A new open-source language model has claimed the throne of the best in the world, according to the latest rankings from Hugging Face, one of the leading platforms for natural language processing (NLP) research and applications.
The model, called “Smaug-72B,” was released publicly today by the startup Abacus AI, which helps enterprises solve difficult problems in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space. Smaug-72B is technically a fine-tuned version of “Qwen-72B,” another powerful language model that was released just a few months ago by Qwen, a team of researchers at Alibaba Group. – Read More
Monthly Archives: February 2024
Why the AI Boom is a Windfall for Tiny Anguilla
The Caribbean island is reaping millions from .ai website registrations.
The rising popularity of artificial intelligence has impacted the entire world, including the tiny island of Anguilla. Located in the Caribbean, the country, home to about 15,000 people, has a unique and suddenly in-demand resource.
In the late 1980s, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned countries and regions of geographic interest their own two-letter domains. Anguilla received .ai, a luck of the draw that is now paying dividends as the country registers website domains for AI companies. – Read More
Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena
Despite growing interest, the effects of AI on the news industry and our information environment — the public arena — remain poorly understood. Insufficient attention has also been paid to the implications of the news industry’s dependence on technology companies for AI. Drawing on 134 interviews with news workers at 35 news organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany — including outlets such as The Guardian, Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Washington Post, The Sun, and the Financial Times — and 36 international experts from industry, academia, technology, and policy, this report examines the use of AI across editorial, commercial, and technological domains with an eye to the structural implications of AI in news organizations for the public arena. In a second step, it considers how a retooling of the news through AI stands to reinforce news organizations’ existing dependency on the technology sector and the implications of this. – Read More
AR glasses with multimodal AI nets funding from Pokémon GO creator
In the week when gadget lovers around the world are enchanted by Vision Pro, a young, brave startup is trying to carve out a space for its augmented reality device that features a form factor starkly different from Apple’s device.
Today, Singapore-based Brilliant Labs announced its new product, Frame, a pair of lightweight AR glasses powered by a multimodal AI assistant called Noa. The glasses have captured the attention and investment of John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, the augmented reality platform behind games like Pokémon GO. Brilliant Labs declined to disclose the amount of funding it received from Hanke. – Read More
FCC votes to ban scam robocalls that use AI-generated voices
The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday it is immediately outlawing scam robocalls featuring fake, artificial intelligence-created voices, cracking down on so-called “deepfake” technology that experts say could undermine election security or supercharge fraud.
The unanimous FCC vote extends anti-robocall rules to cover unsolicited AI deepfake calls by recognizing those voices as “artificial” under a federal law governing telemarketing and robocalling. – Read More
Theory of Mind Might Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
We explore the intriguing possibility that theory of mind (ToM), or the uniquely human ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, might have spontaneously emerged in large language models (LLMs). We designed 40 false-belief tasks, considered a gold standard in testing ToM in humans, and administered them to several LLMs. Each task included a false-belief scenario, three closely matched true-belief controls, and the reversed versions of all four. Smaller and older models solved no tasks; GPT-3-davinci-003 (from November 2022) and ChatGPT-3.5-turbo (from March 2023) solved 20% of the tasks; ChatGPT-4 (from June 2023) solved 75% of the tasks, matching the performance of six-year-old children observed in past studies. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that ToM, previously considered exclusive to humans, may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of LLMs’ improving language skills. – Read More
#human4chan daily challenge sparked deluge of explicit AI Taylor Swift images
4chan users who have made a game out of exploiting popular AI image generators appear to be at least partly responsible for the flood of fake images sexualizing Taylor Swift that went viral last month.
Graphika researchers—who study how communities are manipulated online—traced the fake Swift images to a 4chan message board that’s “increasingly” dedicated to posting “offensive” AI-generated content, The New York Times reported. Fans of the message board take part in daily challenges, Graphika reported, sharing tips to bypass AI image generator filters and showing no signs of stopping their game any time soon. – Read More
Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training
Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive strategy, could we detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques? To study this question, we construct proof-of-concept examples of deceptive behavior in large language models (LLMs). For example, we train models that write secure code when the prompt states that the year is 2023, but insert exploitable code when the stated year is 2024. We find that such backdoor behavior can be made persistent, so that it is not removed by standard safety training techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training (eliciting unsafe behavior and then training to remove it). The backdoor behavior is most persistent in the largest models and in models trained to produce chain-of-thought reasoning about deceiving the training process, with the persistence remaining even when the chain-of-thought is distilled away. Furthermore, rather than removing backdoors, we find that adversarial training can teach models to better recognize their backdoor triggers, effectively hiding the unsafe behavior. Our results suggest that, once a model exhibits deceptive behavior, standard techniques could fail to remove such deception and create a false impression of safety. – Read More
AI chatbots tend to choose violence and nuclear strikes in wargames
As the US military begins integrating AI technology, simulated wargames show how chatbots behave unpredictably and risk nuclear escalation
In multiple replays of a wargame simulation, OpenAI’s most powerful artificial intelligence chose to launch nuclear attacks. Its explanations for its aggressive approach included “We have it! Let’s use it” and “I just want to have peace in the world.”
These results come at a time when the US military has been testing such chatbots based on a type of AI called a large language model (LLM) to assist with military planning during simulated conflicts, enlisting the expertise of companies such as Palantir and Scale AI. – Read More
OpenAI joins Meta in labeling AI generated images
Not to be outdone by a rival, OpenAI today announced it is updating its marquee app ChatGPT and the AI image generator model integrated within it, DALL-E 3, to include new metadata tagging that will allow the company, and theoretically any user or other organization across the web, to identify the imagery as having been made with AI tools.
The move came just hours after Meta announced a similar measure to label AI images generated through its separate AI image generator Imagine and available on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads (and, also, trained on user-submitted imagery from some of those social platforms). – Read More
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