Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 788

The world’s week on AI safety: powerful computing efforts launched to boost research

…Such moves are helping countries like the United Kingdom to develop the expertise needed to guide AI for the public good, says Bengio. But legislation will also be needed, he says, to safeguard against the development of future AI systems that are smart and hard to control.

We are on a trajectory to build systems that are extremely useful and potentially dangerous, he says. We already ask pharma to spend a huge chunk of their money to prove that their drugs aren’t toxic. We should do the same.

Doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03472-x

UK and US governments establish efforts to democratize access to supercomputers that will aid studies on AI systems.

Google AI Chief Says There’s a 50% Chance We’ll Hit AGI in Just 5 Years

More than a decade ago, the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence lab predicted that by 2028, AI will have a half-and-half shot of being about as smart as humans — and now, he’s holding firm on that forecast.

In an interview with tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg said that he still thinks that researchers have a 50–50 chance of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), a stance he publicly announced at the very end of 2011 on his blog.

It’s a notable prediction considering the exponentially growing interest in the space. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long advocated for an AGI, a hypothetical agent that is capable of accomplishing intellectual tasks as well as a human, that can be of benefit to all. But whether we’ll ever be able to get to that point — let alone agree on one definition of AGI — remains to be seen.

Elon Musk and his archrival Sam Altman are racing to create a superintelligent A.I. to save humanity from extinction

Musk cofounded OpenAI—the parent company of the viral chatbot ChatGPT—in 2015 alongside Altman and others. But when Musk proposed that he take control of the startup to catch up with tech giants like Google, Altman and the other cofounders rejected the proposal. Musk walked away in February 2018 and changed his mind about a “massive planned donation.”

Now Musk’s new company, xAI, is on a mission to create an AGI, or artificial general intelligence, that can “understand the universe,” the billionaire said in a nearly two-hour-long Twitter Spaces talk on Friday. An AGI is a theoretical type of A.I. with human-like cognitive abilities and is expected to take at least another decade to develop.

Musk’s new company debuted only days after OpenAI announced in a July 5 blog post that it was forming a team to create its own superintelligent A.I. Musk said xAI is “definitely in competition” with OpenAI.

Complex brain activity detected in dying patients

The study, led by Jimo Borjigin, associate professor of molecular and integrative physiology and neurology at Michigan, was very small, featuring only four patients. But the findings echo animal model studies, where the presence of gamma waves in dying brains has also been observed, including in a previous study in rats that Borjigin and colleagues ran a decade earlier.

“These data demonstrate that the surge of gamma power and connectivity observed in animal models of cardiac arrest can be observed in select patients during the process of dying,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published in PNAS.

What are gamma waves? Gamma waves are high-frequency brain waves researchers believe represent multiple areas of the brain working together in complex thoughts. Take, for example, combining the sight, sound, and smell of a car to get a full picture of the vehicle, Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville uninvolved with the study, told Science.

Researchers have also found patterns of gamma waves in healthy people while dreaming, learning, and recalling lessons, Science reported, with some researchers associating them with consciousness itself. But the exact mechanisms behind gamma waves are “one of the biggest mysteries in neuroscience,” Zemmar said.

Neural Implant Translates Brainwaves Into Words

Summary: A new speech prosthetic offers hope for those with speech-impairing neurological disorders.

By converting brain signals into speech using high-density sensors and machine learning, the technology represents a significant advancement over current slower communication aids.

Though still in early stages, the device has achieved a 40% accuracy in decoding spoken data during limited trials and is moving towards a cordless design.

AI Pioneer Kai-Fu Lee Builds $1 Billion Startup in Eight Months

01. AI’s model outperforms Meta’s Llama 2 on certain metricsStartup to offer open-source model; proprietary options laterA Chinese startup founded by computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee has become a unicorn in less than eight months on the strength of a new open-source artificial-intelligence model that outstrips Silicon Valley’s best, on at least certain metrics.

The company, 01.AI, has reached a valuation of more than $1 billion after a funding round that included Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s cloud unit, Lee said in an interview. The chief executive officer of venture firm Sinovation Ventures will also be CEO of the new startup. He began assembling the team for 01.AI in March and started… More.

Bloomberg connects decision makers to a dynamic network of data, delivering business and financial information, news and insights globally.

Chatbots May ‘Hallucinate’ More Often Than Many Realize

When summarizing facts, ChatGPT technology makes things up about 3 percent of the time, according to research from a new start-up. A Google system’s rate was 27 percent.

When the San Francisco start-up OpenAI unveiled its ChatGPT online chatbot late last year.

When Google introduced a similar chatbot several weeks later, it spewed nonsense about the James Webb telescope. The next day, Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot offered up all sorts of bogus information about the Gap, Mexican nightlife and the… More.

Micron taps Taiwan and Japan to make advanced AI memory chips

Micron President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, speaking at the grand opening of the company’s latest advanced production and test… More.

TAICHUNG, Taiwan — U.S. memory chip maker Micron is doubling down on Taiwan and Japan as the key production bases for its cutting-edge products as it battles South Korean rivals to capture demand from the AI boom.

Taiwan and Japan play vital roles in the production of Micron’s most advanced dynamic random-access (DRAM) memory and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, Naga Chandrasekaran, Micron’s senior vice president of technology development, told reporters on Monday. Advanced DRAM and HBM chips are vital for enabling powerful generative AI computing applications such as ChatGPT and Bard.