AI Secrets is your new weekly update on how AI is changing our everyday lives. Our experts will keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we are focussing on Google.Share this with anyone you want to keep up to date.
Geoffrey Hinton Does Not Admire The Bard đĄ âŻď¸
It seems every week is a huge week for AI, but usually we donât see them coming. This week is different because Google I/O is on the schedules; the tech giantâs annual developer conference is always big news, but this yearâs jamboree is being played for much higher stakes than usual. Google employees are used to setting the agenda in Silicon Valley, but now they seem unable to agree on what the agenda is, and the firmâs internal disarray is causing a great deal of embarrassment.
A further blow to Googleâs reputation came this week as Geoffrey Hinton quit the company, citing concerns over the existential threats posed to humanity by AI. Hinton is one of three widely acclaimed âGodfathers of AIâ - thanks to his pioneering work developing neural networks - and was the last of the three to speak out on this issue. His fellow godfathers, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, have both expressed concerns about future risks - Bengio even signed the infamous Future Of Life open letter calling for a development moratorium - but Hintonâs employment with Google prevented him from speaking out before this week. He cited his concerns about long-term AI safety as the major motivator for quitting in an interview with The New York Times, but also expressed his concerns that Google was losing sight of its safeguarding responsibilities in the rush to catch up with competitors such as OpenAI and Microsoft. In Hintonâs words, Google is no longer acting as a âproper wardenâ.
Hintonâs dramatic exit is big news in itself, but his concerns also highlight a wider problem at the Mountain View firm. Google has been hoovering up top AI talent for the last decade, and has expensively assembled an allstar team of developers and researchers. Few could have predicted that this would be less of a help than a hindrance, but Google now finds itself with a bench of superstars who it needs to perform mundane, commercially beneficial tasks such as âintegrate AI into our productivity appsâ. The superstars, meanwhile, are far more concerned about humanityâs future than the short-term battle with ChatGPT, and motivating them to deliver incremental improvements to Googleâs workplace products may prove tricky.
Quite how this will all play out over the next week is anybodyâs guess, and it seems all outcomes are possible; will we see a carefully controlled display of thoughtful brand messaging, a public bunfight between warring factions, or just another random Bard hallucination that wipes billions of dollars off of Googleâs share price? Whichever way the cards fall, theyâre likely to have major implications for AIâs development for some time to come; while we wait, why not take a look at our in-depth guide to prompting Google Bard?
Special Limited Edition!
Puzzle lovers will adore this unique custom cube. Each of its six sides features a different design. With 43 quintillion unique positions itâs more complex than any spy story! Get ready to have fun and be challenged.
Lawyers representing Elon Musk failed to convince a judge that comments made by him in 2016 were inadmissible because he could not remember making them and they may have been deepfaked.
Stanford students have built glasses that marry speech recognition tech with on-screen displays and AI technology, creating an efficient and discrete AI copilot for job interviews and dates.
Workplace chat app Slack is the latest company to announce AI integration, promising âAI powered conversation summaries and assistanceâ to help enliven the online worldâs watercooler moments.
Chinese videogame developer Tencent has announced a forthcoming âdigital human production platformâ: Give them a few minutes of video and audio, and they will build you a deepfake AI avatar.
Microsoft has made Bing Search available to all users and announced a raft of new features for the service, including more audio and video responses and a beefed up Image Creator service.
In this fascinating account OpenAI staffers give the inside story on the phenomenon that is ChatGPTâs unassuming launch, and the unexpected rush of hype and publicity that swiftly followed.
