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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.”

When asked to read Ars Technica’s coverage of Kevin Liu’s experiment with prompt injection, Bing called the article inaccurate and said Liu was a hoaxter.

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!

A new technical paper titled “A high-fidelity quantum matter-link between ion-trap microchip modules” was published by researchers at University of Sussex, Universal Quantum Ltd, University College London and University of Bristol.

“As quantum computers grow, we will eventually be constrained by the size of the microchip, which limits the number of quantum bits such a chip can accommodate. As such, we knew a modular approach was key to make quantum computers powerful enough to solve step-changing industry problems. In demonstrating that we can connect two quantum computing chips – a bit like a jigsaw puzzle – and, crucially, that it works so well, we unlock the potential to scale-up by connecting hundreds or even thousands of quantum computing microchips,” states Professor Winfried Hensinger, Professor of Quantum Technologies at the University of Sussex and Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Universal Quantum.