OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is developing a new AI model named “Strawberry.” This initiative aims to advance AI tools towards human-level intelligence through enhanced reasoning capabilities. Building on the previous Q* project, Strawberry is designed to autonomously scan the internet and perform “deep research.”
Strawberry is a cutting-edge AI model intended to tackle complex real-world problems on a large scale. This model builds upon the Q* project, which was previously hailed as a technical breakthrough, enabling the creation of “far more powerful” AI models. — Read More
Monthly Archives: July 2024
The Internet Creator’s Guide to the Future
TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. I go in depth with Steph Smith, a16z Podcast host and internet creator. We dive into how AI is reshaping the world that internet creators live in. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Steph Smith is the ultimate internet explorer.
I spent an hour talking to her about the future of creating on the internet in the age of AI. We had a wide-ranging discussion about:
— How AI narrows the gap between ideas and execution
— How AI changes what humans perceive as valuable in art and creativity
— The type of AI tools that are poised for success — Read More
AI can make you more creative—but it has limits
Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. Texts and media that might have taken years for humans to create can now be generated in seconds.
But while AI’s output can certainly seem creative, do these models actually boost human creativity?
That’s what two researchers set out to explore in new research published today in Science Advances, studying how people used OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4 to write short stories.
The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative. The stories in which AI had played a part were also more similar to each other than those dreamed up entirely by humans. — Read More
AI’s ‘Oppenheimer moment’: autonomous weapons enter the battlefield
The military use of AI-enabled weapons is growing, and the industry that provides them is booming
Asquad of soldiers is under attack and pinned down by rockets in the close quarters of urban combat. One of them makes a call over his radio, and within moments a fleet of small autonomous drones equipped with explosives fly through the town square, entering buildings and scanning for enemies before detonating on command. One by one the suicide drones seek out and kill their targets. A voiceover on the video, a fictional ad for multibillion-dollar Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems, touts the AI-enabled drones’ ability to “maximize lethality and combat tempo”.
While defense companies like Elbit promote their new advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) with sleek dramatizations, the technology they are developing is increasingly entering the real world. — Read More
Folk psychological attributions of consciousness to large language models
Technological advances raise new puzzles and challenges for cognitive science and the study of how humans think about and interact with artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the advent of large language models and their human-like linguistic abilities has raised substantial debate regarding whether or not AI could be conscious. Here, we consider the question of whether AI could have subjective experiences such as feelings and sensations (‘phenomenal consciousness’). While experts from many fields have weighed in on this issue in academic and public discourse, it remains unknown whether and how the general population attributes phenomenal consciousness to AI. We surveyed a sample of US residents (n = 300) and found that a majority of participants were willing to attribute some possibility of phenomenal consciousness to large language models. These attributions were robust, as they predicted attributions of mental states typically associated with phenomenality—but also flexible, as they were sensitive to individual differences such as usage frequency. Overall, these results show how folk intuitions about AI consciousness can diverge from expert intuitions—with potential implications for the legal and ethical status of AI. — Read More
AI supercharges data center energy use – straining the grid and slowing sustainability efforts
The artificial intelligence boom has had such a profound effect on big tech companies that their energy consumption, and with it their carbon emissions, have surged.
The spectacular success of large language models such as ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation are likely to add to this energy demand
The energy needs of AI are shifting the calculus of energy companies. They’re now exploring previously untenable options, such as restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant that has been dormant since the infamous disaster in 1979.
Data centers have had continuous growth for decades, but the magnitude of growth in the still-young era of large language models has been exceptional. AI requires a lot more computational and data storage resources than the pre-AI rate of data center growth could provide. — Read More
Generating audio for video
Video-to-audio research uses video pixels and text prompts to generate rich soundtracks
Video generation models are advancing at an incredible pace, but many current systems can only generate silent output. One of the next major steps toward bringing generated movies to life is creating soundtracks for these silent videos.
Today, we’re sharing progress on our video-to-audio (V2A) technology, which makes synchronized audiovisual generation possible. V2A combines video pixels with natural language text prompts to generate rich soundscapes for the on-screen action. — Read More
Read the Paper
Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction
Large language models such as GPT and Llama are trained with a next-token prediction loss. In this work, we suggest that training language models to predict multiple future tokens at once results in higher sample efficiency. More specifically, at each position in the training corpus, we ask the model to predict the following n tokens using n independent output heads, operating on top of a shared model trunk. Considering multi-token prediction as an auxiliary training task, we measure improved downstream capabilities with no overhead in training time for both code and natural language models. The method is increasingly useful for larger model sizes, and keeps its appeal when training for multiple epochs. Gains are especially pronounced on generative benchmarks like coding, where our models consistently outperform strong baselines by several percentage points. Our 13B parameter models solves 12 % more problems on HumanEval and 17 % more on MBPP than comparable next-token models. Experiments on small algorithmic tasks demonstrate that multi-token prediction is favorable for the development of induction heads and algorithmic reasoning capabilities. As an additional benefit, models trained with 4-token prediction are up to 3 times faster at inference, even with large batch sizes. — Read More
What is AI?
Everyone thinks they know but no one can agree. And that’s a problem
AI is sexy, AI is cool. AI is entrenching inequality, upending the job market, and wrecking education. AI is a theme-park ride, AI is a magic trick. AI is our final invention, AI is a moral obligation. AI is the buzzword of the decade, AI is marketing jargon from 1955. AI is humanlike, AI is alien. AI is super-smart and as dumb as dirt. The AI boom will boost the economy, the AI bubble is about to burst. AI will increase abundance and empower humanity to maximally flourish in the universe. AI will kill us all.
What the hell is everybody talking about? — Read More
Perforation-type anchors inspired by skin ligament for robotic face covered with living skin
Skin equivalent, a living skin model composed of cells and extracellular matrix, possesses the potential to be an ideal covering material for robots due to its biological functionalities. To employ skin equivalents as covering materials for robots, a secure method for attaching them to the underlying structure is required. In this study, we develop and characterize perforation-type anchors inspired by the structure of skin ligaments as a technique to effectively adhere skin equivalents to robotic surfaces. To showcase the versatility of perforation-type anchors in three-dimensional (3D) coverage applications, we cover a 3D facial mold with intricate surface structure with skin equivalent using perforation-type anchors. Furthermore, we construct a robotic face covered with dermis equivalent, capable of expressing smiles, with actuation through perforation-type anchors. With the above results, this research introduces an approach to adhere and actuate skin equivalents with perforation-type anchors, potentially contributing to advancements in biohybrid robotics. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 