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Does AI need a 'body' to become truly intelligent?

Plus, how to safeguard your business from deepfakes

Author

Steve Brown
April 04, 2024

This Week in AI

The AI research community is split on this, but a fair number of people working to build human-level intelligence are convinced that AI needs to living inside some kind of ‘body’ and have agency in the world before it can truly understand it and have a chance to reach AGI levels of intelligence. The article explores the role of simulation, Meta’s use of Habitat 3.0, a sophisticated AI training simulator, and what part robots may play in training the super AIs of the future.

As well as causing tragic death, injury, and destruction in the country, the recent quake in Taiwan has once again put a spotlight on the world’s over reliance on the island to make the high-end semiconductors that power our smartphones and AI data centers. TSMC, who makes 92% of the world’s high-end chips, halted production for over 10 hours and is slowly bringing up capacity again. The incident demonstrates the importance of the CHIPS act, a U.S. measure to make strategic investments in semiconductor manufacturing capacity as a way to reduce risk and assure supply of the vital chips that power trillions of dollars in economic value.

Worried that generative AI may commoditize music creation (and perhaps sniffing a potential future hit to profits) a group of 200 musicians—including those mentioned in the headline and Jon Bon Jovi, Elvis Costello, Imagine Dragons, Miranda Lambert, Pearl Jam, and Zayn Malik—have signed an open letter calling on tech companies to avoid undermining human creativity with AI music generation tools. AI is already being used to reanimate long-dead singers. If you haven’t heard them yet, you need to check out Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley ‘covering’ Nirvana.

Most AI models run in the cloud. Over time, as devices get more machine learning acceleration and memory, and capable models become smaller, some AI workloads are expected to move to the edge where they can be run locally. Last year, Intel defined a new category of PC, the AI PC, which has neural processing units (NPUs) able to run some AI tasks locally, improving performance and privacy. The article compares Intel’s roadmap for AI performance with competitors including Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm.

Yahoo will be turbocharging their platform with tech acquired from Artifact, the excellent personalized news app built by the people who co-founded Instagram. Artifact only lasted just over a year before its creators announced it would be going away. Once Yahoo’s acquisition is complete, Artifact will disappear, but its cool recommendation and personalization tech will live on at Yahoo.

Video: A Visual Introduction to Transformers

This week’s video is a bit more ‘technical’ than the usual ones we showcase here. It’s a great explainer on transformers, the AI breakthrough that underpins all large language models like ChatGPT (the ‘T’ in ‘GPT’ is for transformer). If you have a little knowledge already on how AI works, and you want to dig a little deeper, this is an entertaining and informative video where you’ll learn about tokens, vectors, neural networks, embedding, and how knowledge is encoded. If in doubt, give it a try. (27 minutes)

AI Innovation

In the classic movie Jaws, Roy Scheider remarks that “we’re going to need a bigger boat.” With the size of AI models growing exponentially, we’re going to need bigger chips to handle them. Nvidia’s latest chip, Blackwell, has 104 billion transistors, and they put two together to make a 208 billion transistor beast. On the current trajectory, we could see the first trillion transistor GPUs by 2033, further boosting performance and perhaps more importantly, energy efficiency.

One of the major issues still plaguing large language models is their propensity to hallucinate. Assembly AI claims their new Universal-1 model for speech-to-text outperforms Open AI’s leading model with higher accuracy and fewer hallucinations.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania found they could make an AI image generator produce less offensive images by feeding it a tiny amount of additional training data.

While still conjecture at this point, reports from sometimes reliable Bloomberg analyst, Mark Gurman, indicate that Apple is looking for new markets to go after now that their self-driving car project has been terminated. Personal robotics may become a lucrative future market sector. The CEO of Figure, the leading humanoid robotics company, has estimated the total worldwide market for humanoid robots will be 10 billion units. That’s a lot of robots.

AI Insights

This is a venture capitalist’s take on the AI market, by Matt Turck of FirstMark. Full of links to additional analysis and materials, this detailed overview covers the growth in the number of AI companies in the market, the significant shifts occurring in the AI segment, consolidation, generative AI trends, the rise of the modern AI stack, GPU wars, open source, M&A, enterprise trends, AI hype cycles, market concerns, the future of AI and the AI market, and key areas to watch in 2024 (AI agents and Edge AI).

Recently, cybercriminals used deepfake videos of the executives of a multinational company to convince the company’s Hong Kong-based employees to wire out $25.6 million. What should companies do to protect themselves? It starts with employee education but will also require a tightening of cybersecurity.

AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI might. That’s why 500,000+ professionals read The Rundown – the free newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest AI news and teaches you how to apply it in just 5 minutes a day.

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