During the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, U.S. policymakers had to decide whether to formally recognize the Taliban as the new Afghan government. But the first policymakers to address this question publicly were not government officials. They were trust and safety and public policy executives within major tech platforms Facebook (now Meta), Google and Twitter. Their seemingly minor decision whether to allow the Taliban to use official Afghan government accounts would have major effects, similar to state recognition. If they decided to let the Taliban communicate with the Afghan people through official channels, they would imbue the Taliban with legitimacy. Ultimately, platforms decided to continue banning Taliban content. Read More
Daily Archives: December 9, 2021
Decision Transformer: ReinforcementLearning via Sequence Modeling
We introduce a framework that abstracts Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a sequence modeling problem. This allows us to draw upon the simplicity and scalability of the Transformer architecture, and associated advances in language modeling such as GPT-x and BERT. In particular, we present Decision Transformer, an architecture that casts the problem of RL as conditional sequence modeling. Unlike prior approaches to RL that fit value functions or compute policy gradients, Decision Transformer simply outputs the optimal actions by leveraging a causally masked Transformer. By conditioning an autoregressive model on the desired return (reward), past states, and actions, our Decision Transformer model can generate future actions that achieve the desired return. Despite its simplicity, Decision Transformer matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art model-free offline RL baselines on Atari, OpenAI Gym, and Key-to-Door tasks. Read More
Synthesia raises $50M to leverage synthetic avatars for corporate training and more
Because every doc should be a presentation, and every presentation should be a video?
Synthesia, a startup using AI to create synthetic videos, is walking a fine, but thus far prosperous, line between being creepy and being pretty freakin’ cool.
…Synthesia allows anyone to turn text or a slide deck presentation into a video, complete with a talking avatar. Customers can leverage existing avatars, created from the performance of actors, or create their own in minutes by uploading some video. Users also can upload a recording of their voice, which can be transformed to say just about anything under the sun. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 