#AI#GenerativeAI#AITraining#CollectiveIntelligence: "In this conversation, we discuss how Herndon collaborated with a human chorus and her “A.I. baby,” Spawn, on “PROTO”; how A.I. voice imitators grew out of electronic music and other musical genres; why Herndon prefers the term “collective intelligence” to “artificial intelligence”; why an “opt-in” model could help us retain more control of our work as A.I. trawls the internet for data; and much more."
The earliest instance of a generative AI image from the 15th century. Note only the four fingers and the exaggerated index finger. Obviously no understanding of human anatomy!
Next Monday, on the invitation of @tschfflr, at 16:00 c.t., I will give a lecture at #RUB on „#Writing with #GenerativeAI“ and explain why LLMs do not „write“ but „output“ text. The talk will be in German, if you want to join
“Most people are not aware of the resource usage underlying ChatGPT,” Ren said. “If you’re not aware of the resource usage, then there’s no way that we can help conserve the resources.”
In July 2022, the month before OpenAI says it completed its training of GPT-4, Microsoft pumped in about 11.5 million gallons of water to its cluster of Iowa data centers, according to the West Des Moines Water Works. That amounted to about 6% of all the water used in the district, which also supplies drinking water to the city’s residents.
#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#BigTech#SiliconValley: "Company documents obtained by Vox with signatures from Altman and Kwon complicate their claim that the clawback provisions were something they hadn’t known about. A separation letter on the termination documents, which you can read embedded below, says in plain language, “If you have any vested Units ... you are required to sign a release of claims agreement within 60 days in order to retain such Units.” It is signed by Kwon, along with OpenAI VP of people Diane Yoon (who departed OpenAI recently). The secret ultra-restrictive NDA, signed for only the “consideration” of already vested equity, is signed by COO Brad Lightcap.
Meanwhile, according to documents provided to Vox by ex-employees, the incorporation documents for the holding company that handles equity in OpenAI contains multiple passages with language that gives the company near-arbitrary authority to claw back equity from former employees or — just as importantly — block them from selling it.
Those incorporation documents were signed on April 10, 2023, by Sam Altman in his capacity as CEO of OpenAI."
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#Claude: "We successfully extracted millions of features from the middle layer of Claude 3.0 Sonnet, (a member of our current, state-of-the-art model family, currently available on claude.ai), providing a rough conceptual map of its internal states halfway through its computation. This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model.
Whereas the features we found in the toy language model were rather superficial, the features we found in Sonnet have a depth, breadth, and abstraction reflecting Sonnet's advanced capabilities.
We see features corresponding to a vast range of entities like cities (San Francisco), people (Rosalind Franklin), atomic elements (Lithium), scientific fields (immunology), and programming syntax (function calls). These features are multimodal and multilingual, responding to images of a given entity as well as its name or description in many languages." https://www.anthropic.com/news/mapping-mind-language-model
Physicists developed a new method to prepare quantum operations on a given quantum computer using a machine learning generative model to find the appropriate sequence of quantum gates to execute a quantum operation. The study, recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence, marks a significant step forward in unleashing the full extent of quantum computing.
#AI#GenerativeAI#GeneratedMusic#Suno: "Suno, a generative AI music company, has raised $125 million in its latest funding round, according to a post on the company’s blog. The AI music firm, which is one of the rare start-ups that can generate voice, lyrics and instrumentals together, says it wants to usher in a “future where anyone can make music.”
Suno allows users to create full songs from simple text prompts. While most of its technology is proprietary, the company does lean on OpenAI’s ChatGPT for lyric and title generation. Free users can generate up to 10 songs per month, but with its Pro plan ($8 per month) and Premier plan ($24 per month), a user can generate up to 500 songs or 2,000 songs, respectively, on a monthly basis and are given “general commercial terms.”"
#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#Film#Movies#Her: "Now, I do see why Altman likes it so much; besides its treatment of AI as personified emotional pleasure dome, two other things happen that must appeal to the OpenAI CEO: 1. Human-AI relationships are socially normalized almost immediately (this is the most unrealistic thing in the movie, besides its vision of a near-future AI that has good public transit and walkable neighborhoods; in a matter of months everyone seems to find it normal that people are ‘dating’ voices in the earbuds they bought from Best Buy), and 2. the AIs meet a resurrected model of Alan Watts, band together, and quietly transcend, presumably achieving some version of what Altman imagines to be AGI. He professes to worrying that AI will destroy humanity, and has a survival bunker and guns to prove it, so this science fictional depiction of AGIification must be more soothing than the other one.
But the weirdest thing to me is that it’s only after the AIs are gone that the characters can be said to undergo any sort of personal growth; they spend some time looking at the sunset, feel a human connection, and Theo writes that long overdue handwritten apology letter to his ex. It’s hard to see how the AI wasn’t merely holding them back from all this, and why Altman would find this outcome inspiring in the context of running a company that is bent on inundating the world with AI. Maybe he just missed the subtext? It’s become something of a running joke that Altman is bad at understanding movies: he thought Oppenheimer should have been made in a way that inspired kids to become physicists, and that the Social Network was a great positive message for startup founders.
Finally, Altman’s admiration is also a bit puzzling in that the AIs don’t ever really do anything amazing for society, even while they’re here."
"This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition. Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.
You can see this dynamic playing out in OpenAI’s content-licensing agreements, which it has struck with platforms such as Reddit and news organizations such as Axel Springer and Dotdash Meredith. Recently, a tech executive I spoke with compared these types of agreements to a hostage situation, suggesting they believe that AI companies will find ways to scrape publishers’ websites anyhow, if they don’t comply. Best to get a paltry fee out of them while you can, the person argued.
The Johansson accusations only compound (and, if true, validate) these suspicions. Altman’s alleged reasoning for commissioning Johansson’s voice was that her familiar timbre might be “comforting to people” who find AI assistants off-putting. Her likeness would have been less about a particular voice-bot aesthetic and more of an adoption hack or a recruitment tool for a technology that many people didn’t ask for, and seem uneasy about. Here, again, is the logic of OpenAI at work. It follows that the company would plow ahead, consent be damned, simply because it might believe the stakes are too high to pivot or wait. When your technology aims to rewrite the rules of society, it stands that society’s current rules need not apply."
#AI#GenerativeAI#Humanities: "Without some minimal agreement as to what those basic human capabilities are—what activities belong to the jurisdiction of our species, not to be usurped by machines—it becomes difficult to pin down why some uses of artificial intelligence delight and excite, while others leave many of us feeling queasy.
What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. AI dating concierges would not enhance our ability to make romantic connections with other humans, but obviate it. In this case, technology diminishes us, and that diminishment may well become permanent if left unchecked.
Over the long term, human beings in a world suffused with AI-enablers will likely prove less capable of engaging in fundamental human activities: analyzing ideas and communicating them, forging spontaneous connections with others, and the like. While this may not be the terrifying, robot-warring future imagined by the Terminator movies, it would represent another kind of existential catastrophe for humanity."
Companies today are trying to putting Generative AI into everything with the same enthusiasm that they put Radium into consumer products in the 1930s #GenerativeAI#AIrisks
@lns most creative people create things not as a product but because they have a drive to create: a lot of times the final product is almost incidental.
Doing creative stuff for your job is rarely an actual expression of your creativity, even if it requires some element of creativity.
Will creative people cheat and use AI for their jobs? Maybe, if it ever gets to the point where it doesn't suck. Work is work, after all.
Will they stop being creative for creativity's sake? Absolutely not.