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Blog – Page 3618

Slack has evolved from a pure communications platform to one that enables companies to link directly to enterprise applications without having to resort to dreaded task switching. Today, at the Salesforce World Tour event in NYC, the company announced the next step in its platform’s evolution where it will be putting AI at the forefront of the user experience, making it easier to get information and build workflows.

It’s important to note that these are announcements, and many of these features are not available yet.

Rob Seaman says that rather than slapping on an AI cover, they are working to incorporate it in a variety of ways across the platform. That started last month with a small step, a partnership with OpenAI to bring a ChatGPT app into Slack, the first piece of a much broader vision for AI on the platform. That part is in beta at the moment.

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Midjourney 5.1 has been released, bringing another significant improvement in the quality of results from the generative AI art service. The company claims that version 5.1 of the engine is “more opinionated”, bringing it closer to the kind of results that you would get with version 4 of Midjourney, but at a higher quality. There’s also a “raw” mode, for those who don’t want images that are as strongly opinionated.

Other claimed improvements include greater accuracy, fewer unwanted borders or text artifacts in images, and improved sharpness.

See how Midjourney 5.1 delivers another huge improvement to the AI art service’s results with our test images.

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AI startup Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research, ServiceNow’s R&D division, have released StarCoder, a free alternative to code-generating AI systems along the lines of GitHub’s Copilot.

Code-generating systems like DeepMind’s AlphaCode; Amazon’s CodeWhisperer; and OpenAI’s Codex, which powers Copilot, provide a tantalizing glimpse at what’s possible with AI within the realm of computer programming. Assuming the ethical, technical and legal issues are someday ironed out (and AI-powered coding tools don’t cause more bugs and security exploits than they solve), they could cut development costs substantially while allowing coders to focus on more creative tasks.

According to a study from the University of Cambridge, at least half of developers’ efforts are spent debugging and not actively programming, which costs the software industry an estimated $312 billion per year. But so far, only a handful of code-generating AI systems have been made freely available to the public — reflecting the commercial incentives of the organizations building them (see: Replit).

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Researchers at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology, Center for Behavioral Health, Neurological Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio have authored a case report on the positive effects of psilocybin on color blindness.

Published in the journal Drug Science, Policy and Law, the researchers highlight some implications surrounding a single reported vision improvement self-study by a colleague and cite other previous reports, illustrating a need to understand better how these psychedelics could be used in therapeutic settings.

Past reports have indicated that people with deficiency (CVD), usually referred to as , experience better color vision after using lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or psilocybin (magic mushrooms). There is a lack of scientific evidence for these claims, as researching the effects of these drugs has been highly restricted.

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Tools such as DALL – E 2 and ChatGPT have the potential to crush the “competition” because they can do specific creative tasks faster and, in some cases, better than humans. This may sound scary for the people behind the desk; however, as phenomenal as these tools are, they are not infallible. These LLMs are not without their limits. They are vulnerable to inconsistent accuracy, limited creativity and controllability and may provide outdated information.

Despite their significant strengths, they present users with challenges that must be addressed to optimize their potential fully. What this means for those threatened by the existence of AI is the need to step up their game and upskill to remain competitive.

The evolution of technology will continue, addressing the gaps in many different industries to benefit society. Creatives, including digital marketers, copywriters and designers, have already recognized the potential benefits of AI-powered tools. So, the question shouldn’t be whether AI will take over your jobs but how you’ll adapt.

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A collaborative effort has installed electronic “brains” on solar-powered robots that are 100 to 250 micrometers in size – smaller than an ant’s head – so that they can walk autonomously without being externally controlled.

Cornell researchers installed electronic “brains” on solar-powered robots that are 100 to 250 micrometers in size, so the tiny bots can walk autonomously without being externally controlled. Noël Heaney/Cornell University

While Cornell researchers and others have previously developed microscopic machines that can crawl, swim, walk and fold themselves up, there were always “strings” attached; to generate motion, wires were used to provide electrical current or laser beams had to be focused directly onto specific locations on the robots.

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