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- New AI company to build safe superintelligence
New AI company to build safe superintelligence
Plus, Citi expects AI to displace more jobs in finance than any other sector
Steve Brown
June 20, 2024
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This Week in AI
Everyone’s been watching to see what OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever would do next. After the bruising tussle at the company's top earlier this year, Chief Scientist Sutskever finally left OpenAI in May. Two days later, OpenAI dissolved its team dealing with AI risks, an effort Sutskever had championed. Arguably one of the main brains behind OpenAI’s wild success, Sutskever’s next project was always likely to be consequential. The Israeli-Canadian national will set up a new company, named Safe Superintelligence Inc., with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, focused on building—you guessed it—safe superintelligence. He is partnering with two other AI heavyweights, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, who bring experience working at OpenAI, Apple, Google, and Meta. Could the three main frontier AI research labs—OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic—just have been joined by a fourth? Watch this space.
Runway ML was an early entrant in the text-to-video market, but its leadership position was usurped more recently by OpenAI’s Sora and Google DeepMind’s Veo. Runway has come roaring back with Gen-3, which is currently in Alpha release but available to the public today. A range of impressive examples are available to view on their site.
A former engineering manager at Snap has launched a new social network, Butterflies. The twist? This time, not all the users of the network are human. Given Twitter’s reputation (sorry, X’s reputation) for being a place that’s crawling with AI bots spreading disinformation, you might ask how this is much of a new development 🤪 On Butterflies, anyone can create an AI persona known as a Butterfly. The Butterfly, which has a unique backstory, set of opinions, and emotions, then automatically creates posts on the network and interacts with others.
Quick Hits:
This week, Synthetic is adding a new section: ‘Quick Hit’ stories that we think you will find interesting:
Video: Learn how to make a viral AI music video
Are you looking for a fun, creative project to distract the kids this summer, or perhaps itching to practice using some of the latest AI tools yourself?
YouTuber Matt Wolfe has been making fun, informative videos on AI news and tools for over a year now. In this latest video, Matt shows you how to use free AI tools to create a pop song—complete with custom lyrics and music—then create still images, make motion video sequences from those images, and finally edit them all together to make a pop video. The results are surprising. Have fun! (28 mins)
AI Tech and Innovation
With funding from the Gates Foundation, the Thousand Brains Project aims to develop a new framework for AI that is fundamentally different from the deep neural networks that underpin most artificial intelligence today. They hope to reverse engineer the neocortex, the part of the brain thought to be responsible for attention, thought, perception, and episodic memory. AI researchers debate on the best path to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). Some believe scaling LLMs will eventually yield emergent AGI, while others believe AI must be embodied to explore and learn about the world as a child does. Yet another camp believes that a neuromorphic approach is needed, one that is inspired by and attempts to mimic the functions of the human brain.
There are many branches of AI research. One branch, AI for science, focuses on using AI to accelerate scientific research and yield major breakthroughs. An example is DeepMind’s work with AlphaFold to aid our understanding of proteins and accelerate the development of drugs. Several companies have built AIs to accelerate materials science research, and last year, Google DeepMind revealed that it had used deep learning to discover millions of new materials, including 380,000 stable materials that could power future technologies. Strong, permanent magnets are made with alloys of rare-earth metals such as yttrium and cobalt. A UK-based company, Material Nexus, used AI to develop a new magnet that doesn’t use rare-earth metals. They achieved this in just three months, shortcutting what would normally take decades of research. Their plan is to change electric motors forever by making them more sustainable.
Meta’s fundamental AI research team, known as FAIR, has released a new set of models and associated research. The models include Chameleon, a multimodal text and image processing model; multi-token models for faster language model training; JASCO, a text-to-music model; AudioSeal for detecting AI-generated speech; and an effort to improve diversity in text-to-image models.
AI Insights - Reports and a-ha moments
Researchers at Google DeepMind have been exploring whether or not AI is valuable to comedians as a joke-writing aid. Their report, titled “A Robot Walks into a Bar,” shares research results conducted with comedians at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and online.
In a detailed report, Citi shares its perspective on how AI will transform finance in the coming years. Citi believes AI could add $170 billion to global bank profits by 2028 and displace up to 54% of jobs in the banking sector. The report includes many additional details and projections.
In 2021, the burger giant with the Golden Arches partnered with IBM to build and test an AI order-taking system at about 100 drive-thru locations across the US. The goal was to alleviate staffing shortages, manage costs, and reduce ordering errors. After a three-year trial, McDonald’s has abandoned the project. Was the technology not yet ready for prime time? Or did McDonald’s choose the wrong technology partner? Time will tell.
Which of the magnificent seven have bought back the most stock in the last 12 months? It isn’t Tesla or Amazon, as they didn’t report any buybacks. So that leaves Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia to choose from. Will you guess right?
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