Quantification of information processing capacity in living brain as physical reservoir

Delve into the ways scientists measure the brain's information processing capability, a discovery that might contribute to the development of more efficient AI systems.

The introduction of Orca by Microsoft AI, a 13 billion parameter model that learns explanation traces from GPT4, represents a significant breakthrough in advancing instruction-tuned models

Orca may surpass existing models through explanation tuning, scaling tasks and instructions, and rigorous #evaluation, marking a substantial leap forward in AI system capabilities.

Incorporating step-by-step explanations in training processes holds promise for fully unlocking the potential of large foundation models and driving progress in natural language processing.

At its annual Google I/O conference, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, demonstrated how their large language model (LLM) called Bard could describe X-rays.

You just need to ask the AI system the right question like “What is on this picture” or “Can you write me a report analyzing this chest x-ray?”.

Later this summer, Med-PaLM 2, an LLM with 540 billion parameters and knowledge from scientific papers and websites, will be made available to a select group of customers using Google’s Cloud.

This development highlights the importance of physicians mastering the ability to formulate commands (prompts) to communicate seamlessly with artificial intelligence. Prompts refer to the AI language that allows us to ask AI to perform specific tasks, such as describing a mammogram or generating a creative image in a chosen style.

LLMs are not AGIs and lack moral agency, but seem to be good at predicting human moral judgments ... In Mindplex article reviews this informally.

Wysa launched its AI-powered chatbot that helps people manage their mental health long before ChatGPT fueled enthusiasm for technologies that seem to think and talk like humans

Wysa’s interactive bot uses techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy to help people manage anxiety, stress, and other common issues.

But under the hood it doesn’t share ChatGPT’s DNA: The bot uses natural language processing to interpret input from users, but it always delivers one of its pre-written and vetted responses. No generative responses means no potentially unsafe content.

It's a formula that’s been working so far for Wysa, which announced a Series B funding round last year and says 6 million people have tried its app. Wysa is freely available to consumers with paid content options, and is also used by the U.K.'s National Health Service and U.S. employer groups and insurers.

Stanford researchers has been evaluated by organizations that build language models.

In the same way that model scores drive model improvement, so model scores will drive improvements in development and deployment practices.

They then found substantial overlap with the EU AI Act, and thus we initially scoring based on it. But this is just the beginning - there are many aspects not covered by the Act.

A fresh review on the generative AI in brain imaging, with some nice infographics explaining different approaches.

Meta wants companies to make money off Its open-source AI, in challenge to Google

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his deputies want other companies to freely use and profit from new artificial intelligence software Meta is developing, a decision that could have big implications for other AI developers and businesses that are increasingly adopting it.

Meta is working on ways to make the next version of its open-source large-language model—technology that can power chatbots like ChatGPT—available for commercial use.

The move could prompt a feeding frenzy among AI developers eager for alternatives to proprietary software sold by rivals Google and OpenAI. It would also indirectly benefit Meta’s own AI development.

Terence Tao reflecting on GPT-4 in the AI Anthology coordinated by Eric Horvitz:

"I expect, say, 2026-level AI, when used properly, will be a trustworthy co-author in mathematical research, and in many other fields as well."

Deutsche Bank applies for digital asset license amid growth push.

Voice commanded essay copilot

Inspiring demo! Sit back and talk to your computer with high-level instructions, collaborating on a larger document.

OpenAI is considering launching a marketplace in which customers could sell AI models they customize for their own needs to other businesses

Such an appstore could be a version of the OpenAI app store, offering businesses a way to access advanced large-scale models that can, for example, detect financial fraud in online trading transactions or answer questions about specific markets with up-to-date information.

Creating such an app store can also be a hedge against future competitors that is not dominated by any single AI model.

It is not clear if OpenAI will charge a commission on these sales or otherwise generate revenue from the market.

Stat Health brings in $5.1M for its in-ear wearable to track cerebral blood flow

J2 Ventures, BonAngels Venture Partners and a diverse group of angel investors backed the company through the seed funding.

Stat Health also received grant funding from the U.S. Air Force.

Stat Health designed its wearable to help understand symptoms like dizziness, brain fog, headaches, fainting and fatigue upon standing.

These common symptoms can indicate illnesses like long COVID and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). They also may signal myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and other orthostatic syndromes.
According to Stat Health, reduced blood flow to the brain upon standing causes the symptoms for these illnesses.

The company clinically tested its offering at Johns Hopkins, and it was peer-reviewed in the March 2023 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC). Stat Health said it demonstrated the ability to predict fainting minutes before it happens.

Carve out a few hours to learn streamlit.io
Powerful for rapid prototyping, interactive visualization.
It's a hammer and you'll start seeing a lot of nails.

Are we at the beginning of a new era of small models? Here is newest LLM trained fully at Microsoft Research

phi-1 achieves 51% on HumanEval w. only 1.3B parameters & 7B tokens training dataset.

Any other >50% HumanEval model is >1000x bigger (e.g., WizardCoder from last week is 10x in model size and 100x in dataset size).

Corporates Using NFTs - Are They More Than a Passing Fad - Deloitte

NFTs, and the distributed blockchain networks behind them, represent a breakthrough in digital rights management as well as digital representations of assets. Here are just some of the other possible breakthroughs NFTs could drive: 

1 Building a bridge between the digital and physical worlds to authenticate and provide evidence of a transfer

2 Democratising ownership of digital collectibles—for example, the creation of new ways to monetise art, photographs, music, intellectual property (IP), and more

3 Selling digital items—homes, high-end sneakers, streetwear, and more—for use with avatars in gaming and online worlds

4 Developing “super wallets” that allow an NFT owner to keep a verified record of all licenses and rights, along with product warranties, event tickets, access passes for secure locations for work or leisure, and more 

5 Securing the ticketing industry against fraud, providing a percentage of secondary sales revenue to performers or venues, and creating unique keepsakes

6 Extending and monetising brands in new ways for both existing and new customer bases

7 Offering utility services—for instance, serving as a VIP card granting access to a secret concert, membership in an exclusive community, or special discounts on products.

CVPR 2023 announced the Best Paper Awards! It's the world's most prominent computer vision conference, with citation impact just below Nature & Science.

- Best Paper 1: VisProg uses GPT to generate executable code that parses an image and does effective visual reasoning, even though GPT itself is blind. Similar principle as Voyager (executable code to play Minecraft).

VisProg: prior.allenai.org/projects/vispr…
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2211.11559
Another paper with similar high-level idea is called ViperGPT, worth checking out: arxiv.org/abs/2303.08128

- Best Paper 2: Unified Autonomous Driving (UniAD), a comprehensive framework that incorporates full-stack driving tasks in one network.

Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving: opendrivelab.github.io/UniAD/
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2212.10156

- Best Paper Honorable Mention: DynIBaR, a new state-of-the-art on synthesizing novel views from a monocular video of a complex dynamic scene.

DynIBaR, Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering: dynibar.github.io
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2211.11082

- Best Student Paper: a new 3D point cloud registration technique that finds the optimal pose to align a pair of point clouds.

3D Registration with Maximal Cliques: arxiv.org/abs/2305.10854

- Best Student Paper Honorable Mention: a diffusion model that can be customized to a particular subject with only 3-5 example images.

DreamBooth: dreambooth.github.io
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2208.12242

Did you know 1/3 of the world uses 'tonal' languages? For example, the Mandarin word "Ma" may have 4 different meanings based on intonation.

Current english-based speech BCI decoding models could hardly detect tonal differences because they are produced by subtle movements of the larynx.

Published this week, a large consortium in Shanghai came together to overcome this shortcoming.

They also published their ECoG dataset.

Many African, Asian and South American nations are now a step closer to speech restoration.

EY have created a playbook for DAOs - a new way to launch and run companies in Web3 (and Web2.5)

DAO treasuries now have around $25Bn in funding available to build new businesses, or fund growth of their platforms and products.

This report covers everything you need to know to understand the world of DAOs, how they create value, and what it takes to launch one. Including:

- History of DAOs (1991 to today)
- Statistics on the growth of DAOs and DAO members
- Case studies of Web3 and Web2 participation in DAOs
- Key characteristics of a DAO
- Classifications of DAOs (pooling funds, spending time, shared interest)
- DAO value drivers
- Critical success factors for DAOs

Wow! Inflection-1 is a new best-in-class LLM powering Pi, outperforming GPT-3.5, Llama and PALM-540B on major benchmarks commonly used for comparing LLMs.

$1 billion AI venture fund offers elusive Nvidia chips to win deals

Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, a pair of founders turned startup investors, set the venture capital world abuzz last week by announcing a novel tactic to win over
founders: offering them access to a huge number of free servers equipped with the most advanced chips for training machine-learning models.

It turns out the duo also quietly raised an investment fund with more than $1 billion in assets to invest in artificial intelligence and infrastructure startups.

Rival venture capitalists say they are closely watching Friedman, the former CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub, and Gross, a former investment partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator, to see whether their server-chip offer to founders gives them an edge in landing AI startup deals.

The chips have been in extraordinarily short supply as demand for AI has heated up.

The move by Friedman and Gross comes as funding for young AI startups has ballooned, especially for those developing LLM that can automate tasks related to writing and software code.

Friedman and Gross said they recently acquired 2,512 Nvidia H100 server chips, which could be worth $100 million, that they said they would give to founders in exchange for equity—in addition to giving the startups capital from the duo’s venture fund.

The fund, C2 Investments, which started raising capital in the past two years, was managing assets valued at $1.1 billion as of March, according to the regulatory filing. It isn’t clear whether that figure includes the chips and servers.

Other VC firms have debated allocating part of their funds to purchasing chips to help them win deals. Spark Capital, a VC firm whose AI bets include OpenAI rival Anthropic, has discussed dedicating $50 million of the firm’s fund to providing founders with access to AI hardware, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

OpenAI turned to Microsoft for access to graphics processing unit servers in exchange for equity in the startup and a share of OpenAI’s future profits, plus access to its technology.