AI roundup #4 👩‍💻

🤷 Elon Musk calls for a pause on AI

In a statement titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” Elon Musk and 1,332 signatories including Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, called on AI labs to pause the training of advanced AI systems for at least six months.

The letter, which was published via Future of Life Institute, sounded a note of warning regarding the possible costs of the continued creation of “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence”. Critics say this letter that calls for a pause in the development of artificial intelligence is a "hot mess" of "AI hype" that even misrepresents an academic paper.

The letter further argued that the development of powerful AI systems should only be considered when their creators “are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

Sources: Punch, Economic Times

💸 BloombergGPT: an AI for finance

BloombergGPT outperforms similarly-sized open models on financial NLP tasks by significant margins — without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks
- www.bloomberg.com

On 30th March 2023, Bloomberg released a research paper detailing the development of BloombergGPT, a new large-scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) model. This large language model (LLM) has been specifically trained on a wide range of financial data to support a diverse set of natural language processing (NLP) tasks within the financial industry.

This means that advanced machine learning software can quickly analyze financial data to help users make risk assessments, evaluate financial sentiment, classify news, and get questions answered.

Shawn Edwards, Bloomberg’s chief technology officer, said, “BloombergGPT will enable us to tackle many new types of applications, while it delivers much higher performance, out-of-the-box than custom models for each application, at a faster time-to-market.”

The BloombergGPT model far outperforms open models of similar size on financial tasks. It also performs at or above average on general NLP benchmarks, clearly illustrating the value of domain-specific language models.

Sources: The National News, Bloomberg

🔐 ChatGPT raises privacy concerns: banned in Italy

Italy's Data Protection Authority on Friday temporarily banned OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot and launched a probe over a suspected breach of the artificial intelligence application's data collection rules.

The regulator said it would ban and investigate OpenAI "with immediate effect". The Italian data protection authority has given OpenAI a deadline of 20 days to respond to the watchdog's concerns, and failure to do so may result in a penalty of €20 million ($21.7m) or up to 4% of its annual revenues.

The agency, also known as Garante, accused Microsoft Corp-backed ChatGPT of failing to check the age of its users who are supposed to be 13 and up. ChatGPT has an "absence of any legal basis that justifies the massive collection and storage of personal data" to "train" the chatbot, Garante said.

Sources: BBC, CBC

🚫 Midjourney puts an end to free trials

You must have seen outrageous images of US President Donald Trump getting arrested, and Pope wandering in a puffy jacket. So, you must know that those images were not real but created using the AI tool Midjourney.

But that’s not the reason Midjourney says it’s stopping free trials of the service. Midjourney CEO has decided to stop offering the free trial of its app, as the influx of new users was bothersome.

“We stopped trials because of massive amounts of people making throwaway accounts to get free images,” Holz told me via email Friday evening. “We think the culprit was probably a viral how-to video in China.”
- Matt Novak

Midjourney states that “there is no ETA for when we will be able to provide trials.” Paid access is still available, starting at $10 per month or $96 per year and you can read more in this blog post.

Sources: Forbes, How To Geek

🍏 Perplexity launches a new iPhone app

ChatGPT alternative comes to iPhone with Perplexity, offering its own AI assistant. Perplexity AI is an iPhone app that allows users to ask AI questions and receive instant answers. The app is available for free download on the App Store.

Why did we like Perplexity's App? It is because of how simple the app is to use. After downloading it from the App Store, you’re ready to start using it instantly. You won't have to make an account or pay anything — just download Perplexity AI and start asking it questions.

Sources: Digital Trends, Business Insider

🎶 With WavTool, AI is now in music

WavTool is the first AI-accelerated text-to-music DAW in the marketplace. It includes an AI chat assistant that can compose midi, generate instruments, control effects, and runs a number of other activities in the workstation.

ChatGPT generates chord progressions and melody ideas, but it's limited to writing text. WavTool uses GPT-4 to generate musical commands the DAW can act on, from composing MIDI to wavetable synthesis.

This AI-powered digital audio workstation loads in your browser, you never have to download an app, and with their one-click sign-up through Google or Facebook, it's very easy to get started using the latest version of Google Chrome browser.

You can sign up for free, but the app offers a limited number of AI prompts. At the time of writing this article, the DAW costs $20/month. Users can have a conversation, collaborate on song segments, generate or revise MIDI content, and configure plugins to add effects or signal processing.

Unlike Google and OpenAI's MIDI generators, WavTool knows why it generated MIDI in a particular way and explains its reasoning to you in detail.

Sources: Audio Cipher

That is all for this week folks! You can find the recap of March 2023 here.