Last week a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech’s grip on AI.
New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers and app developers can study, build on, and modify—are dropping like candy from a piñata. These are smaller, cheaper versions of the best-in-class AI models created by the big firms that (almost) match them in performance—and they’re shared for free. — Read More
Daily Archives: May 16, 2023
DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet
Recent research has suggested that there are clear differences in the language used in the Dark Web compared to that of the Surface Web. As studies on the Dark Web commonly require textual analysis of the domain, language models specific to the Dark Web may provide valuable insights to researchers. In this work, we introduce DarkBERT, a language model pretrained on Dark Web data. We describe the steps taken to filter and compile the text data used to train DarkBERT to combat the extreme lexical and structural diversity of the Dark Web that may be detrimental to building a proper representation of the domain. We evaluate DarkBERT and its vanilla counterpart along with other widely used language models to validate the benefits that a Dark Web domain specific model offers in various use cases. Our evaluations show that DarkBERT outperforms current language models and may serve as a valuable resource for future research on the Dark Web. — Read More
Open-Source AI Is Gaining on Google and ChatGPT
In February, Meta Platforms set off an explosion of artificial intelligence development when it gave academics access to sophisticated machine-learning models that can understand conversational language. Within weeks, the academics turned those models into open-source software that powered free alternatives to ChatGPT and other proprietary AI software.
Free AI models are now “reasonably close” in performance to proprietary models from Google and ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and most software developers will eventually opt to use the free ones, said Ion Stoica, a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley, who helped develop a key open-source AI model using Meta’s technology. — Read More
Privacy or safety? U.S. brings ‘surveillance city to the suburbs’
The spread of Fusus, a police technology platform that merges public and private cameras with predictive policing and other surveillance tools, is sparking debates in towns across the U.S.
Officer Mike Martinez has a mental map of all the security cameras in the small Californian town of Rialto.
… “This is not about Big Brother watching you,” he told Context from behind the wheel of his black and white SUV police cruiser. “This is about public safety.” — Read More
Stability AI releases an open source text-to-animation tool
You’ve heard of text-to-image, but have you heard of text-to-animation?
From anime to childhood classics, animations have brought stories to life by combining still images. Now, with just a text prompt, you can generate your own animations using AI.
On Thursday, Stability AI, the AI company that created Stable Diffusion, unveiled a text-to-animation tool that allows developers and artists to use Stable Diffusion models to generate animations. — Read More
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