Microsoft is adding AI-generated art to its suite of Office software with a new app named Microsoft Designer.
The app functions the same way as AI text-to-image models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, letting users type prompts to “instantly generate a variety of designs with minimal effort.” Microsoft says Designer can be used to create everything from greeting cards and social media posts to illustrations for PowerPoint presentations and logos for businesses.
Essentially, AI-generated imagery looks set to become the new clip art. Read More
Monthly Archives: October 2022
Growth in AI and robotics research accelerates
It may not be unusual for burgeoning areas of science, especially those related to rapid technological changes in society, to take off quickly, but even by these standards the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has been impressive. Together with robotics, AI is representing an increasingly significant portion of research volume at various levels, as these charts show.
The number of AI and robotics papers published in the 82 high-quality science journals in the Nature Index (Count) has been rising year-on-year — so rapidly that it resembles an exponential growth curve. A similar increase is also happening more generally in journals and proceedings not included in the Nature Index, as is shown by data from the Dimensions database of research publications. Read More
ImpNet: Imperceptible and blackbox-undetectable backdoors in compiled neural networks
Early backdoor attacks against machine learning set off an arms race in attack and defence development. Defences have since appeared demonstrating some ability to detect backdoors in models or even remove them. These defences work by inspecting the training data, the model, or the integrity of the training procedure. In this work, we show that backdoors can be added during compilation, circumventing any safeguards in the data preparation and model training stages. As an illustration, the attacker can insert weight-based backdoors during the hardware compilation step that will not be detected by any training or data-preparation process. Next, we demonstrate that some backdoors, such as ImpNet, can only be reliably detected at the stage where they are inserted and removing them anywhere else presents a significant challenge. We conclude that machine-learning model security requires assurance of provenance along the entire technical pipeline, including the data, model architecture, compiler, and hardware specification. Read More
#adversarialAI-generated podcast features fake voices of Steve Jobs and Joe Rogan
The creators of podcast.ai have released a 20-minute podcast featuring artificially-generated versions of Steve Jobs and Joe Rogan. The entire interview was created using AI, with the clone of Jobs discussing Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, LSD, Google, Microsoft Windows 3, and more Read More
#audio, #fake, #podcastsDSRC vs. C-V2X for Safety Applications
For the past several years, DSRC has been the only V2X technology available. After a long period of multiple large-scale field tests, DSRC based V2X went into production in Japan in 2015 and in the US in 2017 in selected vehicle models. In 2019, VW released its Golf 8 with DSRC based V2X, making Europe’s most popular car the first mass market vehicle with V2X.
The more recent C-V2X technology has the same purpose of direct communication link between vehicles. C-V2X is defined by 3GPP based on cellular modem technology, leading to fundamentally different non-interoperable access layer with DSRC. Aside from that, the two technologies are addressing identical use-cases and having identical network, security and application layers. Read More
The Illustrated Stable Diffusion
AI image generation is the most recent AI capability blowing people’s minds (mine included). The ability to create striking visuals from text descriptions has a magical quality to it and points clearly to a shift in how humans create art. The release of Stable Diffusion is a clear milestone in this development because it made a high-performance model available to the masses (performance in terms of image quality, as well as speed and relatively low resource/memory requirements).
After experimenting with AI image generation, you may start to wonder how it works.
This is a gentle introduction to how Stable Diffusion works. Read More
The AI Bill of Rights Makes Uneven Progress on Algorithmic Protections
The White House has released the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights—which is likely the signature document reflecting the Biden administration’s approach to algorithmic regulation. Paired with a series of agency actions, the Biden administration is working to address many high-priority algorithmic harms—such as those in financial services, health care provisioning, hiring, and more. There is clear and demonstrated progress in implementing a sectorally specific approach to artificial intelligence (AI) regulation. The progress being made, however, is uneven. Important issues in educational access and worker surveillance, as well as most uses of AI in law enforcement, have received insufficient attention. Further, despite its focus on AI research and AI commerce, the White House has yet to effectively coordinate and facilitate AI regulation. Read More
The AI Scaling Hypothesis
How far will this go?
The past decade of progress in AI can largely be summed up by one word: scale. The era of deep learning that started around 2010 has witnessed a continued increase in the size of state of the art models. This has only accelerated over the past several years, leading many to believe in the “AI Scaling Hypothesis”: the idea that more computational resources and training data may be the best answer to achieving the AI field’s long term goals. This article will provide an overview of what the scaling hypothesis is, what we know about scaling laws, and the latest results achieved by scaling. Read More
Amazon Halts Tests of Scout Home-Delivery Robots
The team behind the Scout program is being disbanded and reassigned to new jobs, according to Bloomberg.
Amazon has halted testing of its Scout home-delivery robots as it cuts costs in the wake of slowing sales, according to a Bloomberg report.
Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll told Bloomberg that the team working on its Scout robots was being disbanded and would be offered new jobs at Amazon. Citing a “person familiar with the situation,” Bloomberg reported that work on the project had already been halted. Read More
First extension of AlphaZero to mathematics unlocks new possibilities for research
Algorithms have helped mathematicians perform fundamental operations for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians created an algorithm to multiply two numbers without requiring a multiplication table, and Greek mathematician Euclid described an algorithm to compute the greatest common divisor, which is still in use today.
During the Islamic Golden Age, Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi designed new algorithms to solve linear and quadratic equations. In fact, al-Khwarizmi’s name, translated into Latin as Algoritmi, led to the term algorithm. But, despite the familiarity with algorithms today – used throughout society from classroom algebra to cutting edge scientific research – the process of discovering new algorithms is incredibly difficult, and an example of the amazing reasoning abilities of the human mind.
In our paper, published today in Nature, we introduce AlphaTensor, the first artificial intelligence (AI) system for discovering novel, efficient, and provably correct algorithms for fundamental tasks such as matrix multiplication. This sheds light on a 50-year-old open question in mathematics about finding the fastest way to multiply two matrices. Read More
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