Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI – Page 924

The future of clippy and toy makers is promising 👌 😀 😄.

As Microsoft eagerly adds Chat-GPT to Bing, Word, Edge, and dozens of other products, I can’t help myself from thinking of Clippy. The old assistant could be seen as a precursor to modern, collaborative AI. Clearly, someone else had the same thought, but they actually did something with it.

Roboticist David Packman created an animatronic Clippy that answers voice prompts using Chat-GPT. Like a Alexa or Siri, it listens for a wake word (“Hey, Clippy”) and responds accordingly. Voice prompts and Clippy’s responses are processed through Azure Speech Services, and the whole thing runs on a Raspberry Pi computer.

Read more | >

DeepMind says that it has developed an AI model, called RoboCat, that can perform a range of tasks across different models of robotic arms. That alone isn’t especially novel. But DeepMind claims that the model is the first to be able to solve and adapt to multiple tasks and do so using different, real-world robots.

“We demonstrate that a single large model can solve a diverse set of tasks on multiple real robotic embodiments and can quickly adapt to new tasks and embodiments,” Alex Lee, a research scientist at DeepMind and a co-contributor on the team behind RoboCat, told TechCrunch in an email interview.

RoboCat — which was inspired by Gato, a DeepMind AI model that can analyze and act on text, images and events — was trained on images and actions data collected from robotics both in simulation and real life. The data, Lee says, came from a combination of other robot-controlling models inside of virtual environments, humans controlling robots and previous iterations of RoboCat itself.

Read more | >

At the turn of this century, Jeff Bezos popularized the use of mechanical turks—low-paid workers working remotely with perhaps thousands of others on tiny parts of larger computer projects—to ensure a human perspective on mostly simple tasks that proved perplexing to computers. He termed this blending of human and digital brain power “artificial artificial intelligence.”

About a quarter million people are employed through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace, just one of many sources providing such services.

This week, researchers at Swiss-based university EPFL reported that turks who had provided important human input are now relying on AI-generated content to complete their tasks. They dubbed this phenomenon “artificial artificial artificial intelligence.”

Read more | >

This study demonstrates that AI can be incredibly effective in helping us identify new drug candidates – particularly at early stages of drug discovery and for diseases with complex biology or few known molecular targets.

A machine learning model has been trained to recognise the key features of chemicals with senolytic activity. It recently found three chemicals able to remove senescent cells without damaging healthy cells.

Molecular structure of oleandrin. Credit: Mplanine, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Senescent cells, often referred to as “zombie cells”, are cells that have stopped dividing but remain metabolically active. These cells increase with age and secrete harmful substances that can lead to chronic inflammation and affect the function of nearby cells. This contributes to aging and various age-related diseases like heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and certain cancers. Their elimination or reprogramming is a key focus of aging-related research.

Read more | >

Opera says its generative AI-infused browser is ready for public consumption. Opera One is now out of early access. It’s more broadly available on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can download it from the company’s website.

Opera features an integrated AI called Aria that you can access from the sidebar. You can use a keyboard shortcut (CTRL or Command and /) to start using Aria as well. The AI is also available in Opera’s Android browser starting today.

The AI stems from Opera’s partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Aria connects to GPT to help answer users’ queries. The AI incorporates live information from the web and it can generate text or code and answer support questions regarding Opera products. In addition, Opera One can generate contextual prompts for Aria when you right click or highlighting text in the browser. If you prefer to use ChatGPT or ChatSonic, you can access those from the Opera One sidebar too.

Read more | >

CB Insights has unveiled the winners of the seventh annual AI 100 — a list of the 100 most promising private AI companies across the globe.

Around one-third of this year’s winners are focused on AI applications across specific industries — such as visual dubbing for the media & entertainment sector or textile recycling for fashion & retail. A total of 40 vendors are focused on cross-industry solutions, like AI assistants & human-machine interfaces (HMIs), digital twins, climate tech, and smell tech.

Additionally, 27 companies in this cohort are developing tools like vector database tech and synthetic datasets to support AI development.

Read more | >

“There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” the company said in a research post. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.”

Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, made outside normal working hours.

Meta said in the news release that the model could allow visually impaired people to hear messages from friends in their voices or allow users to speak in foreign languages in their own voice. The company also said the tech opened up the possibility for creators to edit audio tracks for video or create more natural-sounding voices for virtual assistants.

Read more | >