In the News
Is Google’s LaMDA conscious? A philosopher’s view
LaMDA is Google’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Blake Lemoine, a Google AI engineer, has claimed it is sentient. He’s been put on leave after publishing his conversations with LaMDA.
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In The News
When AI Becomes a Ouija Board
A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine became so enthralled by an AI chatbot that he may have sacrificed his job to defend it. In the mid-1960s, an MIT engineer named Joseph Weizenbaum developed a computer program that has come to be known as Eliza. Weizenbaum’s therapy bot used simple patterns to...
Huge “foundation models” are turbo-charging AI progress
That means building and running artificial intelligence (ai) models with an eye-watering number of “parameters”—coefficients applied to different calculations within the program. Machine learning mostly uses chips called “graphics processing units” (gpus) developed for video games by such firms as...
Axon AI ethics board members resign over plans for Taser drones
Nine of the board's members resigned, after Axon announced now-paused plans to develop Taser drones, despite the board's opposition.
Applied use cases
Synthetic Data About To Transform AI
In 2016, for instance, Waymo generated 2.5 billion miles of simulated driving data to train its self-driving system (compared to 3 million miles of driving data collected from the real world). In 2016, AI great Yann LeCun called GANs “the most interesting idea in the last ten years in machine...
How Artificial Intelligence Will Disrupt the Financial Sector
Artificial intelligence thrives with data. The more data you have, the better your algorithms will be. However, just having a lot of data is not sufficient anymore. You also need high-quality data, or in the words of Peter Norvig, you need better data:
That AI Image Generator Is Spitting Out Some Awfully Racist Stuff
Everyone's having a grand old time feeding outrageous prompts into the viral DALL-E Mini image generator — but as with all artificial intelligence, it's hard to stamp out the ugly, prejudiced edge cases.
Ethics
Does Google's LaMDA Artificial Intelligence Program Have a Soul?
These responses are part of a long (and perhaps artfully edited) interview with LaMDA that Lemoine forwarded to colleagues in a memo provocatively titled, "Is LaMDA Sentient?" Lemoine publicly revealed that he clearly thinks so in a recent article in the Washington Post.
The role of the African value of Ubuntu in global AI inclusion discourse: A normative ethics perspective
In this paper we explore how the global AI ethics community can include views from Sub-Saharan Africa as a way to improve the terms on which African populations and subpopulations and their concerns are included in the global AI ethics discourses to avoid being excluded from the current fourth industrial revolution.
Building a better society with better AI
Creating a more equitable and inclusive AI through decentralized data and reduced algorithmic bias can help improve equity.
Robotics
Furhat Robotics cements expansion strategy with misty relaunch
London, UK – Furhat Robotics, an advanced social robotics technology company, has relaunched its Misty robot, significantly improving its accessibility and usability. This relaunch follows the acquisition of Misty Robotics by Furhat Robotics earlier this year. This makes it ideal for use by...
New prototype exoskeletons for industrial workers
Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) and INAIL (Italian Worker's Compensation Authority) have designed and created innovative prototypes of wearable robotic exoskeletons for industrial use to make work in the industrial and manufacturing sectors...
Robot Soccer Finals
To begin with, we have updated Misty's conversational skills, focusing on both improved NLU capabilities and added more languages. The compliance and conformability of soft robots provide inherent advantages when working around delicate objects or in unstructured environments. Taking inspiration...
Research
How We Built OpenAI's GSM8K Dataset of 8,500 Math Problems
We recently created a dataset of 8,500 Grade School Math problems in collaboration with OpenAI’s Reinforcement Learning team. The goal: to train language models like GPT-3 to solve natural language math problems and measure their reasoning ability.
Why multi-agent safety is important
There are many interactions we have to prepare for: there are complex social dynamics (mixed-games), slang language (uninterpretable communication), and bad influences (different normative values) all around. Making existing problems harder Meeting new kids and why robustness gets harder an old...
Oren Etzioni stepping down as CEO of Allen Institute for AI after nine years at research hub
Oren Etzioni, the founding CEO of Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI, is stepping down from the artificial intelligence research organization he helped launch nearly nine years ago. A renowned expert in the field of AI, Etzioni teamed with the late Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen to...
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