IN NOVEMBER, FACEBOOK announced that it was rebranding itself as Meta, sparking a lot of credulous media coverage of “the metaverse,” a somewhat nebulous concept comprising virtual reality, 3D gaming, and a number of other trends. Interest in the metaverse deepened earlier this week, after Microsoft announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard, a leading game developer, for almost $70 billion. Microsoft stated near the top of a press release that the acquisition, which still needs the approval of the Federal Trade Commission, will “provide building blocks for the metaverse”—a claim repeated in more than one news story about the deal, though not universally taken at face value. Read More
Monthly Archives: January 2022
Spectrum Labs raises $32M for AI-based content moderation that monitors billions of conversations daily for toxicity
Two years into the pandemic, online conversations are for many of us still the primary interactions that we are having every day, and we are collectively having billions of them. But as many of us have discovered, not all of those are squeaky clean, positive experiences. Today, a startup called Spectrum Labs — which provides artificial intelligence technology to platform providers to detect and shut down toxic exchanges in real time (specifically, 20 milliseconds or less) — is announcing $32 million in funding. It plans to use the money to continue investing in its technology to double down on its growing consumer business and to forge ahead in a new area, providing services to enterprises for their internal and customer-facing conversations, providing not just a way to help detect when toxicity is creeping into exchanges, but to provide an audit trail for the activity for wider trust and safety tracking and initiatives. Read More
Meta has a giant new AI supercomputer to shape the metaverse
Meta, the tech giant previously known as Facebook, revealed Monday that it’s built one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, a behemoth called the Research SuperCluster, or RSC. With 6,080 graphics processing units packaged into 760 Nvidia A100 modules, it’s the fastest machine built for AI tasks, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says.
That processing power is in the same league as the Perlmutter supercomputer, which uses more than 6,000 of the same Nvidia GPUs and currently ranks as the world’s fifth fastest supercomputer. And in a second phase, Meta plans to boost performance by a factor of 2.5 with an expansion to 16,000 GPUs this year. Read More
Annual reflections of 2021 (Lillian Li)
2021 was an exceptional and rough year for Chinese tech. Things were fixed, but nothing was solved.
Rather than the protracted malaise that pervaded the faceoffs between tech giants and their proxies for much of the late 2010s, 2021 scattered the entire game board. With that, uncertainty defines the start of 2022. Boundaries have been redrawn, directions reset and organisations reformed. As China steers itself towards a new century where higher-quality growth is prioritised over fast growth, 2021 marked the end of an era.
The regulations introduced by the Chinese government in 2021 aimed to create balanced growth by unbalancing incumbent private actors while trying to stimulate future growth by altering the status quo. They’re eggs on a plate, but do they an omelette make?
Excuse my attempts to wax poetics, I never intended to become a Chinese policy analyst or put my development degree to use. But the 2020s is when we expect the unexpected, so let’s try to make sense of it all. Read More
Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme
Cryptocurrency is a scam.
All of it, full stop — not just the latest pump-and-dump “shitcoin” schemes, in which fraudsters hype a little-known cryptocurrency before dumping it in unison, or “rug pulls,” in which a new cryptocurrency’s developers abandon the project and run off with investor funds. All cryptocurrency and the industry as a whole are built atop market manipulation without which they could not exist at scale.
This should surprise no one who understands how cryptocurrency works. Blockchains are, at their core, simply append-only spreadsheets maintained across decentralized “peer-to-peer” networks, not unlike those used for torrenting pirated files. Just as torrents allow users to share files directly, cryptocurrency blockchains allow users to maintain a shared ledger of financial transactions without the need of a central server or managing authority. Users are thus able to make direct online transactions with one another as if they were trading cash.
This, we are told, is revolutionary. But making unmediated online transactions securely in a trustless environment in this way is not without costs. Cryptocurrency blockchains generally don’t allow previously verified transactions to be deleted or altered. The data is immutable. Updates are added by chaining a new “block” of transaction data to the chain of existing blocks.
But to ensure the integrity of the blockchain, the network needs a way to trust that new blocks are accurate. Popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin all employ a “proof of work” consensus method for verifying updates to the blockchain. Without getting overly technical, this mechanism allows blockchain users — known as “miners” in this context — to compete for the right to verify and add the next block by being the first to solve an incredibly complex math puzzle. Read More
Meta’s ‘data2vec’ is a step toward One Neural Network to Rule Them All
The race is on to create one neural network that can process multiple kinds of data — a more-general artificial intelligence that doesn’t discriminate about types of data but instead can crunch them all within the same basic structure.
The genre of multi-modality, as these neural networks are called, is seeing a flurry of activity in which different data, such as image, text, and speech audio, are passed through the same algorithm to produce a score on different tests such as image recognition, natural language understanding, or speech detection.
And these ambidextrous networks are racking up scores on benchmark tests of AI. The latest achievement is what’s called “data2vec,” developed by researchers at the AI division of Meta (parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp).
The point, as Meta researcher Alexei Baevski, Wei-Ning Hsu, Qiantong Xu, Arun Babu, Jiatao Gu, and Michael Auli reveal in a blog post, is to approach something more like the general learning ability that the human mind seems to encompass. Read More
Meta’s new learning algorithm can teach AI to multi-task
If you can recognize a dog by sight, then you can probably recognize a dog when it is described to you in words. Not so for today’s artificial intelligence. Deep neural networks have become very good at identifying objects in photos and conversing in natural language, but not at the same time: there are AI models that excel at one or the other, but not both.
Part of the problem is that these models learn different skills using different techniques. This is a major obstacle for the development of more general-purpose AI, machines that can multi-task and adapt. It also means that advances in deep learning for one skill often do not transfer to others.
A team at Meta AI (previously Facebook AI Research) wants to change that. The researchers have developed a single algorithm that can be used to train a neural network to recognize images, text, or speech. The algorithm, called Data2vec, not only unifies the learning process but performs at least as well as existing techniques in all three skills. “We hope it will change the way people think about doing this type of work,” says Michael Auli, a researcher at Meta AI. Read More
Plask: A New Free Tool for Extracting 3D Motion From Videos
If you are an aspiring animator looking for a software you can proudly call your favorite, here’s one you should definitely consider. Meet Plask, a web-based, AI-powered 3D animation editor and motion capture tool. Plask allows you to seamlessly record, edit, and animate your projects without leaving your browser, as it comes with all the necessary animation tools. Read More
How AI will shape the Metaverse
As different visions of the future digital world known as the Metaverse emerge, what role will AI play in it? Will it improve inclusivity, or will it help create an even more discriminatory digital world?
The Metaverse has become one of the hottest technology and socioeconomic topic. Combining different technologies like VR, 3D animation, blockchain and many others, lots of companies are already working on creating services for this new digital world. Even tech giant Facebook changed its name to Meta, demonstrating that the Metaverse is truly targeting to become the next big mainstream technology.
While a lot has been said about the role of blockchain in the Metaverse, thanks in part to the big NFT hype, I was wondering what was being said about the intersection of the Metaverse and AI. But first, let’s try to answer the question “what is the Metaverse?” or at least, try to point out several visions about it. Read More
Advanced AIs Exhibiting Depression and Addiction, Scientists Say
It turns out that artificial intelligence chatbots may be more like us than you’d think.
A new preprint study out of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) claims that many big name chatbots, when asked the types of questions generally used as cursory intake queries for depression and alcoholism, appeared to be both “depressed” and “addicted.” Read More
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