Lifeboat Foundation

Despite the impressive recent progress in AI capabilities, there are reasons why AI may be incapable of possessing a full “general intelligence”. And although AI will continue to transform the workplace, some important jobs will remain outside the reach of AI. In other words, the Economic Singularity may not happen, and AGI may be impossible.

These are views defended by our guest in this episode, Kenneth Cukier, the Deputy Executive Editor of The Economist newspaper.

Continue reading “A defence of human uniqueness against AI encroachment, with Kenn Cukier” »

Midjourney’s latest V5 update has got hands almost nailed down. Now, it’ll take more sleuthing to tell if an image of a person is AI generated or not.

A wave of consumer enthusiasm following the launch of OpenAI’s viral ChatGPT has prompted some major tech companies to pour resources into AI development and launch new AI-powered products.

But not everyone is feeling optimistic about the highly intelligent technology.

Last month, several high-profile tech figures, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, threw their weight behind an open letter calling for a pause on developing advanced AI. The letter cited various concerns about the consequences of developing tech more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, including risks to democracy.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said AI could become a “super-powered assistant” to humans in the future, in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

The New York Times has a big piece detailing Google’s “shock” and “panic” when Samsung recently floated the idea of switching its smartphones from Google Search to Bing. After being the butt of jokes for years, Bing has been seen as a rising threat to Google thanks to Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI and the integration of the red-hot ChatGPT generative AI. Now, according to the report, one of Android’s biggest manufacturers is threatening to switch its new phones away from Google Search.

Of course, preinstalled search deals are more about cash than quality. Google pays billions every year to be the default search engine on popular products with deals framed as either “revenue sharing” or “traffic acquisition fees.” Google reportedly pays as much as $3.5 billion per year to be the default search on Samsung phones, while it pays Apple $20 billion per year to be the default search on iOS and macOS. The report notes that the Samsung/Google search contract “is under negotiation, and Samsung could stick with Google.”

These chatbots have the ability to perform multiple tasks, from writing code and emails, to creating trip itineraries and business proposals.

A new bio-inspired sensor can recognize moving objects in a single frame from a video and successfully predict where they will move to. This smart sensor, described in a Nature Communications paper, will be a valuable tool in a range of fields, including dynamic vision sensing, automatic inspection, industrial process control, robotic guidance, and autonomous driving technology.

Current motion detection systems need many components and complex algorithms doing frame-by-frame analyses, which makes them inefficient and energy-intensive. Inspired by the human visual system, researchers at Aalto University have developed a new neuromorphic vision technology that integrates sensing, memory, and processing in a single device that can detect motion and predict trajectories.

At the core of their technology is an array of photomemristors, electrical devices that produce electric current in response to light. The current doesn’t immediately stop when the light is switched off. Instead, it decays gradually, which means that photomemristors can effectively “remember” whether they’ve been exposed to light recently. As a result, a sensor made from an array of photomemristors doesn’t just record instantaneous information about a scene, like a camera does, but also includes a dynamic memory of the preceding instants.

There are loopholes.

Try out my quantum mechanics course (and many others on math and science) on Brilliant using the link https://brilliant.org/sabine. You can get started for free, and the first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.

Continue reading “I Think Faster Than Light Travel is Possible. Here’s Why” »

Year 2022 face_with_colon_three

AI models that interact more effectively, precisely, and safely are being developed as a result of technological developments. Large language models (LLMs) have excelled in a variety of tasks in recent years, including question-answering, summarizing, and conversation. Dialogue is an activity that especially interests scholars since it allows for flexible and dynamic communication.

However, LLM-powered chat agents frequently provide incorrect or made-up content, discriminative language, or advocate unsafe conduct. Researchers may be able to create safer conversation bots by learning from user remarks. Based on input from study participants, new strategies for training conversation bots that show promise for a safer system can be examined using reinforcement learning.

Continue reading “DeepMind Sparrow Is A New AGI That Is Safer And More Precise” »