Google's medical AI chatbot is already being tested in hospitals

Google’s Med-PaLM 2, an AI tool designed to answer questions about medical information, has been in testing at the Mayo Clinic research hospital, among others, since April. Med-PaLM 2 is a variant of PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O in May this year. PaLM 2 is the language model underpinning Google’s Bard.

Meta commits to dedicate three engineer-years to implement the removal of the GIL from Python and fix upcoming compatibility and performance issues with it.

All this dependent on whether the Steering Council accepts PEP 703.

This is way more impactful than it sounds.

Python executes on a single thread regardless of how many CPU cores you have. Removing the notorious GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) means that Python can finally run true concurrency.

PayPal released a report about metaverse

The average metaverse user in the U.S. has money stored across 5 different metaverse platforms. And 79% of them have digital assets spread across more than one metaverse world.

Here are some key takeaways from a recent study on how money operates in the metaverse:

- In the U.S., 37.6 million people are already spending more than $28 billion a year in the metaverse.

- 95% of all survey respondents say it is very or somewhat important to be able to use a common currency across metaverse worlds.

- With the average metaverse user holding a median of $500 and an average of $7,335 in the metaverse, there's a clear need for greater security around money in the metaverse.

- 80% of metaverse users currently use cryptocurrency, and 56% of metaverse users expect their use of crypto to increase in the next 5 years.

- 84% of survey respondents say they're interested in at least one type of creating activity in the metaverse, with trading/selling digital goods being the most common type of income-generating activity.

- 95% of the survey sample believe creating in the metaverse would give them access to buyers they would not have in the real world.

It's time to acknowledge that the metaverse is the new business frontier.

Whether it's creating digital goods, building on the blockchain, or trading digital assets, there are countless opportunities to generate income and reach new audiences.

A new device to communicate with the brain using light

Construction of a Flexible optogenetic device for multisite and multiregional optical stimulation through flexible µ-LED displays on the Cerebral Cortex

Gamercraft raises $5 Million for AI-powered skill- gaming platform

⚡️The inaugural edition of the Decoding Bio snapshot, a profile 40 computational bio/chem companies, and exploration of trends in software infrastructure in bio, novel drug screening platforms, next-gene delivery modalities, and much more.

Medical chatbots proposed to be approved as medical devices. Humans next.

Llion Jones the last co-author of the Transformer paper “Attention Is All You Need” who’s still at Google, confirmed to Bloomberg that he will leave Google Japan later this month. He said he plans to start a company after taking time off.

In the intervening years, the paper’s authors have launched notable AI startups, including Cohere, AdeptAI Character AI. With Llion Jones’ departure, all 8 authors have all finally now left Google!

This week in bio:

1. 100 billion parameter protein language model (the largest ever trained), trained for 6+ months on 96 NVIDIA A100s (likely costing millions of dollars) to achieve SOTA on a range of protein optimization tasks

2. wildDISCO, a new technique for whole-body cell mapping in mouse using off-the-shelf antibody immunolabeling, enabling a new method for building cellular and structural maps in various disease states

3. adopting product management methodologies from tech to the wet lab to improve research productivity

4. an overview of different subtypes of diffusion models in generative chemistry for drug design, and a call for more rigorous evaluations beyond simplified metrics that encourage "SOTA leaderboard" climbing rather than truly moving the needle on developing more drug-like molecules

5. single-photon camera for the the non-invasive measurement of neural activity

This is HUGE. Keras launching Keras Core, a new library that brings the Keras API to JAX and PyTorch in addition to TensorFlow.

It enables you to write cross-framework deep learning components and to benefit from the best that each framework has to offer.

Claude-2, Anthropic's shot at GPT-4, has arrived

It's cheaper than GPT-4 and far stronger in reasoning & coding than its older self.

You can try it out at claude.ai

Things you should know:

1. On standard exams, it's not quite at GPT-4 yet but catching up fast compared to v1.3. Winner in bracket:
GRE verbal: 165 vs 169 (GPT-4 wins)
GRE writing: 5 vs 4 (Claude)
GRE quantitative: 154 vs 163 (GPT-4)
USMLE: ~67 vs ~85 (GPT-4)
Bar: 76.5 vs 75.7 (Claude)

2. On reasoning benchmarks,
HumanEval coding: 71.2% vs 67% (Claude wins). Meanwhile GPT-3.5 only scores 48%. Claude's coding ability has improved dramatically.
GSM-8K grade-school math: 88% vs 92% (GPT-4). Claude improves from 85.2 -> 88 vs its prior version.

3. Claude 2 (100K context) is 4-5x cheaper than GPT-4-32K! Prompt tokens cost $11 vs $60/Million, and completion costs $32 vs $120/M, assuming similar tokenization length.

4. Claude-2's knowledge cutoff is in early 2023, while GPT-4 is Sept. 2021. So it's got much fresher memory.

5. Lobotomy is very aggressive. Claude 2 is 2x better at giving harmless responses than v1.3. Anthropic worked with the Alignment Research Center (ARC) and external red teamers for safety audits.

6. 10% of training data is non-English.

7. Claude's long context means that you can upload entire papers and code files to ask for summary or bug fix.

Big caveat on the standardized exam: the prompting protocols may be very different, and there're no error bars on a large number of exams. The comparison may not be statistically significant.

Today, the European Commission has adopted a new strategy on Web 4.0 and virtual worlds to steer the next technological transition and ensure an open, secure, trustworthy, fair and inclusive digital environment for EU citizens, businesses and public administrations.

"The Web 4.0 and virtual worlds will bring benefits for health, contribute to the green transition and better anticipate natural disasters. But we need to have people at the centre and shape it according to our EU digital rights and principles, to address the risks regarding privacy or disinformation. We want to make sure Web 4.0 becomes an open, secure, trustworthy, fair and inclusive digital environment for all." - Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age.

This is HUGE. Max Hodak the founder of Science Corp introduced current revision of the science eye implant

https://science.xyz/products/vision

The United States announced the first criminal case involving attack on a smart contract operated by decentralized exchange.

AHMED, 34, of New York, New York, is charged with wire fraud and money laundering, each of which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Shakeeb Ahmed, who was a senior security engineer at an international technology company, used his expertise to defraud the exchange in solana and its users and steal approximately $9 million in cryptocurrency. After he stole the fees he never legitimately earned, AHMED had communications with the Crypto Exchange in which he decided to return all of the stolen funds except for $1.5 million if the Crypto Exchange agreed not to refer the attack to law enforcement.

Though the DEX hasn’t been named in the indictment, it may be related to the Solana-based liquidity protocol Crema Finance hack that happened at that time last year, when a thief made away with $9 million in digital assets in a flash loan attack but then returned most of the cash.

Cryptoassets. The BIS released a report entitled ‘The crypto ecosystem: key elements and risks’, which was submitted to the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors.

Highlights

This report reviews the key elements of the crypto ecosystem and assesses their structural flaws.

There are three main takeaways.

1. due to underlying economic incentives, the crypto ecosystem is characterised by congestion and high fees, which lead to fragmentation.

2. despite an original ethos of decentralisation, crypto and decentralised finance (DeFi) often feature substantial de-facto centralisation, which introduces various risks.

3. while DeFi mostly replicates services offered by the traditional financial system, it amplifies known risks.

Moreover, as DeFi does not finance activity in the real economy, its growth is driven by the speculative influx of new users, with substantial risks to investors.

The report outlines policy options to mitigate the multiple risks crypto poses to investors, the traditional financial system and the economy at large.

Roblox is coming to Meta QuestVR. Open Beta for developers coming soon on App Lab.

Elon Musk introducing xAI

This is his answer to OpenAI and competitors, built on employees who just left OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, DeepMind, etc.

The iconostasis of scientists is honorary, although somewhat strange. There are also many people on the list who are known in circles where issues of ethics and safety of AI are discussed.

Separately, it is noted that xAI is not associated with X Corp in any way, i.e. twitter. But this is a hoax, because even on the first page, all the links lead to the twitters of the participants, and not to their other pages.

a16z released a massive open-source companion AI repo on GitHub

Chatbot companions are taking off. They have a clear product-market fit.

NASA uses VR and AI to create virtual data worlds

As part of its data visualization research, the US space agency NASA is experimenting with virtual and mixed reality at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The aim is to improve the analysis and interpretation of complex data, particularly in relation to the size and distance of geological features on Mars.

Virtualitics' main product is software that combines artificial intelligence with 3D visualization. It allows users to see patterns and relationships in their data faster than is possible with traditional 2D charts.

An excellent narrative by Nandan Nilkeni on India’s Digital Transformation

«India is innovating a different model for growth. A technology-led model that is collaborative, equitable, and democratises opportunity at population scale. As wealth won’t trickle down, so we are raising the floor».