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Get up to speed on the rapidly evolving world of AI with our roundup of the week’s developments.

In a move that should surprise no one, tech leaders who gathered at closed-door meetings in Washington, DC, this week to discuss AI regulation with legislators and industry groups agreed on the need for laws governing generative AI technology. But they couldn’t agree on how to approach those regulations.

“The Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, who called the meeting ‘historic,’ said that attendees loosely endorsed the idea of regulations but that there was little consensus on what such rules would look like,” The Guardian reported. “Schumer said he asked everyone in the room — including more than 60… More.

In tasks like customer service, consulting, programming, writing, teaching, etc., language agents can reduce human effort and are a potential first step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Recent demonstrations of language agents’ potential, including AutoGPT and BabyAGI, have sparked much attention from researchers, developers, and general audiences.

Even for seasoned developers or researchers, most of these demos or repositories are not conducive to customizing, configuring, and deploying new agents. This restriction results from the fact that these demonstrations are frequently proof-of-concepts that highlight the potential of language agents rather than being more substantial frameworks that can be used to gradually develop and customize language agents.

Furthermore, studies show that the majority of these open-source sources cover only a tiny percentage of the basic language agent abilities, such as job decomposition, long-term memory, web navigation, tool usage, and multi-agent communication. Additionally, most (if not all) of the language agent frameworks currently in use rely exclusively on a brief task description and entirely on the ability of LLMs to plan and act. Due to the high randomness and consistency across different runs, language agents are difficult to modify and tweak, and the user experience is poor.

“Our camera uses a completely new method to achieve high-speed imaging. It has an imaging speed and spatial resolution similar to commercial high-speed cameras but uses off-the-shelf components.”

Scientists from the Institut National De La Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Canada, in collaboration with Concordia University and Meta Platforms Inc., unveiled a game-changing camera that could revolutionize high-speed imaging.

The diffraction-gated real-time ultrahigh-speed mapping (DRUM) camera, introduced in a recent paper published in Optica, is poised to democratize ultrafast imaging, making it accessible for a wide range of applications.

This device can generate deep-UV light with a very narrow wavelength range that is safe for humans but lethal for germs.

A new device that can generate deep-ultraviolet (UV) light to kill germs without harming humans has been developed by a team of researchers from Osaka University, Japan. The device uses a novel method of combining two visible photons into one deep-UV photon inside a thin waveguide made of aluminum nitride, a material that has nonlinear optical properties.

The research, named “229 nm far-ultraviolet second harmonic generation in a vertical polarity inverted AlN bilayer channel waveguide,” has been published in the journal Applied Physics Express.

Users should continue to evaluate their settings to understand how they are being tracked.

Following a lengthy examination into its data practices, Google has agreed to pay $93 million to resolve claims that it misled customers about how and when their location information was being tracked and stored. The investigation was led by the California Department of Justice.

This is according to a statement released by California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office on Thursday.

Google is not unfamiliar to lawsuits. The company has been the target of legal action regarding privacy and data protection throughout the years.

A 65-year old perplexing question may have finally been answered: Why is the Sun’s atmosphere hotter than its surface?

For over six decades, scientists have been baffled by a cosmic mystery of scorching proportions: Why is the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, hotter than its surface?

This enigma contradicting conventional wisdom that things cool down the farther they are from a heat source has puzzled solar physicists until now, revealed the European Space Agency.

Back to AI in healthcare – we’ve looked at this from a number of angles, but what about some of the pros and cons of using AI/ML systems in a clinical context? And also, what about how to conquer disease with AI models?

There’s a broader theory that AI is going to allow for trail-blazing research on everything from cancer and heart disease to trauma and bone and muscle health — and everything in between. Now, we have more defined solutions coming to the table, and they’re well worth looking at!

In this IIA talk, cardiologist Collin Stultz talks about the treatment of disorders, and new tools, starting with a dramatic emphasis on heart disease.

Stable Audio is a first-of-its-kind product that uses the latest generative AI techniques to deliver faster, higher-quality music and sound effects via an easy-to-use web interface. Stability AI offers a basic free version of Stable Audio, which can be used to generate and download tracks of up to 45 seconds, and a ‘Pro’ subscription, which delivers 90-second tracks that are downloadable for commercial projects.

“As the only independent, open and multimodal generative AI company, we are thrilled to use our expertise to develop a product in support of music creators,” said Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI. “Our hope is that Stable Audio will empower music enthusiasts and creative professionals to generate new content with the help of AI, and we look forward to the endless innovations it will inspire.”

Stable Audio is ideal for musicians seeking to create samples to use in their music, but the opportunities for creators are limitless. Audio tracks are generated in response to descriptive text prompts supplied by the user, along with a desired length of audio. For instance, “Post-Rock, Guitars, Drum Kit, Bass, Strings, Euphoric, Up-Lifting, Moody, Flowing, Raw, Epic, Sentimental, 125 BPM” can be entered with a request for a 95-second track, and it would deliver this track.

The Penultimate Truth.
by Philip K. Dick.
Read by Jack Fox.
Originally issued by NLS on cassette in 1991
“A nuclear holocaust has forced humans to seek shelter and safety underground. For fifteen years the survivors have lived in warrens, sustained and exhorted by the patriotic speeches of an unseen president. He urges them to produce more and better armaments. Three people, writer Joseph Adams, physician Carol Tigh, and Nick St. James, band together to go above ground and discover the truth.“
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