2-Min AI Newsletter #3

AI and machine learning are making incredible progress, with new applications and breakthroughs being announced almost daily. In this edition of our newsletter, we'll share some of the latest research news related to AI, machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision.

???? ?? Some of the latest research highlights?

?????No, Google's AI is not sentient

Tech companies are constantly hyping the capabilities of their ever-improving artificial intelligence. But Google was quick to shut down claims that one of its programs had advanced so much that it had become sentient. According to an?eye-opening tale?in the Washington Post on Saturday, one Google engineer said that after hundreds of interactions with a cutting-edge, unreleased AI system called?LaMDA, he believed the program had achieved a level of consciousness.

?????Skydio Researchers Open-Source ‘SymForce’: A Fast Symbolic Computation And Code Generation Library For Robotics Applications Like Computer Vision, etc.

SymForce?is a library for symbolic computation and code generation. It allows to code a problem in python, perform symbolic experimentation, generate optimized code and execute extremely competent optimization problems that depend on the original problem definition.?This exceptional contribution of this research is to provide a free and open-source library having symbolic implementations of geometry and camera types with Lie group operations, as well as fast runtime classes with identical interfaces. It also generates code for turning arbitrary symbolic functions into structured and quick runtime functions.?

?????China launched the world's first AI-operated 'mother ship,' an unmanned carrier capable of launching dozens of drones

China has launched the world's first crewless drone carrier that uses artificial intelligence to navigate autonomously in open water. Beijing has officially described it as a maritime research tool, but some experts have said the ship has the potential to be used as a military vessel. The autonomous ship, the Zhu Hai Yun (pictured?here) is around 290 feet long, 45 feet wide, and 20 feet deep and can carry dozens of air, sea, and submersible drones equipped with different observation instruments, according to?the shipbuilder, CSSC Huangpu Wenchong Shipping Co.

??????AI Trained on 4Chan Becomes ‘Hate Speech Machine’

AI?researcher?and YouTuber Yannic Kilcher trained an AI using 3.3 million threads from 4chan’s infamously toxic Politically Incorrect /pol/ board. He then unleashed the bot back onto 4chan with predictable results—the AI was just as vile as the posts it was trained on, spouting racial slurs and engaging with antisemitic threads. After Kilcher posted his video and a copy of the program to Hugging Face, a kind of GitHub for AI, ethicists and researchers in the AI field expressed concern.

?????444 Authors From 132 Institutions Release BIG-bench: A 204-Task ‘Extremely Difficult and Diverse’ Benchmark for Large Language Models

In the new paper?Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and Extrapolating the Capabilities of Language Models, 444 authors from 132 institutions introduce Beyond the Imitation Game (BIG-bench), a large-scale, extremely difficult and diverse benchmark that includes 204 tasks for predicting the potentially transformative effects of large language models.

???Startup featured for this issue

???Meet ‘LatchBio’, An AI-based Biotech Company That Provides a Code-Free Platform for Bioinformatics Research

Biologists today create?10,000 times more data?for each experiment than a decade ago, which is far more challenging to comprehend. Talented bioinformaticians who can handle the vast amount of biological?data are very rare.?San Francisco-based?LatchBio?is attempting to address this issue by providing a repository of versioned no-code tools, managed computer infrastructure, and a collaborative data hub that is specifically designed for biological research. Its purpose is to provide researchers with a simple, integrated tool for data analysis without the need for a computer scientist.?