020, Bluesheets develops AI-powered data entry and management tools that aim to help companies process their financial data for accounting, reporting and other operations. The startup claims it can update records in real-time while integrating with other enterprise software tools from Google, Microsoft, Quickbooks, Stripe and SAP.

Is Sam Altman Entering The Chip Business?

Sam Altman made news again, with reporting from the Financial Times that the OpenAI CEO is engaged in discussions with key Middle Eastern investors and the Taiwanese chip giant TSMC to launch a new chip venture to design and build semiconductors for accelerating AI workloads.

At the heart of this venture is the ambitious plan to develop and fabricate chips integral for training and building AI models, reflecting the growing importance of custom hardware in the rapidly expanding field of AI.

Sam Altman is discussing establishing a new venture to develop specialized chips for AI applications with prominent Middle Eastern investors and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, TSMC.

DARPA’s 2nd Tools Competition Focuses on AI Tools for Adult STEM, Data Science Learning

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a second iteration of its Tools Competition to discover artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that can aid data science and other forms of adult learning.

The agency said Monday that the new program aims to upskill and reskill adults in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and similarly complex areas, preparing them for the 21st century labor landscape.

The opportunity is open to digital learning platform experts, technologists, researchers, students and educators who can propose AI tools that can provide feature tutoring and self-directed learning. The resulting platform may leverage AI or large language models.

The True Story of How GPT-2 Became Maximally Lewd

In this video, we recount an incident that occurred at OpenAI while researchers were trying to finetune GPT-2 to be as helpful and ethical as possible. It’s narrated that inadvertently flipping a single minus sign led GPT-2 to become the embodiment of a well-known cardinal sin.

#ai #aisafety #alignment.

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OpenAI blog post: https://openai.com/research/fine-tuni
OpenAI paper behind the blog post: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593.pdf.
RLHF explainer on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/blog/rlhf.
RLHF explainer on aisafety.info https://aisafety.info/?state=88FN_904
Concrete Problems in AI Safety, by @RobertMilesAI: • Concrete Problems in AI Safety.

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🟠 Patreon: / rationalanimations.

Brain-based computing chips not just for AI anymore

With the insertion of a little math, Sandia National Laboratories researchers have shown that neuromorphic computers, which synthetically replicate the brain’s logic, can solve more complex problems than those posed by artificial intelligence and may even earn a place in high-performance computing.

The findings, detailed in a recent article in the journal Nature Electronics, show that neuromorphic simulations employing the statistical method called random walks can track X-rays passing through bone and soft tissue, disease passing through a population, information flowing through social networks and the movements of financial markets, among other uses, said Sandia theoretical neuroscientist and lead researcher James Bradley Aimone.

“Basically, we have shown that neuromorphic hardware can yield computational advantages relevant to many applications, not just artificial intelligence to which it’s obviously kin,” said Aimone. “Newly discovered applications range from radiation transport and molecular simulations to computational finance, biology modeling and particle physics.”

Stanford professor on the future of life-saving medicine | Steve Quake

What if AI could tell us we have cancer before we show a single symptom? Steve Quake, head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, explains how AI can revolutionize science.

Up next, Harvard professor debunks the biggest exercise myths ► • Harvard professor debunks the biggest…

AI can help us understand complex systems like our cells. better. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is committed to building one of the world’s biggest non-profit life science AI computing clusters to help build digital models of what goes wrong in cells when we get diseases like diabetes or cancer and more.

Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/sponsored/future

We created this video in partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Go Deeper with Big Think:

Scientists Coax Bacteria Into Making Exotic Proteins Not Found in Nature

A Whole New World

Scientists have already found hundreds of exotic amino acids. AI models such as AlphaFold or RoseTTAFold, and their variations, are likely to spawn even more. Finding carriers and “glue” proteins that match has always been a roadblock.

The new study establishes a method to speed up the search for new designer proteins with unusual properties. For now, the method can only incorporate four synthetic amino acids. But scientists are already envisioning uses for them.