Survey on generative AI highlights the growing impact of new technologies on creative careers, and an urgent need for ethical development that works within copyright laws
Throughout January 2024, we ran a survey of our 12,500 members and other authors, receiving nearly 800 responses on respondents’ experiences of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and their views and concerns about the future impact on creative careers.
The findings demonstrate not only the deep uncertainty about the future role of generative AI in the profession, but also the impact it is already having on careers and livelihoods. — Read More
Monthly Archives: April 2024
Is AI a platform shift or a paradigm shift? With Benedict Evans
Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?
Researchers are using generative AI and other techniques to teach robots new skills—including tasks they could perform in homes.
… What separates this new crop of robots is their software. Instead of the traditional painstaking planning and training, roboticists have started using deep learning and neural networks to create systems that learn from their environment on the go and adjust their behavior accordingly. At the same time, new, cheaper hardware, such as off-the-shelf components and robots like Stretch, is making this sort of experimentation more accessible.
Broadly speaking, there are two popular ways researchers are using AI to train robots: reinforcement learning, an AI technique that allows systems to improve through trial and error, to get robots to adapt their movements in new environments, and imitation learning, models learn to perform tasks by, for example, imitating the actions of a human teleoperating a robot or using a VR headset to collect data on a robot. — Read More
Klarna CEO says AI can do the job of 700 workers. But job replacement isn’t the biggest issue.
Fintech company Klarna, which powers e-commerce transactions for some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including Expedia, Macy’s and Nike, is at the forefront of AI adoption. It has integrated artificial intelligence across the company, most notably with an AI chatbot that it recently said does the equivalent work of 700 customer service agents. Klarna, which employs roughly 4,000 people, recently released statistics that show how efficient and effective the tool has been, wading into the thick of sensitive and high-stakes debates about the role of generative AI in business, how humans interact with it and its implications for the future of work. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski explains why he is so transparent about AI’s capabilities, and what concerns him most about the new technology. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. — Read More
#augmented-intelligenceAmazon CEO: “We’re deeply investing” in generative AI
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed details about the company’s investments in generative AI in his annual shareholder letter published Thursday morning.
…[T]here are three distinct layers in the GenAI stack, each of which is gigantic, and each of which we’re deeply investing,” Jassy writes.
The “bottom layer” of Amazon’s AI strategy is to help developers and companies train models and produce predictions. Amazon says having its own custom AI training and inference chips will bring down costs for customers.
A “middle layer” serves companies that want to use their own data to customize existing foundational models and gain security and other features to build and scale generative AI applications.
The “top layer” is where Amazon builds generative AI applications for its own consumer businesses. For example, there’s “Rufus,” Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant, and the Amazon Web Services “Amazon Q.”
Read More
Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro can now hear
Google’s update to Gemini 1.5 Pro gives the model ears. The model can now listen to uploaded audio files and churn out information from things like earnings calls or audio from videos without the need to refer to a written transcript.
During its Google Next event, Google also announced it’ll make Gemini 1.5 Pro available to the public for the first time through its platform to build AI applications, Vertex AI. Gemini 1.5 Pro was first announced in February. — Read More
New Google and Intel Chips
Google is stepping up its competition with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip market by developing custom hardware solutions.
Google has unveiled a new lineup of custom chips designed to bolster its position in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) market. The tech giant introduced the Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and an Arm-based central processing unit (CPU) named Axion, showcasing its commitment to innovate in AI hardware.
While the TPUs offer a competitive alternative to Nvidia’s AI chips, they are exclusively accessible through Google Cloud and unavailable for direct purchase. — Read More
Meta confirms that its Llama 3 open source LLM is coming in the next month
At an event in London on Tuesday, Meta confirmed that it plans an initial release of Llama 3 — the next generation of its large language model used to power generative AI assistants — within the next month.
This confirms a report published on Monday by The Information that Meta was getting close to launch.
“Within the next month, actually less, hopefully in a very short period of time, we hope to start rolling out our new suite of next-generation foundation models, Llama 3,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs. — Read More
AMAZON GIVES ANTHROPIC $2.75 BILLION SO IT CAN SPEND IT ON AWS XPUS
If Microsoft has the half of OpenAI that didn’t leave, then Amazon and its Amazon Web Services cloud division needs the half of OpenAI that did leave – meaning Anthropic. And that means Amazon needs to pony up a lot more money than Google, which has also invested in Anthropic but which also has its own Gemini LLM, if it hopes to have more leverage – and get the GPU system rentals in return.
We live in strange times. … Microsoft investing $13 billion in OpenAI – with a $10 billion promise last year – and now Amazon making good on its promise to invest $4 billion in Anthropic by kicking in the second traunch of $2.75 billion is a brilliant way to buy a stake in any AI startup. You get access to the startup’s models, you get a sense of their roadmap, and you get to be the first one to commercialize their products at scale.
As we have pointed out before, … [t]here is a danger of this looking like roundtripping, where the money just moves from the IT giant to the AI startup as an investment and then back again to the IT giant. (This kind of thing used to happen in the IT channel from time to time.) It would be enlightening to see how these deals are really structured. But there is a likelihood that they are really minority stakes in the AI startups for enormous sums and an actual exchange of goods and services on the part of both parties. — Read More
How Hollywood’s Most-Feared AI Video Tool Works — and What Filmmakers May Worry About
As generative artificial intelligence marches on the entertainment industry, Hollywood is taking stock of the tech and its potential to be incorporated into the filmmaking process. No tool has piqued the town’s interest more than OpenAI’s Sora, which was unveiled in February as capable of creating hyperrealistic clips in response to a text prompt of just a couple of sentences. In recent days, the Sam Altman-led firm released a series of videos from beta testers who are providing feedback to improve the tech. The Hollywood Reporter spoke with some of those Sora testers about what it can, and can’t, really do.
… [Walter] Woodman [of Shy Kids, a Toronto-based production company,] says he considers Sora another tool in his arsenal, similar to Adobe After Effects or Premiere. “It’s something where you bring your energy and your talents and you work with it to make something,” he explains. “There’s a lot of hot air about just how powerful this is and how this is going to replace everything and how we don’t need to do anything. That’s really undervaluing what a story is and what the components of a story are and what the role of storytellers is.” — Read More
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