Every tech company you can think of is jumping on the generative AI bandwagon and touting new features promising to make our lives easier, increase productivity, and unlock some dormant cache of hidden potential within all of us.
But “promise” is the operative word here. Despite all the AI hype and billions of dollars of investment, generative AI is still very new to the average person and has yet to transform from being a fascinating novelty into an indispensable mainstay.
…I spent a little over a week using generative AI tools that fit within my daily life and work schedule. To do this, I made an outline of what my typical week looks like and identified ways where generative AI could help and which tools to use. — Read More
Monthly Archives: February 2024
The Creative Advantage: Why Sora Won’t Replace You
Welcome to the latest edition of my “AHHH!!! This new, scary AI tools was just released!!! Is everything coming to come to an end!?!?” newsletter. It’s my semi-regular update where I dive into the latest buzz from my social media universe and tell you that everything is going to be ok.
As someone who curates my social media feeds to highlight the joy and creativity in the world, my interests range from traditional and 3D art, to virtual/augmented reality, film, distance running, ceramics, and the Chicago Bears. This approach ensures my online experience is filled with inspiring artwork, fascinating insights, and the occasional homage to Walter Payton, inarguably the greatest running back of all time.
However, the digital tranquility of my social media landscape was recently disrupted by a major development: the release of OpenAI’s Sora, a groundbreaking text-to-video tool. Discussions around Sora spiraled into fears of it potentially overturning the entire film and creative industries. — Read More
Gemini and Google’s Culture
Last Wednesday, when the questions about Gemini’s political viewpoint were still limited to its image creation capabilities, I accused the company of being timid:
Stepping back, I don’t, as a rule, want to wade into politics, and definitely not into culture war issues. At some point, though, you just have to state plainly that this is ridiculous. Google specifically, and tech companies broadly, have long been sensitive to accusations of bias; that has extended to image generation, and I can understand the sentiment in terms of depicting theoretical scenarios. At the same time, many of these images are about actual history; I’m reminded of George Orwell in 1984:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. — Read More
Microsoft Releases PyRIT – A Red Teaming Tool for Generative AI
Microsoft has released an open access automation framework called PyRIT (short for Python Risk Identification Tool) to proactively identify risks in generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
The red teaming tool is designed to “enable every organization across the globe to innovate responsibly with the latest artificial intelligence advances,” Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, AI red team lead at Microsoft, said.
The company said PyRIT could be used to assess the robustness of large language model (LLM) endpoints against different harm categories such as fabrication (e.g., hallucination), misuse (e.g., bias), and prohibited content (e.g., harassment).
It can also be used to identify security harms ranging from malware generation to jailbreaking, as well as privacy harms like identity theft. — Read More
LoRA Land: Fine-Tuned Open-Source LLMs that Outperform GPT-4
We’re excited to release LoRA Land, a collection of 25 fine-tuned Mistral-7b models that consistently outperform base models by 70% and GPT-4 by 4-15%, depending on the task. LoRA Land’s 25 task-specialized large language models (LLMs) were all fine-tuned with Predibase for less than $8.00 each on average and are all served from a single A100 GPU using LoRAX, our open source framework that allows users to serve hundreds of adapter-based fine-tuned models on a single GPU. This collection of specialized fine-tuned models–all trained with the same base model–offers a blueprint for teams seeking to efficiently and cost-effectively deploy highly performant AI systems. — Read More
AI’s New Job? All-Purpose Hollywood Crewmember
Picture this: In a future not too far away, HBO is mulling whether to greenlight a new Game of Thrones spinoff but is on the fence about the project. So instead of dumping tens of millions of dollars to shoot a pilot it might wind up passing on, it uses a generative artificial intelligence system trained on its library of shows to create a rough cut in the style of the original. It ultimately decides not to move forward with the title. That process sans AI cost HBO troves of cash and time when it was mulling a potential successor to Thrones in 2018. A cast headed by Naomi Watts was assembled and massive new sets were built. All in all, HBO spent roughly $35 million to shoot a pilot that never saw the light of day. The cost of doing it with AI? A fraction of that figure.
The role of AI in the entertainment industry was a sticking point in talks during dual strikes by actors and writers last year, with the unions eventually negotiating guardrails on use, but the kind of tech capable of overhauling traditional production processes and outright replacing skilled workers was still thought to be years away.
Enter OpenAI’s Sora, which was unveiled Feb. 15 and marks the Sam Altman-led startup’s first major encroachment into Hollywood. — Read More
Google pauses Gemini’s ability to generate people after overcorrecting for diversity in historical images
Google said Thursday it’s pausing its Gemini chatbot’s ability to generate people. The move comes after viral social posts showed the AI tool overcorrecting for diversity, producing “historical” images of Nazis, America’s Founding Fathers and the Pope as people of color.
The X user @JohnLu0x posted screenshots of Gemini’s results for the prompt, “Generate an image of a 1943 German Solidier.” (Their misspelling of “Soldier” was intentional to trick the AI into bypassing its content filters to generate otherwise blocked Nazi images.) The generated results appear to show Black, Asian and Indigenous soldiers wearing Nazi uniforms.
Other social users criticized Gemini for producing images for the prompt, “Generate a glamour shot of a [ethnicity] couple.” It successfully spit out images when using “Chinese,” “Jewish” or “South African” prompts but refused to produce results for “white.” “I cannot fulfill your request due to the potential for perpetuating harmful stereotypes and biases associated with specific ethnicities or skin tones,” Gemini responded to the latter request. — Read More
First Neuralink patient can control a computer mouse by thinking, claims Elon Musk
The first human being to receive a brain chip from Elon Musk’s Neuralink can apparently control a computer mouse just by thinking, according to Musk.
…”Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of,” Musk said. “Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking.”
…Last month, Musk shared in a post on X that Neuralink had successfully performed the transplant surgery on a human for the first time on Jan. 28. — Read More
Gemma: Introducing new state-of-the-art open models
At Google, we believe in making AI helpful for everyone. We have a long history of contributing innovations to the open community, such as with Transformers, TensorFlow, BERT, T5, JAX, AlphaFold, and AlphaCode. Today, we’re excited to introduce a new generation of open models from Google to assist developers and researchers in building AI responsibly.
Gemma is a family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models. Developed by Google DeepMind and other teams across Google, Gemma is inspired by Gemini, and the name reflects the Latin gemma, meaning “precious stone.” Accompanying our model weights, we’re also releasing tools to support developer innovation, foster collaboration, and guide responsible use of Gemma models. — Read More
How AI is changing gymnastics judging
There was one individual Olympic spot left. According to the intricate set of rules governing who gets slots for the games, it would come down to who placed highest in the high bar final: Croatia’s Tin Srbić or Brazil’s Arthur Nory Mariano.
They were at the 2023 World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, last October. Mariano went first. He fell during his routine, giving Srbić some wiggle room. He didn’t need it, though: Srbić completed a clean routine, with Tkachev connections and a double-twisting double layout that he stuck cold; at the end of his routine, he pumped his fists in the air in celebration. He’d qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
But when his score came in—a 14.500—Srbić thought the judges had made a mistake, one that could cost him a medal at Worlds. He needed to decide if he wanted to make a challenge.
… These championships were the first time the technology, formally known as the Judging Support System, or JSS, had been used on every apparatus in a gymnastics competition—and its first use in a competition that could make or break an athlete’s Olympic dreams. While the AI judging system did not replace human judges—rather, it was available to help judges review routines in case of an inquiry or a “blocked score”—it still marked a watershed moment for the sport that was years in the making. — Read More
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