Insider's Edit: Can Quantum Help AI Understand?

This week's top stories on AI Business:

AI Meets Quantum: Leap Forward for AI Models to ‘Understand’

AI systems that can understand the world instead of merely predicting the next word or code is the dream of many AI researchers.

A group of quantum computing scientists developed a new approach that brings the dream a step closer: They developed a framework that enables machines to learn the way humans do.

A new paper from the team at Quantinuum describes the framework, which lets AI systems learn concepts like shape and color. Not only can the machine look at an image and recognize it, but it also actually understands the meaning of the object.

They developed the Compositional Quantum Framework, which is designed to structure and learn concepts automatically from data through both classical and quantum computing approaches.

In simple terms, the researchers essentially merged insights from quantum computing with cognitive science concepts to create a framework that provides a mathematical structure to allow an AI system to visualize an action.

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Air Canada Held Responsible for Chatbot’s Hallucinations

A Canadian small claims tribunal has ordered Air Canada to refund a traveler’s airfare as a result of its chatbot’s hallucinations.

Last November, Jake Moffatt purchased tickets from Vancouver to Toronto after his grandmother’s death. He researched bereavement policies on Air Canada’s website and was told by its chatbot that he can apply to get the discounted bereavement airfare within 90 days.

After his return, Moffatt applied to get the discount only to be told that he cannot ask retroactively for the discounted fare. Air Canada instead offered him a $200 coupon for his next flight.

Moffatt filed a case with the Civil Resolution Tribunal to get his money back.

The airline said it cannot be held liable for the information provided by the chatbot. But this means that Air Canada “suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,” wrote Tribunal member Christopher C. Rivers in his ruling.

Moffatt won. Air Canada was told to pay him $812.02, comprising his refund, interest and tribunal fees.

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Hugging Face Debuts Open Source AI Assistant Builder

Popular code repository Hugging Face has taken the wraps off its own AI assistants builder – and it is free and open source.

The service, which is found in Hugging Face Chat, lets developers create their own custom AI assistants using open source language models. It is similar to OpenAI’s GPT builder that is accessed through ChatGPT Plus, which is available only to paying customers.

The assistant can use “any available open LLM, like Llama2 or Mixtral,” tweeted Philipp Schmid, technical lead at Hugging Face.

Users can make their own private AI assistant and host it themselves. Access it here.

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In other news

• Nvidia reported record revenue and earnings and announced Nvidia AI as a service, which will be hosted by major cloud providers. The stock soared by 16% and made Nvidia the third most valuable company in the U.S. CEO Jensen Huang added $9.6 billion to his fortune. He is now the 21st richest person in the world.
• Google released Gemma, its new family of small-sized open source models, targeting popular open source language models from Meta and Mistral of similar size.
• Cohere unveils Aya: A new model and dataset combo that lets developers build AI applications that span over 100 languages.
• Next week is the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Expect plenty of AI news at the world’s largest event for the telecommunications industry.

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