This Week in AI

Bride and groom saved $10,000 using AI to plan their wedding

People reports that a New York couple used ChatGPT and other AI tools to help them plan their wedding, make invitations, and book a photographer. A recent survey found that 11% of couples said they were planning to use AI tools as part of their wedding planning. 💒

Apple’s launch event is a teaser for it’s AI future

Apple surprised the market by launching a new super thin iPad Pro with the new M4 chip inside it. The M4 is faster and supports ray traced graphics, but it’s the amount of AI accelerating oomph inside that’s got people talking, and put Intel and AMD on the back foot. The M4 neural engine has 38 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of machine learning performance (article incorrectly quotes 34 TOPS) while the current Intel Core Ultra boasts around 10 TOPS and AMD’s Ryzen 8040 has 16 TOPS. Intel’s ‘Lunar Lake’ processor, due to ship later this year, will have 45 TOPS of performance. Microsoft has said that AI PCs with performance less than 40 TOPS will not be able to use all of the Copilot features they have coming. Side note: A 1-minute Apple ad for the iPad Pro has caused controversy as they crush items in a press.

Open AI exploring how to make AI-generated porn

"We're exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT. We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behavior in this area.” Teenage boys everywhere are paying close attention.

Video: Ryan Gosling explains LLMs

Using deepfake video technology and voice-generation technology from ElevenLabs, YouTubers put together this fun explainer video on how LLMs work. It gets a little complicated in the middle, but stick with it and hopefully all will become clear. LLMs work by understanding the relative importance of words in your input prompt to generate an output. This video explains how.

Watch this video, hosted by ‘Sheldon’ of the Big Bang, to learn how the Ryan Gosling video was made and how deepfake technology works. In related news, deepfakes of celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Eminem, and Santa 🎅 are being used to teach kids physics and maths on TikTok.

AI Tech and Innovation

AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules

Building on the protein folding work they did with AlphaFold 2, Google DeepMind has published a new paper in Nature that extends their work to all the biological structures of life including DNA, RNA, ligands, and more. This work will help researchers to understand biological processes and build drugs and other therapeutics to fight diseases. To this end, DeepMind is also giving away AlphaFold Server, a platform to help researchers explore the interactions of proteins with other molecules throughout the cell.

Generative AI sucks: Meta’s chief AI scientist calls for a shift to objective-driven AI

Futurist, Bernard Marr, shares his insights from attending a talk given by Yann LeCun, AI luminary and currently Meta’s chief AI scientist. LeCun argues, as he has done for a number of years now, that to build truly valuable artificial intelligence we need a totally different approach, and that scaling large language models won’t get us there. He proposes a radically different approach that allows machines to build their own internal models of the world, simulate outcomes, reason about the future, and make informed decisions to reach objectives. In other words, a machine that ‘thinks’ more like humans do, using causal reasoning and understanding the connection between actions and outcomes. This is clearly a long-term project but LeCun feels it’s a much more likely path to lead us to artificial general intelligence than other approaches.

AI might make augmented reality glasses useable (finally)

Augmented reality headsets have been around for a while now—Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta have all had a go—but the experience is underwhelming, fatiguing, and makes many people feel sick. Researchers at Stanford University, Nvidia, and the University of Hong Kong, have used AI to help them develop a new type of metasurface waveguide that can create small holographic images and aim them at your eyeballs. The resulting AR glasses are lightweight and said not to suffer from problems associated with previous efforts in the space. Consumer-ready products are likely years away. More details published in Nature.

In other AR/AI news, Singapore Startup Brilliant Labs is launching Frame, a pair of lightweight AR glasses that ‘brings AI to the eyes.’

AI Insights

HBR: For success with AI, bring everyone on board

People feel excluded from decisions around AI and 80% of organizations say their main goal with AI is hyper automation. Savvy leaders will prioritize participation from the rank and file, and seek tight collaboration between humans and machines rather than outright automation. The article explores what your company should do to engage employees and why that will lead to optimal outcomes and reduce resistance to change.

Report: Firms not ready to deploy models

Hewlett Packard Enterprise surveyed 2400 IT leaders in 14 countries and found that companies are keen to embrace AI but struggling to deploy models effectively. In a detailed report, HPE explores best practices related to data management, governance, and more.

AI engineers face burnout in rat-race to stay ahead

In scary AI safety news, CNBC reports that AI engineers are being pushed to deliver results without proper testing and without any concern over the impact on climate change, surveillance, or other potential harms. As major tech companies go all-in on AI and race to catch up with the current leader, Open AI, corners are being cut and speed is prioritized over quality, CNBC claims.

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