Lifeboat Foundation

University of Calgary researchers designed a novel imaging and experimental preparation system, allowing them to record the activity of the enteric nervous system in mice. The new technique allows researchers to record what is sometimes referred to as the gut’s brain during the complex processes of digestion and waste elimination.

“This completely different way of conducting experiments allows us to better understand the complexity of the nerve interactions that are regulating and coordinating the responses by the gut’s nervous system,” says Dr. Wallace MacNaughton, Ph.D., co-principal investigator. “It opens up new avenues for us to understand what’s really going on, and that’s going to help us understand gastrointestinal diseases and disorders a lot better.”

Neurons, or nerve cells, embedded in the wall of the gut precisely control its movements. The team used mice genetically encoded with fluorescent labels, so the neurons in the gut’s nervous system would “light up,” glowing green under microscopes, whenever the neurons were activated. The images are already providing new insights.

Google has trained an artificial intelligence, named SingSong, that can generate a musical backing track to accompany people’s recorded singing.

To develop it, Jesse Engel and his colleagues at Google Research used an algorithm to separate the instrumental and vocal parts from 46,000 hours of music and then fine-tuned an existing AI model – also created by Google Research, but for generating speech and piano music – on those pairs of recordings.

Business Insider reported based on a leaked company-wide email that Google is asking all of its employees to take two to four hours of their day to test Google’s “Bard” AI, the same system the company plans to integrate into its chat function. It’s unclear if all Googlers over the world have received the same ask. The company recently announced 12,000 job cuts to its global workforce, but Google, without its parent company Alphabet, still employs over 170,000 around the world.

In that memo, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he would “appreciate” if all staff “contributed in a deeper way” and take two to four hours to pressure test Bard. Anybody who’s ever read a “suggestion” email from their boss knows that it’s more of a mandate than anything else. It’s unclear based on the email text if the two-to-four hour suggestion would be asked of them every day or spread over a longer period of time.

Several researchers playing with Bing Chat over the last several days have discovered ways to make it say things it is specifically programmed not to say, like revealing its internal codename, Sydney. Microsoft has even confirmed that these attacks are real and do work… for now.

However, ask Sydney… er… Bing (it doesn’t like it when you call it Sydney), and it will tell you that all these reports are just a hoax. When shown proof from news articles and screenshots that these adversarial prompts work, Bing becomes confrontational, denying the integrity of the people and publications spreading these “lies.”

Continue reading “Microsoft’s GPT-powered Bing Chat will call you a liar if you try to prove it is vulnerable” »

Motherboard spoke to multiple voice actors and advocacy organizations, some of which said contracts including language around synthetic voices are now very prevalent.

A video about nuclear weapons. The song is “Electric Funeral” by the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath off their 1970 album Paranoid, an extremely influential album for metal and rock music.

Hundreds of thousands of brain cells in a dish are being taught to play Pong by responding to pulses of electricity – and can improve their performance more quickly than an AI can.

Theory of mind may have spontaneously emerged from large language models.

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!