… An Air Force colonel who oversees AI testing used what he now says is a hypothetical to describe a military AI going rogue and killing its human operator in a simulation in a presentation at a professional conference.
But after reports of the talk emerged Thursday, the colonel said that he misspoke and that the “simulation” he described was a “thought experiment” that never happened. — Read More
Monthly Archives: June 2023
Open-Source LLMs
In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didn’t just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers immediately started modifying it, improving it, and getting it to do things no one else anticipated. And their results have been immediate, innovative, and an indication of how the future of this technology is going to play out. Training speeds have hugely increased, and the size of the models themselves has shrunk to the point that you can create and run them on a laptop. The world of AI research has dramatically changed.
This development hasn’t made the same splash as other corporate announcements, but its effects will be much greater. It will wrest power from the large tech corporations, resulting in both much more innovation and a much more challenging regulatory landscape. The large corporations that had controlled these models warn that this free-for-all will lead to potentially dangerous developments, and problematic uses of the open technology have already been documented. But those who are working on the open models counter that a more democratic research environment is better than having this powerful technology controlled by a small number of corporations. — Read More
Generating Images with Multimodal Language Models
We propose a method to fuse frozen text-only large language models (LLMs) with pre-trained image encoder and decoder models, by mapping between their embedding spaces. Our model demonstrates a wide suite of multimodal capabilities: image retrieval, novel image generation, and multimodal dialogue. Ours is the first approach capable of conditioning on arbitrarily interleaved image and text inputs to generate coherent image (and text) outputs. To achieve strong performance on image generation, we propose an efficient mapping network to ground the LLM to an off-the-shelf text-to-image generation model. This mapping network translates hidden representations of text into the embedding space of the visual models, enabling us to leverage the strong text representations of the LLM for visual outputs. Our approach outperforms baseline generation models on tasks with longer and more complex language. In addition to novel image generation, our model is also capable of image retrieval from a prespecified dataset, and decides whether to retrieve or generate at inference time. This is done with a learnt decision module which conditions on the hidden representations of the LLM. Our model exhibits a wider range of capabilities compared to prior multimodal language models. It can process image-and-text inputs, and produce retrieved images, generated images, and generated text — outperforming non-LLM based generation models across several text-to-image tasks that measure context dependence. — Read More
The Urgent Risks of Runaway AI – and What to Do about Them | Gary Marcus
Digital Renaissance: NVIDIA Neuralangelo Research Reconstructs 3D Scenes
Neuralangelo, a new AI model by NVIDIA Research for 3D reconstruction using neural networks, turns 2D video clips into detailed 3D structures — generating lifelike virtual replicas of buildings, sculptures and other real-world objects.
Like Michelangelo sculpting stunning, life-like visions from blocks of marble, Neuralangelo generates 3D structures with intricate details and textures. Creative professionals can then import these 3D objects into design applications, editing them further for use in art, video game development, robotics and industrial digital twins. — Read More
Shall we play a game?
GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?
Maybe, but AI is not an arms race (Read More). We need to ask ourselves, Is Avoiding Extinction from AI Really an Urgent Priority? The history of technology suggests that the greatest risks come not from the tech, but from the people who control it (Read More). Somehow, with AI, we leapt immediately to DEFCON 1 (Read More).
So, existential threat or marketing hype?
HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?
What runs ChatGPT? Inside Microsoft’s AI supercomputer
Artificial Intelligence Will Entrench Global Inequality
The debate about regulating AI urgently needs input from the global south.
The artificial intelligence race is gathering pace, and the stakes could not be higher. Major corporate players—including Alibaba, DeepMind, Google, IBM, Microsoft, OpenAI, and SAP—are leveraging huge computational power to push the boundaries of AI and popularize new AI tools such as GPT-4 and Bard. Hundreds of other private and non-profit players are rolling out apps and plugins, staking their claims in this fast-moving frontier market that some enthusiasts predict will upend the way we work, play, do business, create wealth, and govern.
Amid all the enthusiasm, there is a mounting sense of dread. A growing number of tech titans and computer scientists have expressed deep anxiety about the existential risks of surrendering decision-making to complex algorithms and, in the not so distant future, super-intelligent machines that may abruptly find little use for humans. A 2022 survey found that roughly half of all responding AI experts believed there is at least a one in 10 chance these technologies could doom us all. Whatever the verdict, as recent U.S. congressional testimony from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reveals, AI represents an unprecedented shift in the social contract that will fundamentally redefine relations between people, institutions, and nations. — Read More
MyHeritage debuts Reimagine, an AI app for scanning, fixing and even animating old photos
AI is impacting the realm of photography, ranging from tools for professionals like Adobe Photoshop’s new generative AI, to those for consumers, like Google Photos’ forthcoming Magic Editor. Now, genealogy company MyHeritage is turning to AI to make it easier for families to preserve their memories with the launch of its latest app, Reimagine. The new mobile app’s main focus is to help users easily import printed photos stored in albums, then touch them up by improving their resolution, fixing scratches and creases, and even restoring color in black-and-white photos and animating faces — the latter, a technique that went viral in prior years with MyHeritage’s launch of “Deep Nostalgia.” — Read More
The Roll iOS app uses AI to simulate crane and dolly shots on iPhone footage
Roll uses generative AI to simulate a 3D environment, allowing users to create panning or close-up shots without needing to move their iPhone camera.
Roll AI is a new video creation and collaboration platform for iOS and web that allows users to add simulated video effects to iPhone footage that would typically require professional camera equipment to achieve, such as stabilized pan or crane shots. It’s one of the latest examples in a boom of new apps and services that utilize AI to simplify technical creative processes like photo and video editing.
Roll AI uses its proprietary generative AI models to recreate the filming environment in iPhone footage as a 3D space, allowing users to add text overlay effects and simulate side-panning, dolly, and crane camera movements in postproduction and apply various studio effects like bokeh (background blur). The service also uses AI to automatically edit your footage for publishing. Roll captures metadata from audio and video recordings that the Roll editor later uses to reframe hosts and create scene changes based on any on-screen conversations. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 