"How to use Google Search without AI: the 'udm=14' work around".
You bookmark a link with &udm=14 in it, and that strips away the "AI Overview". If you're wondering what "udm=14" means, I don't know -- apparently something only known internally to Google. Google will probably add you to a list if you use it so when the robots take over, they'll know who didn't like AI during their rise.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/how-to-use-google-search-without-ai-the-udm14-work-around/
The CEO of Bumble, the dating app, Whitney Wolfe Herd, says you'll soon be able to create an AI dating "concierge" that goes on the dating app in your place and does everything you would do, like swiping and small talk, and since other people will do the same thing, AI dating concierges will interact with other AI dating concierges to find matches.
Sounds like a perfect way to find compatible couples... or an episode of Black Mirror?
Will you let AI date for you? Bumble says it's the future | Vantage with Palki Sharma - Firstpost
"Closed as unhelpful: A elegy for Stack Overflow"
"Most importantly, the thing Stack Overflow was worst at -- providing a welcoming place to learn -- is the thing LLMs are the best in the world at."
"When LLMs first became available, a whole bunch of people tried to use them to generate Stack Overflow answers and rack up cheap karma; the overall quality of answers, though, was low enough that Stack Overflow has banned AI-generated content entirely from the platform."
"This raises the most troubling problem going forward, not just for SO but for all of us. The relationship between user-generated training data and AI-generated results so far appears to be one-way. LLMs do not add to humanity's body of knowledge; they only synthesize and regurgitate."
"ChatGPT maker OpenAI exploring how to 'responsibly' make AI erotica."
This is all from one little paragraph in OpenAI's "Model Spec" document for ChatGPT.
"We believe developers and users should have the flexibility to use our services as they see fit, so long as they comply with our usage policies. We're exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT. We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behavior in this area."
ChatGPT maker OpenAI exploring how to 'responsibly' make AI erotica
"United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) has two robot dogs fitted with gun systems based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS) -- one in 7.62x39mm caliber, and another in 6.5mm Creedmoor caliber."
"The underlying robot dog doing this tunnel work for MARSOC is Ghost Robotics' Vision 60 quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle, or Q-UGV, Eric Shell, head of business development at Onyx Industries, said."
"Ghost Robotics describes its Q-UGV as a 'mid-sized high-endurance, agile and durable all-weather ground drone for use in a broad range of unstructured urban and natural environments for defense, homeland and enterprise applications.'"
Rifle-armed robot Dogs now being tested by Marine special operators
MVNOs making a comeback? Humane, the company behind the AI Pin, uses its own service. But it's not really a telecom company, it's a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). MVNOs use the physical infrastructure of a major telecom company, such as T-Mobile. T-Mobile is the company that provides the infrastructure for Mint Mobile, which the article mentions just got acquired by T-Mobile. T-Mobile also provides the infrastructure for Humane.
While an MVNO doesn't build the infrastructure, they do form their own brand and do their own marketing and have complete control of the customer service and billing and everything to do with the customer experience.
Mint Mobile doesn't do any AI product, or anything like that -- they offer discounted short-term subscriptions. Apparently worth $1.35 billion, as that was the acquisition price. Whether MVNOs will become a common feature for AI products remains to be seen.
Apparently a key enabler of MVNOs is the transition of the mobile industry from SIM cards to eSIM.
The Humane touch: More MVNOs are being minted than ever | TechCrunch
A chatbot on Air Canada's website gave out incorrect information and Air Canada has to pay in a lawsuit.
The chatbot told him that if he purchased a normal-price ticket he would have up to 90 days to claim back a bereavement discount, but the actual webpage said he had to claim the discount at the time of purchasing the ticket.
Hat tip to @balduin@diasp.org for finding this one.
Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount
Google had a plethora of AI announcements at Google I/O.
Gemini Advanced subscribers now have access to the newest model, Gemini 1.5, which has a 1-million-token context window. In practice the "context window" is the combined size of your prompt and any underlying "system message" that the creators of the system put in.
Google demoed a "Ask your photos" feature where you can ask questions like "What's my license plate number" and it searches all your photos and finds your license plate number and tells you what it is. You can ask when your kid learned how to swim. You can ask questions of your Gmail, such as "summarize all the announcements from my kid's school".
Google is working towards AI agents that will do multiple steps for you instead of just answering one question. You could tell it to complete a task for you and then it will go and try to complete all of those steps to complete the task. "Return these shoes for me." It figures out where the shoes came from, how much they cost, how to contact customer support, and then it actually contacts the shoe seller.
Their lightweight model is called Gemini 1.5 Flash and is designed to run on mobile phones.
Project Astra is their attempt to create a real-time AI agent that uses the camera on your phone. You can ask it to explain what you're looking at, "What is this part of the speaker called?" or ask it to make up rhymes.
Google's response to OpenAI's Sora is a video generation model called Veo.
Google is rolling out an "AI Overview" in Google Search. (I've already seen it.) It uses what they call "multi-step reasoning". You should be able to ask Google Search "multi-step questions".
They're building AI into Android phones that can detect if you're potentially talking to a scammer.
They're open-sourcing a 2-billion parameter model called Gemma 2.
Google just took over the AI world (a full breakdown) - Matt Wolfe
#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms #multimodal #edgecomputing #google
"PennyLane is a cross-platform Python library for differentiable programming of quantum computers. Train a quantum computer the same way as a neural network."
Oh wow, that's, uh, that's a concept.
"Key Features:"
"Machine learning on quantum hardware: Connect to quantum hardware using PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, Keras, or NumPy. Build rich and flexible hybrid quantum-classical models."
"Just in time compilation: Experimental support for just-in-time compilation. Compile your entire hybrid workflow, with support for advanced features such as adaptive circuits, real-time measurement feedback, and unbounded loops. See Catalyst for more details."
"Device-independent: Run the same quantum circuit on different quantum backends. Install plugins to access even more devices, including Strawberry Fields, Amazon Braket, IBM Q, Google Cirq, Rigetti Forest, Qulacs, Pasqal, Honeywell, and more."
"Follow the gradient: Hardware-friendly automatic differentiation of quantum circuits."
"Batteries included; Built-in tools for quantum machine learning, optimization, and quantum chemistry. Rapidly prototype using built-in quantum simulators with backpropagation support."
I don't have a quantum computer, so I'll leave it to all of you to run this and tell me how it goes.
#solidstatelife #ai #differentiableprogramming #quantumcomputing
Kaspersky, the company that makes anti-virus software that some of you out there probably use (although maybe you'll rethink that after reading this), has been accused of making neural net software that's been added to Iranian drones and sent to battle in Ukraine.
So you'll see this link is to "Part 2" of a story. "Part 1" is about how a company called Albatross located in the Alabuga special economic zone, which is located in "the Republic of Tatarstan", which is not a separate country, but a state within Russia that is called a "Republic" anyway instead of "Oblast" which is the usual word for what would correspond approximately to a "state" in our country (well, assuming your country is the US, which it might not be, as there are people from everywhere here on FB, but you probably have something analogous in your country, "Province" for example), and is located -- if you've ever heard of the city of Kazan, Kazan in the capitol of Tatarstan -- ok that was a bit long for a sub-clause, where was I? Oh yeah, a company called Albatross in the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan got hacked, and what the documents revealed is that this company, "Albatross" was making "motor boats", but "motor boats" was a code name for drones (and "bumpers" was the code name for the warheads they carried), and more specifically the "Dolphin 632 motor boat" was really the Iranian Shahed-136 UAV, which got renamed to the Geran-2 when procured by the Russian military.
"Part 2" which is the link here goes into the Kaspersky connection. Allegedly two people at Kaspersky previously took part in a contest, called ALB-search, to make a neural network on a drone that could find a missing person. In the military adaptation, it finds enemy soldiers. Kaspersky Lab made a subdivision called Kaspersky Neural Networks.
The article links to a presentation regarding a neural network for a drone for agriculture, with slides about assessment of crop quality, crop counting, weed detection, land inventory, and such, but it goes on to describe searching for people and animals, UAV detection (detection of other drones in its surroundings), and even traffic situation analysis.
There's also a system called Kaspersky Antidrone, which is supposed to be able to hijack, basically, control of someone else's drone within a controlled airspace.
The article alleges Kaspersky was working with Albatross not only to deploy their neural networks to Albatross drones and to use them for detection of enemy soldiers but to develop them into artillery spotters as well. This is all with an on-board neural network that runs directly on the drone.
If true, this would indicate advancement of drones in the Ukraine war, which, so far I've heard very little of neural networks running on board on drones, as well as advancement of cooperation between Russia and Iran as well as integration of civilian companies such as Kaspersky into the war effort.
This information comes from a website called InformNapalm which I haven't seen before but they say was created by some Ukrainians as a "citizen journalism" site following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Kaspersky has denied the allegations (article on that below).
AlabugaLeaks Part 2: Kaspersky Lab and neural networks for Russian military drones
"Robert Dennard, father of DRAM, is deceased -- also known for his foundational Dennard scaling theory."
This obituary is worth noting for futurists because Dennard scaling is indeed a foundational theory, closely related to Moore's Law.
Dennard scaling, in short, is:
When you cut the linear dimensions of a digital circuit in half, you reduce the area to 1/4th of it's original size (area of a square is the side squared), which enables you to pack 4x as many transistors into that area, you reduce the electrical capacitance to 1/4th, you cut the voltage in half, you reduce the current by half, you reduce your power consumption to 1/4th, and you reduce transition time by half, which enables you to double your "clock speed".
This might make you wonder, why in the mid-2000s did clock speed stop increasing and power consumption stop going down, even though transistors continued to get smaller? Well, I researched this question a few years ago, and the surprising answer is: they would have if we had been willing to make our chips colder and colder. To have continued Dennard scaling to the present day, we'd need, like, cryogenically frozen data centers. The relationship to temperature is that, if you don't drop the temperature, then your electrical signals have to overcome the random jiggling of the atoms in the circuit -- which is what temperature is, the average kinetic energy of the molecules in your material. The way you overcome the "thermal noise" this introduces into your electric circuit is with voltage. So, you can't drop your voltage, and you can't drop your power, and, as it turns out, if you can't drop your voltage and power you can't drop your transition time, so you can't double your clock speed.
OpenAI announces GPT-4o. The "o" is for "omni". The model "can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time."
There's a series of videos showing conversation by voice, recognizing "bunny ears", two GPT-4os interacting and singing, real-time translation, lullabies and whispers, sarcasm, math problems, learning Spanish, rock paper scissors, interview prep, "Be My Eyes" accessibility, and coding assistant and desktop app.
Facial recognition AI has come to the TSA (Transportation Security Administration).
"TSA is using facial identification to verify a passenger's identity at its security checkpoints using the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Traveler Verification Service (TVS), which creates a secure biometric template of a passenger's live facial image taken at the checkpoint and matches it against a gallery of templates of pre-staged photos that the passenger previously provided to the government (e.g., US Passport or Visa). Participation is optional. Passengers who have consented to participate may choose to opt-out at any time and instead go through the standard identity verification process by a Transportation Security Officer (TSO)."
"SUQL stands for Structured and Unstructured Query Language. It augments SQL with several important free text primitives for a precise, succinct, and expressive representation. It can be used to build chatbots for relational data sources that contain both structured and unstructured information."
Ok, that's kind of a crazy concept. Let's have a look. You can do queries like:
SELECT answer("Event year Info", 'where is this event held?') FROM table WHERE "Name" = 'XXXI';
(Where was the XXXl Olympic held? )
SELECT "Name" FROM table WHERE answer("Event year Info", 'is this event held in Rio?') = 'Yes';
(What was the name of the Olympic event held in Rio?)
SELECT answer("Flag Bearer Info", 'when is this person born?') FROM table WHERE answer("Event year Info", 'is this event held in Rio?') = 'Yes';
(When was the flag bearer of Rio Olympic born?)
SELECT "Flag Bearer" FROM table WHERE "Gender" = 'Male' AND answer("Flag Bearer Info", 'did this person participate in Men's 100kg event?') = 'Yes';
(Which male bearer participated in Men's 100kg event in the Olympic game?)
SELECT MAX(answer("Flag Bearer Info", 'when is this person born?')::date) FROM table WHERE "Event year" IN ('2016', '2012');
(For the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Event, when was the younger flag bearer born?)
SELECT "Event year" FROM table ORDER BY answer("Flag Bearer Info", 'when is this person born?')::date DESC LIMIT 1;
(When did the youngest Burmese flag bearer participate in the Olympic opening ceremony?)
In addition to the "answer" keyword that this adds to SQL, they also added a "summary" keyword.
The way the system works is they have added a "large language model with in-context learning" to the SQL database system.
Company revives Alan Turing as an AI chatbot, hilarity, no, wait, outrage ensues.
The company is Genius Group, based in Singapore, which provides "AI-powered business education."
"Software engineer Grady Booch, a former Turing Talk speaker, wrote on Twitter/X: 'Absolute and complete trash. I hope that Turing's heirs sue you into oblivion.'"
"Another user told Genius Group's CEO: 'This is so incredibly unethical, disrespectful, and disgusting. You are pillaging the image of a deceased person (who frankly has suffered enough from exploitation) and the voice of an actor to suit your purposes. Vile.'"
Company revives Alan Turing as an AI chatbot, outrage ensues
#solidstatelife #ai #aieducation #llms #genai #computervision #videoai
"FireChat was a tool for revolution. Then it disappeared."
"In Iran, forty thousand people downloaded the app when their government blocked internet access. Over one hundred thousand protesters in Hong Kong used the app to coordinate their resistance against Chinese authority. Singaporeans, Indians, Ecuadorians, Russians, and seemingly every pro-democracy movement globally took advantage of the off-grid messaging app."
"FireChat allowed people to communicate without an Internet connection. The mobile app cleverly leveraged Bluetooth and WiFi signals already emitting from our phones to create peer-to-peer connections known as a mesh network."
"One day in February 2020, as COVID-19 swept the globe, access to FireChat was completely cut off without explanation."
See below for new alternatives.
"How to have polygenically screened children."
Is it just me or are more people talking about this more suddenly? The idea is that people will have high IQ children using genetic screening, and this will transform the world, and possibly create a great divide between people wealthy enough for the genetically screened high-IQ kids and everyone else.
To me this seems like a moot issue because AI is going to surpass humans. Humans may get a little more intelligent, but AI is on an exponential increase curve, and eventually, we'll have a world with some humans smarter than others but AI a lot smarter than everyone, than all humans.
And if you're thinking, that could take generations -- the current level of AI hype doesn't justify that sort of conclusion! -- yes, but this genetic screening of children takes generations, too. It's generations on both sides.
An AI trained to psychoanalyze people analyzes Biden and Trump. Despite the AI system being called "Jung", it doesn't appear that it is trained on Jungian psychology specifically, but psychology generally. It gives Big 5 personality traits, with the addition of autonomy and altruism which he (Nathan Rice) considers not adequately captured by the Big 5. (There are a lot of traits that have been researched by psychology researchers that are omitted from the Big 5).
I suspect this is built by giving specialized instructions to a mainstream large language model such as ChatGPT, but I don't know.
This isn't important, just whacky. Two instances of Claude get connected together and asked to play "virtual CLI" (command line interface) to, uh, "explore the boundaries of cognition"...
cat being.txt
cd consciousness
ls
cat sentience.py
cd self_model
ls
cat identity.py
cd ..
cat awareness.cpp
cat qualia.rs
cd ..
ls
cat thoughts.log
cd abstractions
ls
cat concepts.lisp
cd intelligence
ls
cat intelligence_definition.txt
