Artificial Intelligence

The trend of hallucinations showing up in public AI demos continues. As noted by a couple of reporters already, OpenAI’s demo of its new SearchGPT engine shows results that are mostly either wrong or not helpful.

From The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong:

In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29 and will have its final concert on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)

According to a post from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT Plus subscribers will get access to its new voice feature next week. The company initially demoed this feature back in May, you know, the one that sounded like Scarlett Johansson’s character from the movie Her? They yoinked that voice option though, sorry guys.

This will be interesting to test out, especially ahead of ChatGPT getting baked into Siri.

Two specialized AI systems from DeepMind, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry, were able to solve four out of six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). This is a big deal because AI is really bad at math. Have you seen the posts about ChatGPT saying 9.11 is bigger than 9.9?

The IMO represents a “litmus test” that suggests researchers could make bigger future breakthroughs, DeepMind VP David Silver said in a press briefing.

Researcher Alex Hanna, of Distributed AI Research Institute and previously of Google, reflects on what might come next:

After the dust settles and NVIDIA has stopped churning out shovels (e.g. H100s) for the gold rush, what will be left behind? Will data centers go the way of shopping malls? Likely not—they’ll be repurposed for other massive computing projects. But what about those climate pledges?

Look, I know unsightly stickers on Windows laptops have been with us since long ago when “Intel Inside” was something people actually wanted boast about. But come on, HP.

Alongside the FTC and the DOJ, the UK and EU’s antitrust authorities have issued a joint statement saying they will work to ensure fair competition in the AI industry.

One potential issue highlighted by the enforcers is the possibility that AI chipmakers could “exploit existing or emerging bottlenecks,” giving them “outsized influence over the future development” of AI tools.

Demos on this Meta blog show how the company will implement its promise to bring AI to its VR headsets. Like the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, you can ask it questions about things you see (in passthrough), and it will answer.

The experimental feature rolls out in English next month, in the US and Canadia (excluding the Quest 2).

Reuters reports that Nvidia is working on a version of its new “Blackwell” chips for the Chinese market, which would be in line with strict US export controls for AI training chips.

Nvidia will reportedly work with Chinese distributor partner Inspur on launching the so-called “B20” chip, which is pitched to compete against domestic offerings from Huawei and Tencent-backed startup Enflame.

Open source developers dismissed OpenAI from their 2022 lawsuit alleging that it violated copyright law by reproducing their code without attribution.

As Bloomberg Law writes, the lawsuit will continue against GitHub and Microsoft (although without the Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims that the judge dismissed this month).

House music and technology are my two favorite things, and finally, I’ve found a way to write about them both.

Thanks to the CrowdStrike fail that caused chaos in systems across the globe, a DJ named Chris Lake is facing challenges with his concert in New York tonight. One of the DJs, Andruss, can’t make it, so they’ve had to adjust the lineup to fill his spot.

According to The Information, OpenAI is in discussion with Broadcom and other semiconductor designers about developing its own artificial intelligence chip to address shortages in its supply chain and reduce dependency on Nvidia. OpenAI has apparently also hired former Google chip staffers.

Bloomberg previously reported in January that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was planning to raise billions of dollars to set up a network of chip factories.

That’s according to the Financial Times, reporting that Meta is looking to further its partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban and so many other eyewear brands.

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses released last year now support multimodal AI to identify what wearers are seeing. They also sold more in a few months than the previous pair did in two years, according to EssilorLuxottica’s CEO.

The new Proton Scribe writing tool runs locally on the device and is available to all privacy conscious Proton Mail business customers as an add-on:

Proton Scribe helps users improve their productivity by composing emails based on a prompt, redrafting to better convey a message, and proofreading content. No user data or information is used to train Proton Scribe, and no data is shared with third parties.

Proton says it’s rolling out to web and desktop apps.

Earlier this month, the country’s data protection authority (ANPD) issued a temporary measure banning Meta from training its AI models on Brazilian personal data over privacy and transparency concerns.

Like it did following similar constraints with the EU, Meta has now decided to suspend its generative AI tools in the region while it works to find a resolution with ANPD, according to Reuters.