Medical artificial intelligence (AI) offers great potential for recognizing signs of health conditions in retinal images and expediting the diagnosis of eye diseases and systemic disorders1. However, the development of AI models requires substantial annotation and models are usually task-specific with limited generalizability to different clinical applications2. Here, we present RETFound, a foundation model for retinal images that learns generalizable representations from unlabelled retinal images and provides a basis for label-efficient model adaptation in several applications. Specifically, RETFound is trained on 1.6 million unlabelled retinal images by means of self-supervised learning and then adapted to disease detection tasks with explicit labels. We show that adapted RETFound consistently outperforms several comparison models in the diagnosis and prognosis of sight-threatening eye diseases, as well as incident prediction of complex systemic disorders such as heart failure and myocardial infarction with fewer labelled data. RETFound provides a generalizable solution to improve model performance and alleviate the annotation workload of experts to enable broad clinical AI applications from retinal imaging. — Read More
#humanMonthly Archives: September 2023
What OpenAI Really Wants
The young company sent shock waves around the world when it released ChatGPT. But that was just the start. The ultimate goal: Change everything. Yes. Everything.
… For Altman and his company, ChatGPT and GPT-4 are merely stepping stones along the way to achieving a simple and seismic mission, one these technologists may as well have branded on their flesh. That mission is to build artificial general intelligence—a concept that’s so far been grounded more in science fiction than science—and to make it safe for humanity. — Read More
Machine Learning, Illustrated
An Illustrated Machine Learning series that takes a (boring sounding) machine learning concept and makes it fun by illustrating it! — Read More
Stability AI, gunning for a hit, launches an AI-powered music generator
… Today marks the release of Stable Audio, a tool that Stability claims is the first capable of creating “high-quality,” 44.1 kHz music for commercial use via a technique called latent diffusion. Trained on audio metadata as well as audio files’ durations — and start times — Stability says that Audio Diffusion’s underlying, roughly 1.2-billion-parameter model affords greater control over the content and length of synthesized audio than the generative music tools released before it. — Read More
ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders
Driven by improved architectures and better representation learning frameworks, the field of visual recognition has enjoyed rapid modernization and performance boost in the early 2020s. For example, modern ConvNets, represented by ConvNeXt, have demonstrated strong performance in various scenarios. While these models were originally designed for supervised learning with ImageNet labels, they can also potentially benefit from self-supervised learning techniques such as masked autoencoders (MAE). However, we found that simply combining these two approaches leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional masked autoencoder framework and a new Global Response Normalization (GRN) layer that can be added to the ConvNeXt architecture to enhance inter-channel feature competition. This co-design of self-supervised learning techniques and architectural improvement results in a new model family called ConvNeXt V2, which significantly improves the performance of pure ConvNets on various recognition benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection, and ADE20K segmentation. We also provide pre-trained ConvNeXt V2 models of various sizes, ranging from an efficient 3.7M-parameter Atto model with 76.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, to a 650M Huge model that achieves a state-of-the-art 88.9% accuracy using only public training data. — Read More
Introducing ChatGPT Enterprise
We’re launching ChatGPT Enterprise, which offers enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access, longer context windows for processing longer inputs, advanced data analysis capabilities, customization options, and much more. We believe AI can assist and elevate every aspect of our working lives and make teams more creative and productive. Today marks another step towards an AI assistant for work that helps with any task, is customized for your organization, and that protects your company data. — Read More
Alibaba opens AI model Tongyi Qianwen to the public
Alibaba said on Wednesday it would open its artificial intelligence model Tongyi Qianwen to the public, in a sign it has gained Chinese regulatory approval to mass-market the model.
Authorities in China have recently accelerated efforts to support companies developing AI as the technology increasingly becomes a focus of competition with the United States. — Read More
California lawmakers want to protect actors from being replaced by artificial intelligence
As Hollywood actors and writers continue to strike for better pay and benefits, California lawmakers are hoping to protect workers from being replaced by their digital clones.
On Wednesday, Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San José) was expected to introduce a bill that would give actors and artists a way to nullify provisions in vague contracts that allow studios and other companies to use artificial intelligence to digitally clone their voices, faces and bodies. — Read More
Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness
Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of our best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. We survey several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories we derive “indicator properties” of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow us to assess AI systems for these properties. We use these indicator properties to assess several recent AI systems, and we discuss how future systems might implement them. Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also suggests that there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators. — Read More
China AI & Semiconductors Rise: US Sanctions Have Failed
As we approach the 1-year anniversary on the October 7th China sanctions, it is abundantly clear that the export controls are failing. The Biden Administration’s stated aim was to limit Chinese firms’ ability to manufacture the highest end chips including those in AI and other technologies that could be used for nefarious purposes by the Chinese Communist Party. See the US justification below.
… However, the release of Huawei’s new flagship chip on SMIC’s N+2 (7nm) process, Chinese companies’ continued importation of billions of dollars of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and acquisition of hundreds of thousands of powerful NVIDIA H800 & A800 chips, it is abundantly clear that the Commerce Department’s standards were set at a level that will not ultimately inhibit China from breaking through the barriers set last fall.<
In this report we’ll explore what the Huawei chip crystallizes about the trajectory of Chinese domestic semiconductor manufacturing and AI capabilities. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 