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In the second episode of this 12-part podcast series, Tales of the Synapse, neuroscientist Anil Seth describes his research into consciousness, which he describes as “insurance against falling into a single, disciplinary hole.”

Alongside neuroscientists, Seth’s research group at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, also includes string theorists, mathematicians and psychologists. The team also collaborates with academics in the arts and humanities.

His 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. begins by challenging the idea that consciousness is beyond the reach of science, and concludes with a look at consciousness in non-human animals, before asking if artificial intelligence will one day become both sentient and conscious.

On Friday, Meta announced a new AI-powered large language model (LLM) called LLaMA-13B that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-3 model despite being “10x smaller.” Smaller-sized AI models could lead to running ChatGPT-style language assistants locally on devices such as PCs and smartphones. It’s part of a new family of language models called “Large Language Model Meta AI,” or LLAMA for short.

“Unlike Chinchilla, PaLM, or GPT-3, we only use datasets publicly available, making our work compatible with open-sourcing and reproducible, while most existing models rely on data which is either not publicly available or undocumented,” tweeted project member Guillaume Lample.

Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans— benefits all of humanity.

If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.

AGI has the potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities; we can imagine a world where all of us have access to help with almost any cognitive task, providing a great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity.

AI might not take your job any time soon, but companies are already using it to help them decide who to lay off.

That’s according to a November Capterra survey of 300 US human resources leaders, which found that 98% of respondents plan to use software and algorithms to help them make any layoff decisions in 2023.

While many companies have access to a wide range of employee data — including information on employee attendance, pay, and experience — the HR leaders said “skills” and “performance” data would be most likely to be used in a layoff decision, with 70% of the leaders saying each of these would be considered.

A million here, times a million there. Pretty soon you’re talking about big numbers. So Nvidia claims for its AI accelerating hardware in terms of the performance boost it has delivered over the last decade and will deliver again over the next 10 years.

The result, if Nvidia is correct, will be a new industry of AI factories across the world and gigantic breakthroughs in AI processing power. It also means, ostensibly, AI models one million times more powerful than existing examples, including ChatGPT, in AI processing terms at least.

But the computing power necessary for a company to adopt in-house AI capabilities is enormous, and that’s where Nvidia’s new service offering comes in. Dubbed “DGX Cloud,” Nvidia is offering an AI supercomputer accessible to its customers via a web browser. The company partnered with various cloud providers, including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, to launch the service.

“Nvidia AI as a service offers enterprises easy access to the world’s most advanced AI platform, while remaining close to the storage, networking, security and cloud services offered by the world’s most advanced clouds,” Huang explained.

“Nvidia AI is essentially the operating system of AI systems today,” Huang also said.