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☆ The AI world's most valuable resource is running out, and it's scrambling to find an alternative: 'fake' data
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-09 | by ( Hasan Chowdhury | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has argued that AI models should eventually produce synthetic data good enough to train themselves effectively. As the well of usable human-generated data dries up, more companies look into using synthetic data. Rather than being pulled from the real world, synthetic data is generated by AI systems that have been trained on real-world data. Synthetic data may help offer some effective "countertuning" to the biases produced by real-world data, too. 'Habsburg AI'While the AI industry found some advantages in synthetic data, it faces serious issues it can't afford to ignore, such as fears synthetic data can wreck AI models.

Persons: —, that's, Sam Altman, Gary Marcus, It's, Nathan Lambert, Gretel, SynthLabs, Meta, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, LLMs, Sadowski, Alexandr Wang, AlphaGeometry, Marcus Organizations: Service, Google, Business, Oxford, Gartner, New York University, Allen Institute, AI, Nvidia, Meta's, Anadolu, Getty, Rush, Microsoft, Monash University Locations: Cambridge, Habsburg

☆ Artificial Intelligence Gives Weather Forecasters a New Edge
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-29 | by ( William J. Broad | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +13 min

Artificial Intelligence Gives Weather Forecasters a New Edge The brainy machines are predicting global weather patterns with new speed and precision, doing in minutes and seconds what once took hours. GraphCast GraphCast Miss. specialist at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the agency that got upstaged on its Beryl forecast. Even so, reliable weather forecasts turn out to be extraordinarily hard to achieve. As a result, weather forecasts can fail after a few days, and sometimes after a few hours.

Persons: Hurricane Beryl, GraphCast, Beryl MEXICO, Hurricane Beryl Miss ., William B, Davis, ”, Matthew Chantry, Christopher S, Amy McGovern, Dr, McGovern, “, Brandon Bell, Maria Molina, Bretherton, Sir Richard Friend, Rémi Lam, GraphCast’s, Lam, . Lam, Beryl, Hurricane Lee, DeepMind’s GraphCast, . Chantry, Chantry, Paul G, Allen, ‘, we’ve, Molina, Jamie Rhome, Rhome, Mr, There’s Organizations: A.I, Beryl MEXICO CUBA European, JAMAICA European, Beryl MEXICO CUBA JAMAICA Hurricane, National Hurricane Center, Hurricane, NOAA, European Press Agency, Google, European Center, University of Washington, University of Oklahoma, University of Maryland, Royal Academy of Engineering, Cambridge University, Getty, Nvidia, Huawei, Fudan University, Allen Institute for A.I, Microsoft Locations: Va . Ky, N.C, Okla, ., Ala . Texas, Texas, Fla, Va, Kan, Mo, Ky, Beryl MEXICO CUBA, VENEZUELA COLOMBIA, Tenn, Okla ., Beryl MEXICO CUBA JAMAICA, Caribbean, Mexico, Houston, London, DeepMind, Land , Texas, A.I, Freeport , Texas, England, Canada, Nova Scotia, China, Corpus Christi , Texas, Miami

☆ AI has racist tendencies. Scientists and founders are trying to fix it.
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-20 | by ( Monica Melton | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

The police had used a facial-recognition AI program that identified her as the suspect based on an old mugshot. AdvertisementThe Detroit Police Department said that it restricts the use of the facial-recognition AI program to violent crimes and that matches it makes are just investigation leads. AdvertisementThe study also found that in a hypothetical murder trial, the AI models were more likely to propose the death penalty for an AAE speaker. A novel proposalOne reason for these failings is that the people and companies building AI aren't representative of the world that AI models are supposed to encapsulate. Bardlavens leads a team that aims to ensure equity is considered and baked into Adobe AI tools.

Persons: —, Woodruff, who's, Ivan Land, Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, Valentin Hofmann, OpenAI's, AAE, Geoffrey Hinton, Christopher Lafayette, Udezue, OpenAI, Google's, John Pasmore, Latimer, Buolamwini, Timothy Bardlavens, Microsoft Bing, Microsoft Bardlavens, Bardlavens, Esther Dyson, Dyson, Arturo Villanueva, I'd, Villanueva, Alza, We're, Andrew Mahon, Alza's Organizations: Service, Detroit, Business, Court of Michigan, Detroit Police Department, Microsoft, IBM, Allen Institute, AI, Dartmouth College, Center for Education Statistics, Big Tech, Udezue, Meta, Google, Tech, Companies, Adobe Locations: That's, American, Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, Spanish

☆ An A.I. Researcher Takes On Election Deepfakes
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( Cade Metz | Tiffany Hsu | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For nearly 30 years, Oren Etzioni was among the most optimistic of artificial intelligence researchers. But in 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. And by the middle of last year, he said, he was distressed that A.I.-generated deepfakes would swing a major election. He founded a nonprofit, TrueMedia.org in January, hoping to fight that threat. The tools, available from the TrueMedia.org website to anyone approved by the nonprofit, are designed to detect fake and doctored images, audio and video.

Persons: Oren Etzioni, Etzioni Organizations: University of Washington, Allen Institute for A.I, TrueMedia.org

☆ Google just can't seem to catch a break
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-23 | by ( Hasan Chowdhury | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The search giant announced a major upgrade to its AI model Gemini. Google under fireGoogle's big problem came after Gemini users started to report problems this week with its image-generation feature. For Google, the moment is one that casts a shadow over real advances it has made in AI to keep it neck-and-neck with competitors. In part, it's because the Gemini image generation blunder really is as bad as people say. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has previously said he feels "very comfortable" about where the company is with its AI mission.

Persons: —, Gemma, Gemini, Elon, Musk, Nathan Lambert, OpenAI's, haven't, It's, Sundar Pichai Organizations: Service, Microsoft, Business, Google, Gemini, Allen Institute, AI

☆ An Industry Insider Drives an Open Alternative to Big Tech’s A.I.
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-19 | by ( Steve Lohr | More About Steve Lohr | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Ali Farhadi is no tech rebel. The Allen Institute has begun an ambitious initiative to build a freely available A.I. In an industry process called open source, other researchers will be allowed to scrutinize and use this new system and the data fed into it. The stance adopted by the Allen Institute, an influential nonprofit research center in Seattle, puts it squarely on one side of a fierce debate over how open or closed new A.I. Would opening up so-called generative A.I., which powers chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, lead to more innovation and opportunity?

Persons: Ali Farhadi, Farhadi, Google’s Bard Organizations: University of Washington, Apple, Allen Institute, AI, Google Locations: Seattle

☆ Ambitious research yields new atlas of human brain cells
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-12 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

The human brain is complex in terms of its utility - sensing, moving, reading, writing, speaking, thinking and more - and its cellular diversity. The research identified 3,313 cell types, roughly 10 times more than previously known, and the complete set of genes used by each cell type while also mapping their regional distribution in the brain. "The brain cell atlas as a whole provides the cellular substrate for everything that we can do as human beings," said neuroscientist Ed Lein of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, one of the researchers. The various cell types have distinct properties and are likely affected differently in disease, Lein said. "We are only at the very beginning of delineating the complexity of the human brain," said another of the researchers, Bing Ren, director of the University of California, San Diego Center for Epigenomics.

Persons: Denis Balibouse, Ed Lein, Lein, Trygve Bakken, Bing Ren, Will Dunham, Rosalba O'Brien Organizations: Belle Idee University, REUTERS, Rights, U.S, government's National Institutes of Health, Census Network, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Allen, University of California, San Diego Center for Epigenomics, Thomson Locations: Neuropsychiatry, Chene, Bourg, Geneva, Seattle

☆ 'Data leverage' and the Harry Potter test: How much is a single book worth to a giant AI model?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( Alistair Barr | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

This month, serious AI researchers waded into this debate with 2 papers that seek to address various aspects of the situation. AdvertisementAdvertisementThe Harry Potter testThen the researchers went deep into the weeds, using J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books to see if individual pieces of data influence AI model performance. The other datastore excluded all 7 Harry Potter books. Then they repeated the exercise, excluding the second Harry Potter book, then the third, and so on. Important legal benefitsHelping J.K. Rowling make even more money from her Harry Potter books was not the goal of the SILO study, though.

Persons: Nick Vincent, Vincent, what's, Benedict Evans, I've, I'm, Harry Potter, Rowling's Harry Potter, LLMs, there's, Rowling, Oren Etzoni, Etzioni Organizations: Morning, Simon Fraser University, University of Washington, UC Berkeley, Allen Institute, AI Locations: Vancouver, Google's, Seattle

☆ The world's most-powerful AI model suddenly got 'lazier' and 'dumber.' A radical redesign of OpenAI's GPT-4 could be behind the decline in performance.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( Alistair Barr | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Lately, the giant AI model has become faster, but performance has declined. The world's most-powerful AI model has become, well, less powerful. It's considered the most-powerful AI model available broadly and is multimodal, which means it can understand images as well as text inputs. They think OpenAI is creating several smaller GPT-4 models that act similarly to the large model but are less expensive to run. This week, several AI experts posted what they claimed were details of GPT-4's architecture on Twitter.

Persons: OpenAI's, Peter Yang, I've, Frazier MacLeod, Christi Kennedy, OpenAI, ChatGPT, It's, Sharon Zhou, Theseus, Zhou, Yam, Semianalysis, George Hotz, Soumith Chintala, Oren Etzioni, Greg Brockman, " Brockman, Lilian Weng Organizations: Morning, Twitter, Roblox, Microsoft, Meta, Allen Institute, AI Locations: GPT

☆ Uncensored Chatbots Provoke a Fracas Over Free Speech
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-02 | by ( Stuart A. Thompson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Several uncensored and loosely moderated chatbots have sprung to life in recent months under names like GPT4All and FreedomGPT. Many were created for little or no money by independent programmers or teams of volunteers, who successfully replicated the methods first described by A.I. Most groups work from existing language models, only adding extra instructions to tweak how the technology responds to prompts. The uncensored chatbots offer tantalizing new possibilities. Independent A.I.

Persons: A.I, ”, Oren Etzioni, “ They’re Organizations: Big Tech, A.I, University of Washington, Allen Institute for A.I

☆ How Could A.I. Destroy Humanity?
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-10 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“Hypothetical is such a polite way of phrasing what I think of the existential risk talk,” said Oren Etzioni, the founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI, a research lab in Seattle. Are there signs A.I. But researchers are transforming chatbots like ChatGPT into systems that can take actions based on the text they generate. In theory, this is a way for AutoGPT to do almost anything online — retrieve information, use applications, create new applications, even improve itself. “People are actively trying to build systems that self-improve,” said Connor Leahy, the founder of Conjecture, a company that says it wants to align A.I.

Persons: ”, Oren Etzioni, Connor Leahy Organizations: Allen Institute, AI Locations: Seattle, AutoGPT

☆ Allen Institute teams up with AWS to build first-ever map of the brain
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-08 | by ( Ashley Capoot | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

AWS on Wednesday announced its technology will support the Allen Institute as it builds a map of the human brain, called the Brain Knowledge Platform. To build the new platform, the Allen Institute is using single cell genomics technologies. The Allen Institute is a nonprofit research institute based in Seattle. As such, the Allen Institute is leveraging AWS' cloud computing and machine learning to standardize and consolidate complex brain data into one place. The Allen Institute will work to build the Brain Knowledge Platform over the next five years.

Persons: Dr, Ed Lein, It's, Lein, Rowland Illing Organizations: Genome Project, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Amazon Web Services, Wednesday, Allen Institute, Allen Locations: Washington ,, Seattle

For now, tech companies seem to view both trust and safety and AI ethics as cost centers. That included all but one member of the company's 17-person AI ethics team, according to Rumman Chowdhury, who served as director of Twitter's machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team. Chowdhury referenced an initiative in July 2021, when Twitter's AI ethics team led what was billed as the industry's first-ever algorithmic bias bounty competition. Still, sources familiar with the matter said that following the layoffs, the company has fewer people working on misinformation issues. watch nowFor those who've gained expertise in AI ethics, trust and safety and related content moderation, the employment picture looks grim.

☆ Sam Altman is tech’s next household name — if we survive the killer robots
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-17 | by ( David Ingram | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +11 min

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, walks from lunch during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 6, 2022, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Sam Altman may be tech's next household name, but many Americans probably haven't heard of him. To anyone outside San Francisco, Altman would probably seem like just another young tech CEO. That worldview flared up into controversy in 2017 when Altman wrote a blog post criticizing political correctness, saying tech entrepreneurs were leaving San Francisco over it. "I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco," he wrote.

☆ White House Issues ‘Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights’
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-04 | by ( Angus Loten | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +5 min

The White House on Tuesday issued guidelines aimed at safeguarding personal data from misuse in artificial-intelligence algorithms that drive hiring, lending and other business decisions. The guidelines, which the Biden administration described as a “blueprint for an AI bill of rights,” are nonbinding and don’t include enforcement measures. They also fall short of the European Union’s landmark privacy regulation that has forced global technology companies to change how they collect data, among other things. Still, some technology leaders said the White House blueprint could lead to heavy-handed regulation that might risk putting U.S. businesses at a disadvantage. “If implemented properly, the bill could reduce AI misuse and yet support beneficial uses of AI in medicine, driving, enterprise productivity, and more,” Mr. Etzioni said.

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