New entries: AWS and Bain

PLUS: are we actually doomed now?

Author

Ben Tossell
February 22, 2023

Hey folks! A quick one from me today as I'm in the terminal waiting for my flight...btw have some people genuinely never been through security before?!!!

Let's get to it.

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🤌 Ben's Picks

1/

After you battle your way through the 10 minute preamble about a pending existential crisis for the interviewer, you’ll find yourselves in the hands of Eliezer Yudkowsky for way over an hour. And I guarantee you haven’t faced such pessimism. He talks about an AI escape velocity that produces superintelligence, and explains that superintelligence is a level of generality where it knows the optimal move in every situation. You cannot beat it. And as such it “does not love you, it does not hate you, it is indifferent to you, and your atoms can be used for something more useful”. It will creep up on us, and it will kill us - and he’s even thought of the method it’ll use to boot. Eeek!

Beyond the overriding backdrop of impending doom, this is actually a really good interview where Yudkowsky explains in detail many of the further-out aspects of the future of AI, and allows us to step inside the mind of one of (if not the) leading thinkers in AI alignment and safety.

2/

First we had OpenAI and Microsoft; then came Anthropic and Google. Now it turns out that Hugging Face and Amazon have been dating on the sly and have decided to make it official! They plan to bring generative AI modelling to the people, making it faster and easier to train, fine-tune, and deploy models on the cloud in an open, accessible, and transparent way. Essentially, their partnership is aimed at making it possible for people without an insane amount of funding to train their own generative ML models with the highest performance and lowest cost.

3/

Yes, I know we featured Gary Marcus in our picks yesterday, but he’s just reeling out the good stuff right now so here he is again! He reports that Microsoft have pulled off the ultimate publicity stunt, releasing Bing AI whilst being well aware of its delusional, rude, and stubborn tendencies that we’ve all been sharing over the past few weeks. (That second link will take you to evidence that a Microsoft person flagged it in November 2022.) It was more obvious than Gary seems to think, but taking a step back, it’s also way more serious than we seem to think. After all, this is the company that has become the face of AI safety and responsibility…

I thought we all knew Microsoft knew...

4/

The consultants have waded in to get their piece of the pie, and it’s big! OpenAI and Bain - that massive business consulting firm you’ve probably heard of - have partnered up to form a services alliance. The plan is to combine OpenAI’s tools with Bain’s extensive business strategy expertise to bring clarity to AI business applications. As a service provider, they’ll take their customer’s business models, and pinpoint areas with the highest AI-value-add, deploy proof-of-concepts, and implement capabilities across the business.

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🛠️ Cool Tools

  • Perplexity AI’s new chrome extension can now provide answers focused on the website you're currently on. (link)

  • LangChain document loaders in TypeScript. (link)

  • Open source CSV importer powered by GPT3. (link)

  • PicWonderful - AI-powered photo toolkit. (link)

  • Dreamphilic - Frontpage for AI generated content. (link)

  • Cmd J - ChatGPT extension for Google, StackOverflow, Gmail. (link)

  • OpenSight - The new chatbot that goes beyond pulling answers from help centre articles. (link)

  • Read Easy - Make the text of your website or app easy to read for people with low literacy skills. (link)

  • Empy AI - Promote empathic language in your Slack workspace. (link)

  • ‎Scribbler - Draw beautiful art. (link)

  • Private web-app to turn any arbitrary CSV file into a dashboard of data visualisations. (link)

  • Networkoracle - Search on your contacts and ask an AI assistant questions. (link)

  • Truewind - AI-powered bookkeeping & finance for startups. (link)

  • Clarity AI - Implement up-to-date info from the web into OpenAI powered search queries. (link)

  • Learn from a book through conversation, questions, and in the order you want. (link)

  • Delphi creates AI clones to receive leadership advice from your favourite US presidents. (link)

  • Movio - Create your custom avatar in just 3 min. (link)

  • Legalslang - Turn complex legal text into plain English. (link)

  • Promptly - Prompt management made easy. (link)

  • Podsqueeze - Generate shownotes, timestamps, newsletters and more for your podcast with one click. (link)

  • ChatGPT Robotics - Demo app for design principles and model abilities. (link)

  • Phind - The AI search engine for developers. (link)

🤓 Miscellaneous

  • Love in the time of Replika. (link)

  • AI avatars are spreading pro-Venezuela propaganda. (link)

  • Generative AI is coming for the lawyers. (link)

  • ChatGPT hype sparks hopes and fears around AI. (link)

  • AI is starting to pick who gets laid off. (link)

  • Autonomous AIs. (link)

  • Almost-unbeatable AI comes to Gran Turismo 7. (link)

  • A16Z is investing in Replicate. (link)

  • Machine learning needs better tools. (link)

  • ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon. (link)

  • The YC W23 gen AI landscape. (link)

  • Rumour has it that OpenAI privately announced Foundry, which enables developers to run OpenAI model inference at scale with dedicated capacity. (link)

  • An ML-powered survivors' geolocation tool is being used to assist rescue efforts after earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. (link)

  • AGI in sight - Our look at the game board. (link)

🎓 Learn

  • Using Langchain’s simple sequential chain to make an app. (link)

  • Prompt engineering first steps by building a hotel booking chatbot. (link)

  • How to make cool AI videos, step by step. (link)

👋 Too many links?! I created a database for all links mentioned in these emails. Refer 1 friend using this link and I'll send over the link database.

🔬 Research

  • ChatGPT - Jack of all trades, master of none. (link)

  • PEFT - Fine-tune a Whisper-large model faster. (link)

  • Diffusion models and semi-supervised learners benefit mutually with few labels. (link)

  • RealFusion 360 - Reconstruction of any object from a single image. (link)

  • PC2: Projection-conditioned point cloud diffusion for single-image 3D reconstruction. (link)

  • Zero-shot information extraction via chatting with ChatGPT. (link)

  • Offline reinforcement learning for mixture-of-expert dialogue management from Google. (link)

  • Hyena Hierarchy - Towards larger convolutional language models. (link)

  • Deep transformers without shortcuts from Deepmind - Modifying self-attention for faithful signal propagation. (link)

  • Growing steerable neural cellular automata from Google. (link)

  • Learning 3D photography videos via self-supervised diffusion on single images from Microsoft. (link)

  • Optical transformers - Reducing the energy cost of running state-of-the-art neural networks. (link)

  • Reusable slotwise mechanisms. (link)

📰 Unclassifieds

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🖼 AI images of the day

Socrates giving a TED talk

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