Keeping up with an industry that changes as quickly as AI can be a challenge. Until AI can do it for you, here's a roundup of recent buzz in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments that we wouldn't have covered on our own.
By the way, TechCrunch will be launching an AI newsletter soon. Stay tuned. In the meantime, we're increasing the semi-regular cadence of our AI columns from twice a month to weekly, so keep an eye out for upcoming issues.
In other AI news this week, OpenAI announced it has signed a deal with emerging publishing giant News Corp to train a generative AI model developed by OpenAI on News Corp-branded articles. The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and MarketWatch. The deal, which the companies described as “multi-year” and “historic,” also gives OpenAI the right to display News Corp's name within apps like ChatGPT in response to certain questions, presumably when the answers are taken in whole or in part from News Corp publications.
Doesn't this sound like a win for both sides? News Corp will receive a $250 million+ cash infusion for its content at a time when the outlook for the media industry is even bleaker than usual (Generative AI threatens to make things worse, drastically reducing referral traffic for publications). Meanwhile, OpenAI, which is battling copyright holders on multiple fronts over fair use, now has one less expensive legal battle to worry about.
But the devil is in the details: Note that the deal with News Corp. has an end date, as does all of OpenAI's content license agreements.
That, in itself, is not malice on OpenAI's part. Perpetual licenses are unusual in the media, given the incentives for all parties involved to leave the contract open to renegotiation. However, teeth It's a bit suspicious, given recent comments from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the declining importance of training data for AI models.
“Definitely,” Altman said on the “All In” podcast. [doesn’t] I think there will be an arms race. [training] “Once the models get smart enough, at some point, they don't need more data, at least in training,” he said, telling MIT Technology Review's James O'Donnell that he's “optimistic” that OpenAI, and the AI industry as a whole, “will find a way out of this.” [needing] The training data continues to grow.”
The models aren't very “smart” yet, so OpenAI is reportedly experimenting with synthetic training data and scouring the depths of the web and YouTube for organic sources. do not To make any leaps of improvement, we need a lot more data. What will publishers do, especially after OpenAI has scraped their entire archives?
My point is that publishers and other content owners with whom OpenAI has worked are merely short-term partners of convenience. Through licensing agreements, OpenAI effectively neutralizes its legal threats (at least until the courts decide how fair use applies in the context of AI training), gets to celebrate a PR victory; publishers get much-needed capital; and work on AI that could seriously harm those publishers continues.
Other notable AI-related news in the past few days include:
- Spotify's AI DJ: Spotify's addition of an AI DJ feature that gives users personalized music selections was the company's first step toward an AI future, and now Spotify is developing a Spanish-speaking DJ alternative, Sala writes.
- Meta’s AI Council: Meta announced the formation of an AI advisory board on Wednesday, but there's a big problem: The board's members are all white and male, which seems a bit off-base, given that it's marginalized groups that are most vulnerable to flaws in AI technology.
- FCC Proposes AI Disclosure: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed requiring disclosure of AI-generated content in political ads, but not banning it. Devin has the full story.
- Answer calls with your voice: Truecaller, the widely known caller ID service, will soon be allowing its customers to answer calls at home using an AI-powered assistant. Own A new partnership with Microsoft has brought voice recognition technology to the table.
- Humane is considering selling: Humane, the company behind the much-hyped Ai Pin that launched last month to poor reviews, is looking for a buyer. The company is reportedly looking at a price between $750 million and $1 billion, and is in the early stages of a sale process.
- TikTok Introduces Generative AI: TikTok is the latest tech company to bring generative AI into its advertising business, as the company announced on Tuesday that it will release its new TikTok Symphony AI suite for brands. The tools will help marketers write scripts, produce videos and enhance their current advertising assets, Aisha reports.
- Seoul AI Summit: At the AI Safety Summit in Seoul, South Korea, government officials and AI industry executives agreed to apply basic safety measures to the rapidly changing field and to establish an international safety research network.
- Microsoft's AI PC: During the keynote address at its annual Build developer conference this week, Microsoft announced a new lineup of Windows machines (and Surface laptops) that the company is calling “Copilot+ PCs,” along with generative AI-powered features like “Recall,” which helps users find apps, files, and other content they've viewed in the past.
- OpenAI's voice problems: OpenAI is removing one of ChatGPT's text-to-speech voices after users found the voice, called Sky, eerily similar to Scarlett Johansson, who has previously played AI characters. Johansson herself has also released a statement saying she has hired a lawyer to investigate the Sky voice and get precise details about its development.
- UK Autonomous Driving Law: The UK's regulations on self-driving cars have now been made official with Royal Assent, the final approval any legislation must pass before becoming law.
More Machine Learning
Here's some interesting AI-related research this week: Renowned researcher Shyan Gollakota from the University of Washington is making waves again with his noise-canceling headphones that block out everything except the voice of the person you want to hear. You put the headphones on, look at the person you want to hear, and press a button, which samples the voice coming from that particular direction and uses it to power a hearing rejection engine that filters out background noise and other voices.
The researchers, led by Gollakota and some graduate students, called the system “Target Speech Hearing” and unveiled it at a conference in Honolulu last week, and it's a useful feature both as an accessibility tool and an everyday option that's sure to be one big tech company will include in the next generation of premium headphones.
Chemists at EPFL are apparently tired of performing 18 tasks in particular, so they're instead training a model, called ChemCrow, to perform them—not the actual tasks like titrating or pipetting, but the planning tasks like reviewing the literature or planning reaction chains. Of course, ChemCrow doesn't just do all that for the researchers, it also acts as a natural language interface to the whole set, with search and calculation options when needed.
The lead author of the paper introducing ChemCrow says that ChemCrow is “analogous to human experts with access to computers and databases,” i.e. like a graduate student. So they can work on more important things and skip the boring parts. It reminds me a bit of Coscientist. As for the name, “because crows are known to be good with tools.” Enough!
Robotics experts at Disney Research are hard at work making their creations move more realistically without having to animate every movement by hand. A new paper being presented at SIGGRAPH in July shows a combination of procedurally generated animation and an artist interface for fine-tuning it, all working on a real bipedal robot called Groot.
The idea is to let artists create a type of bouncy, stiff, choppy movement, and engineers don't have to implement every single detail, just make sure it fits within certain parameters. The proposed system can then essentially improvise precise movements and execute them instantly. You'll probably see this at Disney World in a few years…
