An interview with the designers behind the “Are You The Asshole” bot
Reddit’s r/AmITheAsshole is one of the most entertaining subreddits on the entire site. Though it started in 2013, the subreddit’s popularity increased during the pandemic when people, isolated from social interaction, started stewing about the little things. Are you the asshole when you punched your roommate after they ate all your food? How about when you screamed at your parents when they made you the supermarket gopher? Well, if you ask, thousands of people will give their opinion to let you know whether or not you’re the asshole.
Internet artist Morry Kolman, along with developer Alex Petros, dove into the immense data set of r/AmITheAsshole and built Are You The Asshole, a bot that helps teach us about bias, machine learning, and the beauty of human-computer interaction. Read More
Daily Archives: May 13, 2022
Robots are creating images and telling jokes. 5 things to know about foundation models and the next generation of AI
f you’ve seen photos of a teapot shaped like an avocado or read a well-written article that veers off on slightly weird tangents, you may have been exposed to a new trend in artificial intelligence (AI).
Machine learning systems called DALL-E, GPT and PaLM are making a splash with their incredible ability to generate creative work. Read More
A Generalist Agent
Inspired by progress in large-scale language modelling, we apply a similar approach towards building a single generalist agent beyond the realm of text outputs. The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens. In this report we describe the model and the data, and document the current capabilities of Gato. Read More
Paper
Cautionary Tales from Cryptoland
Web3 is off to a rocky start. Optimists may rattle on about progress on the horizon, but at present the space is rife with fraud, hacks, and collapses. In this Q&A with Web3 critic Molly White, creator of the website Web3 Is Going Just Great, White argues that as this technology becomes more mainstream, its ability to do harm — financial, emotional, and reputational — will grow, and fast. For one, blockchain technology is often applied in ways, or to problems, to which it is not suited, and companies frequently don’t understand the consequences of their decision to utilize it. Additionally, some issues are being overlooked, such as privacy concerns, which could make it more difficult to address online harassment. Finally, for all the rhetoric from Web3 proponents about opportunity and democratization, crypto projects have mostly served to make the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 