Down the Rabbit hole, The Neuralink, and What is all this A.I poisoning....
Salve Amici!! Welcome to another edition of Kommunicate Korner. AI is moving at a pace that would put the SpaceX rocket’s to shame, and we are trying to catch up with it. Since the last time we wrote this newsletter, there have been some very interesting developments, and this time not in the software space. So without further ado, here we go:
TL:DR;
1. Down the Rabbit Hole: Has the smartphone as we know it come to an end?
We are the smartphone generation. The people who are addicted to their screens. The smartphone zombies, as many older people like to refer to us. Imagine the impact that a single device has on an entire generation of people, and then multiply that by a factor of 10. That is what the smartphone has done.
The smartphone, especially the app dominated phones started by the iPhone, has been a part of our lives for a good part of the last 15 years. But is the era of smartphones coming to an end? Is there a new generation of devices, powered by Generative AI, that is going to stop the domination of smartphones in our lives? Devices that are smaller, smarter, and most importantly, play well with gen AI.
The folks at Rabbit are telling us that this device is already out of the hat (pun intended). The R1, Rabbit’s flagship device, was displayed by the company’s CEO Jesse Lyu earlier this month. The device, about half the size of an iPhone, has vowed gadget enthusiasts already.
?A 2.88 inch touchscreen, a rotating camera and a scroll wheel/button for navigation. That’s pretty much everything you need to know about the device.
What’s impressed Silicon Valley about the Rabbit R1 is not the hardware though, but the software powering the R1. The Rabbit OS is powered by what the makers call a Large Action Model (LAM), which is kind of like a universal controller for apps. A single interface for you to listen to music, buy your groceries, and do other day to day activities like book a movie ticket.
What Rabbit is doing is smart, extremely smart. If you build an entirely new OS, it is difficult to onboard new developers to support it. Rather, Rabbit is teaching the LAM underneath it to learn how to use apps by itself. So, just like a human learning to use an app, the Rabbit OS will learn how to use it, understanding things like what the Settings screen looks like and where the search bar is located.
So a super app- a single interface for you to do most of your everyday tasks, is the vision with which the creators of Rabbit are powering forward. Will this vision be a reality? Will this small rectangular box replace the larger rectangular box in your pocket? Well, for the moment, with the pace at which the developments are happening, we are just rabbits caught in the headlight (pun intended).
2. The Neuralink - Think before you switch?
A couple of days ago, Elon Musk announced that the first human being who has received a brain implant from Neuralink is now “recovering well.” Now, you may be wondering what Elon Musk has to do with the medical field and why he is concerned about patients. Bear with us.
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The Neuralink is a device that contains a chip and electrode arrays of flexible conductors that a surgical robot places directly inside the cerebral cortex. These electrodes are designed to register thoughts related to motion.
To put it in simpler terms, the Neuralink lets you control electronic devices such as smartphones and computers with your thoughts. Yup, you read that right. Just your thoughts. In the words of Elon, “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or an auctioneer. That is the goal.”
Neuralink got the permission to conduct the first human trials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in May 2023, and, ever since, it has been enlisting people aged 22 and above, who are living with quadriplegia. The clinical trial has been called PRIME - Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface.
The implant is powered by a small battery that can be charged from the outside wirelessly. As with everything Elon does, there have been a set of controversies associated with Neuralink too. There have been allegations that almost 12 monkeys have been euthanized as part of the research to implant a chip into the brain of a living being.
Allegations aside, Neuralink may pave the way for a new generation of devices, and soon, you may be able to switch on your TV or flip the channels by merely thinking about it. So will these kinds of thought-powered devices make us even more addicted to technology? That’s food for thought.
3. The NightShade - A.I poisoning and what you should know about it
Artists, writers, journalists and all the other creatives who have their work published on the internet have been crying foul that the AI companies such as DALL-E and Midjourney have been using their works illegally to train these large language models. The New York Times even decided to sue OpenAI which was crawling the NYT articles without its consent.
A team of computer scientists were seeing all this from the sidelines, and they decided to act. Enter NightShade. Developed by computer scientists from the University of Chicago, the NightShade may be the answer that artists are looking for to protect their pieces of work.
Named after the deadly nightshade plant that was used to poison Roman emperors, Nightshade works by exploiting a security vulnerability that is inherent within AI models. It adds pixels to a digital image that are invisible to the human eye, affecting the image itself and the text or captions associated with it. The AI relies on both of these to identify what’s in the picture.?
The technical term for this is prompt-specific poisoning attack, this can cause AI tools to malfunction. AI will, for example, mistake the picture of cats for dogs, if it has been sufficiently “poisoned” with tarnished images.
This is a brave new move by the researchers, and the response to the Nightshade has been super impressive. 250,000 downloads within weeks of its launch stand testament to the fact that more and more people want to fight back against the AI companies smooching off their work. If you are a sympathizer to the AI Companies or one who stands with the artists, what is interesting to know is that even advanced pieces of AI are not immune to human tampering.
Until next time.
#artificial intelligence #generativeAI