English, Mandarin and Spanish are the dominant global languages. That is likely to continue. China is a world leader in AI and has multiple firms with mandarin based LLMs.

TenCent’s WeChat platform is huge in China. It is a combination of TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, with games, banking, and shopping rolled into one. It has a huge user base without many of the data collection restrictions of US and European companies. They could definitely be a competitor

Actually, my bet would be on a non US based AI. Baidu in China is a competitor but there are less obvious choices. Hyundai recently bought robotics firm Boston Dynamics but that is just one piece of their broad based AI R&D efforts. The point is there are dozens of well funded AI efforts doing top tier cutting edge work. Any one of them could create the next “game changer”.

Google lost 100 billion In valuation after the early February release of Bard, the Google Chatbot that they previewed.

“Bard underwhelmed audiences with inaccurate responses”

https://fortune.com/2023/02/08/google-bard-ai-mistake-ad-stock-price-market-cap/amp/

I suspect both Bing and Google need to worry. There is clearly an opening for the first company that gets it right and there is no guarantee either of those companies will succeed. History has shown that disruption usually comes from smaller companies without a vested interest in the status quo. Both Bing and Google have huge investments and commitment to their current business models.

I find the whole hallucination thing fascinating. Researchers are suggesting that LLMs exhibit a theory of mind and that they construct their own machine learning model in its hidden states, the space in between the input and output layers. It is unlikely that machine consciousness would arrive fully developed. Human infants take longer to develop than other primates or mammals. It is unlikely that machine consciousness would just turn on like a switch. It would take time to develop an awareness, to integrate the internal and external worlds, to develop an identity. Are these examples of hallucinations and LLMs developing an internal model the baby steps of developing consciousness?

I agree but I also think we are on the threshold of a time of rapid scientific advancement. As an example, we’ve known about protein folding and gene function for decades so advances driven by AlphaFold or CRISPR may not qualify as disruptive discoveries but they will lead to revolutionary changes in our approach to medicine and our understanding of underlying biology. That same process is happening across multiple fields where the foundational science is understood but rapid technological advances are transforming the way that knowledge is used.

It is a variation on the glass half empty vs the glass half full nature of pessimists vs optimists. It is a debate as old as history. The optimist focuses on what it can do and is understandably impressed. The pessimist focuses on what it can’t do and proceeds to shit all over it. What matters is that that we keeping moving forward. We take so many things for granted that seemed unobtainable at one time. Think about how what goes into to turn by turn GPS navigation. It’s a standard feature in every phone. You have computer generated speech ( with different language, gender, and accent voice options) using a combination of satellites and highly detailed mapping, routing you through a city, or across a country, and making real time adjustments for traffic accidents and construction closures and being used every day by hundreds of millions of people across the globe. Take a minute to think about how amazing that really is. There was a popular book in the 1990’s called Longitude. It was the story of a guy in the 1800s that built the first sufficiently accurate clock for ships to be able to calculate their longitudinal position at sea. It was a major problem. There was a huge cash prize to whoever could solve the problem. Prior to that, ships were crossing oceans with only a guesstimate of their location. What would a sailor from that era think of people carrying a device in their pocket that could pinpoint their exact location on earth, translate languages, play music, take pictures and do everything a phone can do. I take the optimist view because I compare now to the past, not to an imagined future

Porn producers took the lead in making their films available on Videotape. The availability of at home porn created the market for VCRs. Hollywood didn’t get involved until there was enough households with VCRs to justify releasing films on tape. It’s all about market penetration

It’s not insulting to say all art is derivative. Like every human creation it’s a mashup of ideas and influences and tools that pull from the common pool of other peoples ideas and creations. The artist imbues their creation with some elements unique to themselves but even that depends on the age and culture and society they are a part of.

Yes. It will require a new response by computer security professionals.

It won’t take long for this tech to find its way into corporate life in customer service, information retrieval, information processing etc. Currently a lot of corporate information is siloed. Locating and moving information between silos requires experience and knowledge of multiple systems and features. An AI that can effectively understand verbal requests and interface with corporate systems to provide, summarize, and update information would reinvent corporate life.

It’s a mistake to view this as just a threat to unskilled labor. Yes, physical robots can replace unskilled labor in many cases but the same underlying technology will significantly impact skilled jobs. We are already seeing that. In my previous job, I was working with automated systems that replaced pharmacists and pharmacy techs. More and more legal research and documentation is being automated. The bulk of corporate white collar desk jobs that consist of shuffling and summarizing information and filtering it based on some particular knowledge set are in danger.

I would love to have this to collaborate with. I’m a mediocre musician, a shit singer, and a decent lyricist. I often have a mental idea of what I want a song to be and can build a framework but i lack the talent or the collaborators to create it into a polished piece. I can see this being the perfect addition for any wanna music creator.

What if it is based on a genre: surrealism or Impressionism or specific scenes within a genre, such as landscapes or portraits or tavern scenes? How do you determine if a generative AI work is copied or original.

Someone has been watching ancient apocalypse

The field is increasingly dominated by established tech giants so there is less opportunity for start ups. The cost of entry is high. In addition, it’s a mistake to just focus on US companies. AI research is happening globally and China, in particular, is battling the U.S. for AI supremacy.

The Turing Test was developed in the 1950’s. I suspect Alan Turing would be amazed by the progress of modern computers. He certainly never imagined a machine having access to a world wide library of the collected works of humanity. His test idea was a conversation between an evaluator and two other participants- one a machine and one a human. The evaluators job is to determine the human from the machine. By modern standards, that can be done. We’ve all heard of the Google engineer who believed his AI was conscious. The challenge now is to determine what constitutes “understanding”. AI’s can create art, engage in conversation, solve problems, manage massive amounts of information, and are increasingly challenging our ideas of what constitutes intelligence.

I see it happening and I also see intellectual property holders having a meltdown. We are seeing that now with AI art. Quite a few popular modern artists are seeing AI art that they didn’t create and don’t own but that is based on their own unique style. What happens when you can tell an AI I want to use a CoD style game engine but set in middle earth and using stormtroopers riding pterodactyls as air support. The entire world of pop culture and human history can be appropriated and repurposed for game play. It is going to challenge the concepts of ownership.

Researchers understand the importance of contextual memory and a lot of different paths are being explored by various AI researchers. Like most things related to understanding and mimicking human intelligence, it seems simple in general terms but frustratingly difficult in real terms. Humans have long and short term memory. We have sense memories of scents, and images and sounds. We attach varying levels of emotional significance to certain memories. We attach different levels of relevance and importance to different memories. We attach memories to specific places and people and times. A database of previous conversations misses all the nuances that people attach to memory. It may have some value to a chatbot but the idea as you have outlined it is not new. I am not being critical. It’s all in the implementation and I don’t know enough to vote yay or nay in your project. Good luck

Yes. The Native Americans were more evenly matched in their fighting capabilities with the Vikings than they were against the later Europeans. The later Europeans brought muskets, cannons, horses, and smallpox. For the Vikings, getting to the Americas was only half the challenge. Making it back was the other. It is also possible that having reached the Americas, the Vikings chose to stay. The locals may have welcomed them.

This is not unexpected but it is significant. It has always been tedious and time consuming to program robots via points or paths. Parallel improvements in vision systems and spatial awareness puts us on the threshold of a major revolution in robotics

It wasn’t that long ago- maybe just pre pandemic— that there was a flurry of articles on how AI had plateaued and all these huge investments weren’t producing significant improvements.

I’m less concerned with bias in targeted ads than bias in targeted news. If your average redneck engages more with stories that portray immigrants in a negative light, does the algorithm feed him more negative stories, memes, and disparaging comments of immigrants while avoiding anything that might portray immigrants in a positive light. We know it happens, but the lack of public data , research and transparency at a time when social media is being called out for amplifying social division shows a need to better understand the algorithms being used by social media to do demographic and individual targeting

My first mistake this year 😂😂😂