AI roundup #5 👩‍💻

🇨🇳 Chinese tech giants enter generative AI

Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei are reportedly ready to satisfy local demand for generative AI chatbots in the coming weeks.

Demand in China for ChatGPT appears to be miles ahead of any other country as per Google Trends. Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Chinese users have been eager to get their hands on the technology. Cities like Beijing have pledged to assist developers, while academia and private industry alike have made progress.

Alibaba’s research institute, DAMO Academy, is reportedly working to incorporate the full-scale model into its Tmall Genie – a smart speaker that houses the intelligent personal assistant AliGenie.

Reports have surfaced that some netizens tested the early copies.

Out of 15 questions, ten answers would outperform competitors. The criteria for determining this result were not disclosed.

Sources: TheRegister, Oltnews

⚔️ AI leaders opposing the pause on AI

On April 7, a discussion titled "Why the 6-Month AI Pause Is a Bad Idea" was hosted on Deep Learning AI's Youtube channel. AI leaders Andrew Ng & Yann LeCun outlined their views on the open letter with many signatories across the tech & AI space calling for a Pause on AI.

Why slow down the progress of knowledge and science? Then there is the question of products…I’m all for regulating products that get in the hands of people. I don’t see the point of regulating research and development. I don’t think that serves any purpose other than reducing the knowledge that we could use to actually make technology better, safer.
Source: Venture Beat

With rapid advancements in the field of AI, there are rising concerns. In this online discussion, the leaders categorized the fears around AI being of two types.

1. Around fairness, bias, and other such near-future consequences
2. Around the development of AGI, leading to elimination of humanity

Yann LeCun & Andrew Ng also took to Twitter to share their thoughts, opposing the open letter.

This event was held in light of the growing debate around the regulation of LLMs.

Sources: Venture Beat, Business Insider

🦺 OpenAI addresses AI safety

Ensuring that AI systems are built, deployed, and used safely is critical to our mission.
Source: OpenAI

OpenAI, the creator of the chatbot ChatGPT, has publicly spoken about the safety of AI and how it tries to keep its products safe for its users. They have published a new blog post committing to developing artificial intelligence (AI) that’s safe and broadly beneficial.

The company had come under criticism following privacy breaches and started approaching the problem by rapidly releasing new iterations of its models.

In the post, Open AI states that it rigorously tests any new system before it is introduced to the public using external experts and uses reinforcement learning with human feedback to make improvements. The company claims that it tested its recent model, GPT-4, for six months before it was released publicly and called for regulation to ensure that the industry adopts such practices at large.

Sources: Search Engine Journal, Interesting Engineering

🤳  Bing on Android via Microsoft's SwiftKey

Microsoft has now introduced the Bing chatbot to the SwiftKey keyboard on Android devices. This will let users chat with Bing on any app that uses SwiftKey.

The new feature is rolling out to SwiftKey beta users. With the latest integration, users will be able to rewrite any text right within the keyboard as well as search the Web to find what they need.

Microsoft SwiftKey beta for Android can be downloaded from the Play Store. Notably, the update is available for Android users only.

Microsoft dropped SwiftKey support for iOS last year, however, it brought back the app to the App Store later with a promise to “invest heavily in the keyboard.”

For the unversed, Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard for Android and iPhone are keyboards that adapt to the way a user types including words, phrases, and emojis, and correct typos as well as misspellings accordingly.

Sources: Gadgets360, Slashdot

✂️  “Segment Anything Model” powered by Meta

Diving into Computer Vision research, Meta launched "SAM", an advanced AI model that can segment any object in an image or a video efficiently, with high quality.

We are making the SA-1B dataset available for research purposes and the Segment Anything Model is available under a permissive open license (Apache 2.0).

Source: Meta AI

SAM allows users to segment objects with a single click or by enabling selection of multiple reference points to perform the needed action of adding or removing the objects from the frame.

This is a revolutionary advancement that will help computer vision research to flourish.

Sources: Meta AI, DataConomy

📋 Stanford releases the 2023 AI index report

The AI Index, from the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, worked with experts from academia and private industries to collect information and predictions on the matter. As a yearly effort (and by the size of it, you can bet they’re already hard at work laying out the next one), this may not be the freshest take on AI, but these periodic broad surveys are important to keep one’s finger on the pulse of the industry.

The 2023 AI Index is out, covering the world of artificial intelligence from technical performance achievements, ethics advances, education and policy trends to economic impact, R&D, and the hiring and jobs scene.
Source: Stanford University

This year’s report includes “new analysis on foundation models, including their geopolitics and training costs, the environmental impact of AI systems, K-12 AI education, and public opinion trends in AI,” plus a look at the policy in a hundred new countries.

To begin with, the report highlights the dramatic shift in the release of AI models. While until a few years ago, it was academia that led the development of large models, now it is the industry that is leading the charge.

Sources: Techcrunch, Interesting Engineering

Also read:
AI Roundup #4: Last Week in AI