An interview with Jeffrey Ding, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, who researches implications of advances in AI for a possible U.S.-China power transit
Review on Apple Podcasts: Jeffrey Ding (@jjding99) is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, sponsored by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, as well as a research affiliate with the Centre for the Governance of AI at the University of Oxford. His current research is centered on how technological change affects the rise and fall of great powers, with an eye toward the implications of advances in AI for a possible U.S.-China power transition. Read More
Monthly Archives: November 2021
China’s Race for AI Supremacy
With Decentralized Identity, Your Reputation Travels With You Across Cyberspace
Web3 is based on the premise that each internet user will have a unique internet identifier, like an email address, that can be natively linked to any piece of software and stored on a blockchain. As part of someone’s “decentralized identity,” a portion of a person’s online activity would then be “on chain,” meaning that it would be public and easily searchable via their individual crypto wallet.
With such decentralized identity — a readable history unique to each person — one’s crypto wallet would function as a sort of profile, similar to Facebook or LinkedIn. But unlike web2 profiles, decentralized identities are backed by hard evidence: a permanent, timestamped record of a person’s accomplishments, contributions, interests, and activities to date. Read More
AWS makes AI and machine learning tangible with first major art debut at Smithsonian
Amazon Web Services Inc. has commissioned its first-ever major art piece, a site-specific sculpture powered by artificial intelligence and designed by artist and architect Suchi Reddy that will be the centerpiece of the Smithsonian’s “Futures” exhibit.
The artwork, called “me + you,” was unveiled today in the 90-foot-tall central rotunda of the Smithsonian’s historic Arts and Industries Building in Washinton, D.C. It’s an important locale as America’s first national museum and because the interactive sculpture itself is nearly two stories tall. Read More
What Will a Metaverse Embassy Look Like?
Barbados’ plans to claim sovereignty over digital land remain inscrutable.
This morning, my colleague Andrew Thurman put out a piece for this website about the government of Barbados, and its plans to establish a so-called “metaverse embassy.”
The metaverse is a kind of multiplayer social space in virtual reality; think Second Life or Playstation Home – a place where virtual people live virtual lives, entirely on a screen. Proponents say it’s like a copy of the real world, only better, since users don’t have to abide by the laws of physics. For skeptics, it’s cringey at best and dystopian at worst: a comprehensive new framework for digital surveillance and intrusive advertising. Read More
Why You Absolutely Must Invest In The Metaverse
Since Mark Zuckerberg announced on October 28 that Facebook would now be known as the Meta Platform, or simply Meta, its share price has risen by more than 9%, which is more than double what the Nasdaq NDAQ -1% has done.
If you don’t know what the Metaverse is – think of it as a virtual world. There are many types of virtual worlds. Facebook wants to be the biggest one. Say what you will about Facebook’s foray into the metaverse (they’ll probably censor people in these new parallel universes), Zuckerberg’s move into this space shows that within the Big Tech juggernauts, this guy is ahead of the curve. Read More
Metaverse similar to rise of internet: Matthew Ball
The metaverse is the next venue for body dysmorphia online
Some people are excited to see realistic avatars that look like them. Others worry it might make body image issues even worse.
In Facebook’s vision of the metaverse, we will all interact in a mashup of the digital and physical worlds. Digital representations of ourselves will eat, talk, date, shop, and more. That’s the picture Mark Zuckerberg painted as he rebranded his company Meta a couple of weeks ago.
…If avatars really are on their way, then we’ll need to face some tough questions about how we present ourselves to others. How might these virtual versions of ourselves change the way we feel about our bodies, for better or worse? Read More
AI’s Smarts Now Come With a Big Price Tag
As language models get more complex, they also get more expensive to create and run. Some companies are locked out.
Calvin Qi, who works at a search startup called Glean, would love to use the latest artificial intelligence algorithms to improve his company’s products.
Glean provides tools for searching through applications like Gmail, Slack, and Salesforce. Qi says new AI techniques for parsing language would help Glean’s customers unearth the right file or conversation a lot faster.
But training such a cutting-edge AI algorithm costs several million dollars. So Glean uses smaller, less capable AI models that can’t extract as much meaning from text. Read More
Internet-Augmented Dialogue Generation
The largest store of continually updating knowledge on our planet can be accessed via internet search. In this work we study giving access to this information to conversational agents. Large language models, even though they store an impressive amount of knowledge within their weights, are known to hallucinate facts when generating dialogue (Shuster et al., 2021); moreover, those facts are frozen in time at the point of model training. In contrast, we propose an approach that learns to generate an internet search query based on the context, and then conditions on the search results to finally generate a response, a method that can employ up-to-the-minute relevant information. We train and evaluate such models on a newly collected dataset of human-human conversations whereby one of the speakers is given access to internet search during knowledge driven discussions in order to ground their responses. We find that search-query based ac cess of the internet in conversation provides superior performance compared to existing approaches that either use no augmentation or FAISS-based retrieval (Lewis et al., 2020) Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 