Lifeboat Foundation

Andy Jassy used Thursday’s earnings call to underscore just how much the company is investing in artificial intelligence.

“Every single one” of Amazon’s businesses has “multiple generative AI initiatives going right now,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call on Thursday. The company offers infrastructure and services via AWS that can help power many generative artificial intelligence applications, which Jassy did discuss on the call, but he also stressed just how important AI is across the company as a whole.

Here’s more from Jassy about those generative AI initiatives:

Continue reading “‘Every single’ Amazon team is working on generative AI, says CEO” »

Kenya has ordered Worldcoin to stop collecting data in the country due to privacy and security concerns.

Kenya is pumping the brakes on Worldcoin — the eyeball-scanning crypto project launched by OpenAI founder Sam Altman. The Kenyan government has ordered Worldcoin to stop collecting data in the country while it reviews the project for potential privacy and security risks, as reported earlier by Reuters.

Worldcoin is a project that uses your iris to create a unique digital identity, which you can then link to digital currencies managed through the company’s World App. The project launched last week and has had people lining up to get their eyeballs scanned by the shiny, silver orbs Worldcoin… More.

Continue reading “Kenya suspends Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning crypto project” »

What you get, starting out in this video, is that algorithms impact our lives in, as CSAIL grad student Sandeep Silwal puts it, “silent ways”

Silwal uses a simple example – maps – in discussing what he calls the “marriage of provable algorithm design and machine learning.”

Lots of people, he notes, want to move from the area around MIT, south across the Charles to Fenway Park, to see the Red Sox.

Continue reading “Algorithms Can Learn, And They Probably Should: Saving Resources For The Future” »

Meta has released AudioCraft, a new open-source generative AI framework that can produce music from simple text prompts. AudioCraft is based on a dynamic framework that enables high-quality, realistic audio and music generation from text-based user inputs. It aims to revolutionize music generation by empowering professional musicians to explore new compositions, indie game developers to enhance their virtual worlds with sound effects, and small business owners to add soundtracks to their Instagram posts, all with ease.

AudioCraft is based on a dynamic framework that enables high-quality, realistic audio and music generation from text-based user inputs. It aims to revolutionize music generation by empowering professional musicians to explore new compositions, indie game developers to enhance their virtual worlds with sound effects, and small business owners to add soundtracks to their Instagram posts, all with ease.

AudioCraft is a collection of three robust models: MusicGen, AudioGen and EnCodec. While MusicGen uses text-based user inputs to generate music, AudioGen performs a similar role for ambient sounds. Both are trained with Meta-owned and specifically licensed music and public sound effects, respectively. A recent release from the company offers an improved version of EnCodec. This decoder allows for high-quality music generation with fewer artifacts, based on the pre-trained AudioGen and all AudioCraft model weights and code.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne have developed a fast, inexpensive and scalable method for engineering blood vessels from natural tissue.

Apple spent $22.61 billion on research and development through 2023, and CEO Tim Cook confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that part of that expenditure is because the company is working on generative AI.

Google Assistant has been our go-to assistant for years, and now a new directive from Google might make it better than ever with Bard integration.

Sometimes, the best place to hide a secret is in broad daylight. Just ask the sun.

“The sun is more surprising than we knew,” said Mehr Un Nisa, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University. “We thought we had this star figured out, but that’s not the case.”

Nisa, who will soon be joining MSU’s faculty, is the corresponding author of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters that details the discovery of the highest-energy light ever observed from the sun.

Get facts and statistics about skin cancer from The University of Kansas Cancer Center in Kansas City.