Lifeboat Foundation

In a recent review published in BJC reports, researchers investigated the complex relationship between gut bacteria, diet, and patient nutrition, aiming to discern how these combined elements impact responses to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) cancer treatment and identify patients most likely to benefit from such therapy.

Study: Gut microbiome and nutrition-related predictors of response to immunotherapy in cancer: making sense of the puzzle. Image Credit: SewCreamStudio/Shutterstock.com.

Plus: The race to find a better way to label AI.

Earlier this year, when I realized how ridiculously easy generative AI has made it to manipulate people’s images, I maxed out the privacy settings on my social media accounts and swapped my Facebook and Twitter profile pictures for illustrations of myself.

The revelation came after playing around with Stable Diffusion–based image editing software and various deepfake apps. With a headshot plucked from Twitter and a few clicks and text prompts, I was able to generate deepfake porn videos of myself and edit the clothes out of my photo. As a female journalist, I’ve experienced more than my fair share of online abuse. I was trying to see how much… More.

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.