Babies can help unlock the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI), according to Trinity College neuroscientists and colleagues who have just published new guiding principles for improving AI.
The research, published today in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, examines the neuroscience and psychology of infant learning and distills three principles to guide the next generation of AI, which will help overcome the most pressing limitations of machine learning.
Dr Lorijn Zaadnoordijk, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Trinity College explained:
“Artificial intelligence (AI) has made tremendous progress in the last decade, giving us smart speakers, autopilots in cars, ever-smarter apps, and enhanced medical diagnosis. These exciting developments in AI have been achieved thanks to machine learning which uses enormous datasets to train artificial neural network models. However, progress is stalling in many areas because the datasets that machines learn from must be painstakingly curated by humans. But we know that learning can be done much more efficiently, because infants don’t learn this way! They learn by experiencing the world around them, sometimes by even seeing something just once.” Read More
Monthly Archives: July 2022
A year in the making, BigScience’s AI language model is finally available
After more than a year of planning and training, a volunteer-led project has produced an open source language model that they claim is as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-3, but free and open for anyone to use (if they have the computing power). Dubbed Bloom, the model is available in open source along with the code and datasets used to create it. Brooklyn-based AI startup Hugging Face has released a free web app that lets anyone try Bloom without having to download it.
Bloom is the brainchild of BigScience, an international, community-powered project with the goal of making large natural language models widely available for research. Large language models, or “LLMs” for short, can translate, summarize and write text with humanlike nuance — more or less. (See GPT-3.) But they’ve been historically costly to create, keeping them out of reach of researchers and firmly within the hands of Big Tech companies like Meta, Google and Microsoft. Read More
A New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser
EVERYONE FROM ADVERTISERS and marketers to government-backed hackers and spyware makers wants to identify and track users across the web. And while a staggering amount of infrastructure is already in place to do exactly that, the appetite for data and new tools to collect it has proved insatiable. With that reality in mind, researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology are warning this week about a novel technique attackers could use to de-anonymize website visitors and potentially connect the dots on many components of targets’ digital lives.
The findings, which NJIT researchers will present at the Usenix Security Symposium in Boston next month, show how an attacker who tricks someone into loading a malicious website can determine whether that visitor controls a particular public identifier, like an email address or social media account, thus linking the visitor to a piece of potentially personal data. Read More
Meta’s latest generative AI system creates stunning images from sketches and text
Meta Platforms Inc. today unveiled an advanced “generative artificial intelligence system” that’s designed to help artists better showcase their creativity.
The system, called “Make-A-Scene,” is meant to demonstrate how AI has the potential to empower anyone to bring their imagination to life. The user can simply describe and illustrate their vision through a combination of text descriptions and freeform sketches, and the AI will come up with a stunning representation of it. Read More
DALL-E Mini Is the Internet’s Favorite AI Meme Machine
Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence projects, saw traffic to an AI image-generation tool called DALL-E Mini skyrocket.
The outwardly simple app, which generates nine images in response to any typed text prompt, was launched nearly a year ago by an independent developer. But after some recent improvements and a few viral tweets, its ability to crudely sketch all manner of surreal, hilarious, and even nightmarish visions suddenly became meme magic. Behold its renditions of “Thanos looking for his mom at Walmart,” “drunk shirtless guys wandering around Mordor,” “CCTV camera footage of Darth Vader breakdancing,” and “a hamster Godzilla in a sombrero attacking Tokyo.” Read More
Craiyon Link
DeepMind AI reacts to the physically impossible like a human infant
Adding assumptions about objects better than learning from scratch, claims researcher
DeepMind has looked to developmental psychology to help AI gain a basic understanding of the physical world.…
Real-world physics are for AIs to grasp when asked to start from scratch with only training data to guide them. But researchers have demonstrated babies as young as five months are surprised if they are shown a physically impossible event, such as a toy suddenly disappearing, implying they gain some intuitive physical understanding at an early age. Read More
Why business is booming for military AI startups
The invasion of Ukraine has prompted militaries to update their arsenals—and Silicon Valley stands to capitalize.
Exactly two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics company Palantir, made his pitch to European leaders. With war on their doorstep, Europeans ought to modernize their arsenals with Silicon Valley’s help, he argued in an open letter.
For Europe to “remain strong enough to defeat the threat of foreign occupation,” Karp wrote, countries need to embrace “the relationship between technology and the state, between disruptive companies that seek to dislodge the grip of entrenched contractors and the federal government ministries with funding.” Read More
Why Lockdown mode from Apple is one of the coolest security ideas ever
Apple intros “extreme” optional protection against the scourge of mercenary spyware.
Mercenary spyware is one of the hardest threats to combat. It targets an infinitesimally small percentage of the world, making it statistically unlikely for most of us to ever see it. And yet, because the sophisticated malware only selects the most influential individuals (think diplomats, political dissidents, and lawyers), it has a devastating effect that’s far out of proportion to the small number of people infected.
This puts device and software makers in a bind. How do you build something to protect what’s likely well below 1 percent of your user base against malware built by companies like NSO Group, maker of clickless exploits that instantly convert fully updated iOS and Android devices into sophisticated bugging devices?
On Wednesday, Apple previewed an ingenious option it plans to add to its flagship OSes in the coming months to counter the mercenary spyware menace. The company is upfront—almost in your face—that Lockdown mode is an option that will degrade the user experience and is intended for only a small number of users. Read More
Didn’t plan on failing the Turing Test today? Sorry, you’ve already started
Is the text you’re reading right now written by AI? The Turing Test is nothing more than answering this simple question. [1] Read More
American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century
When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York Police Department. But unless you or someone you love has been targeted for deportation, you probably don’t immediately think of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This report argues that you should. Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency. Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives. By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time. In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has – without any judicial, legislative or public oversight – reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.
ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system by crossing legal and ethical lines, leveraging the trust that people place in state agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite with their families. Despite the incredible scope and evident civil rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be invoked to impose limitations. Federal and state lawmakers, for the most part, have yet to confront this reality.
This report synthesizes what is already known about ICE surveillance with new information from thousands of previously unseen and unanalyzed records, illustrating the on-the-ground impact of ICE surveillance through three case studies – ICE access to driver data, utility customer data and data collected about the families of unaccompanied children. The report builds on, and would not have been possible without, the powerful research, organizing and advocacy of immigrant rights organizations like CASA, the Immigrant Defense Project, Just Futures Law, Mijente, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), Project South and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California (among many others), which have been leading the effort to expose and dissever ICE’s American dragnet. Read More
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