The tech giants are girding their loins for battle in the AI search space.
Microsoft announced that today, we’re launching an all new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser, available in preview now at Bing.com, to deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content. We think of these tools as an AI copilot for the web.
“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.” Read More
Meanwhile, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced Bard, a ChatGPT competitor, in a blog post today, describing the tool as an “experimental conversational AI service” that will answer users’ queries and take part in conversations. The software will be available to a group of “trusted testers” today, says Pichai, before becoming “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”
It’s not clear exactly what capabilities Bard will have, but it seems the chatbot will be just as free ranging as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A screenshot encourages users to ask Bard practical queries, like how to plan a baby shower or what kind of meals could be made from a list of ingredients for lunch. Read More
Not to be outdone, China’s largest search engine company plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March, initially embedding it into its main search services, said the person, asking to remain unidentified discussing private information. The tool, whose name hasn’t been decided, will allow users to get conversation-style search results much like OpenAI’s popular platform. Read More
Monthly Archives: February 2023
Stunning AI Robot Shows How It Will Replace Humans
The People Onscreen Are Fake. The Disinformation Is Real.
Exclusive Q&A: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence
The iconic Dallas game developer, rocket engineer, and VR visionary has pivoted to an audacious new challenge: developing artificial general intelligence—a form of AI that goes beyond mimicking human intelligence to understanding things and solving problems. Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030. Here’s how, and why, he’s working independently to make it happen.
North Texas’ resident tech genius, John Carmack, is taking aim now at his most ambitious target: solving the world’s biggest computer-science problem by developing artificial general intelligence. That’s a form of AI whose machines can understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task that humans can do.
Inside his multimillion-dollar manse on Highland Park’s Beverly Drive, Carmack, 52, is working to achieve AGI through his startup Keen Technologies, which raised $20 million in a financing round in August from investors including Austin-based Capital Factory.
This is the “fourth major phase” of his career, Carmack says, following stints in computers and pioneering video games with Mesquite’s id Software (founded in 1991), suborbital space rocketry at Mesquite-based Armadillo Aerospace (2000-2013), and virtual reality with Oculus VR, which Facebook (now Meta) acquired for $2 billion in 2014. Carmack stepped away from Oculus’ CTO role in late 2019 to become consulting CTO for the VR venture, proclaiming his intention to focus on AGI. He left Meta in December to concentrate full-time on Keen. Read More
Exclusive Interview: OpenAI’s Sam Altman Talks ChatGPT And How Artificial General Intelligence Can ‘Break Capitalism’
As CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman captains the buzziest — and most scrutinized — startup in the fast-growing generative AI category, the subject of a recent feature story in the February issue of Forbes.
After visiting OpenAI’s San Francisco offices in mid-January, Forbes spoke to the recently press-shy investor and entrepreneur about ChatGPT, artificial general intelligence and whether his AI tools pose a threat to Google Search. Read More
AI-generated Seinfeld parody banned on Twitch over transphobic standup bit
Nothing, Forever, a 24/7 show based on popular sitcom, will be offline for 14 days as makers blame technical glitch
An AI-generated Seinfeld show has been banned from the streaming platform Twitch for at least 14 days after a transphobic and homophobic standup bit aired during the show.
… Mimicking Seinfeld, the AI stream opens up with its character Larry performing a standup routine at the show’s beginning.
But during a stream on Sunday night, Larry made a series of homophobic and transphobic remarks during a standup bit, according to a clip on LiveStreamFails.com. Read More
Attacking Machine Learning Systems
The field of machine learning (ML) security—and corresponding adversarial ML—is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data. It’s a heady time; because we know so little about the security of these systems, there are many opportunities for new researchers to publish in this field. In many ways, this circumstance reminds me of the cryptanalysis field in the 1990. And there is a lesson in that similarity: the complex mathematical attacks make for good academic papers, but we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that insecure software will be the likely attack vector for most ML systems.
We are amazed by real-world demonstrations of adversarial attacks on ML systems, such as a 3D-printed object that looks like a turtle but is recognized (from any orientation) by the ML system as a gun. Or adding a few stickers that look like smudges to a stop sign so that it is recognized by a state-of-the-art system as a 45 mi/h speed limit sign. But what if, instead, somebody hacked into the system and just switched the labels for “gun” and “turtle” or swapped “stop” and “45 mi/h”? Systems can only match images with human-provided labels, so the software would never notice the switch. That is far easier and will remain a problem even if systems are developed that are robust to those adversarial attacks.
At their core, modern ML systems have complex mathematical models that use training data to become competent at a task. And while there are new risks inherent in the ML model, all of that complexity still runs in software. …. Read More
Andrew Ng’s Intel Innovation Luminary Keynote
OpenAI’s Greg Brockman: The Future of LLMs, Foundation & Generative Models (DALL·E 2 & GPT-3)
Whispers of A.I.’s Modular Future
ChatGPT is in the spotlight, but it’s Whisper—OpenAI’s open-source speech-transcription program—that shows us where machine learning is going.
One day in late December, I downloaded a program called Whisper.cpp onto my laptop, hoping to use it to transcribe an interview I’d done. I fed it an audio file and, every few seconds, it produced one or two lines of eerily accurate transcript, writing down exactly what had been said with a precision I’d never seen before. As the lines piled up, I could feel my computer getting hotter. This was one of the few times in recent memory that my laptop had actually computed something complicated—mostly I just use it to browse the Web, watch TV, and write. Now it was running cutting-edge A.I.
Despite being one of the more sophisticated programs ever to run on my laptop, Whisper.cpp is also one of the simplest. If you showed its source code to A.I. researchers from the early days of speech recognition, they might laugh in disbelief, or cry—it would be like revealing to a nuclear physicist that the process for achieving cold fusion can be written on a napkin. Whisper.cpp is intelligence distilled. It’s rare for modern software in that it has virtually no dependencies—in other words, it works without the help of other programs. Instead, it is ten thousand lines of stand-alone code, most of which does little more than fairly complicated arithmetic. It was written in five days by Georgi Gerganov, a Bulgarian programmer who, by his own admission, knows next to nothing about speech recognition. Gerganov adapted it from a program called Whisper, released in September by OpenAI, the same organization behind ChatGPT and dall-e. Whisper transcribes speech in more than ninety languages. In some of them, the software is capable of superhuman performance—that is, it can actually parse what somebody’s saying better than a human can.
What’s so unusual about Whisper is that OpenAI open-sourced it, releasing not just the code but a detailed description of its architecture. They also included the all-important “model weights”: a giant file of numbers specifying the synaptic strength of every connection in the software’s neural network. In so doing, OpenAI made it possible for anyone, including an amateur like Gerganov, to modify the program. Gerganov converted Whisper to C++, a widely supported programming language, to make it easier to download and run on practically any device. This sounds like a logistical detail, but it’s actually the mark of a wider sea change. Until recently, world-beating A.I.s like Whisper were the exclusive province of the big tech firms that developed them. Read More
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