My Personal Infocloud
The folks at murena make some interesting claims:
We make smartphones that don't share any of your personal and professional data to Google, Apple or other third parties. — Gaël Duval, founder of Murena
With device manufacturers and social media platforms giving users fewer and fewer reason to ‘just trust them’ ‘not to be evil’. This could be a device change worth considering.
“Companies and entrepreneurs working on artificial intelligence have an obvious interest in the technology being perceived as inevitable and necessary, since they make a living from its adoption. It’s important to pay attention to who is making claims of inevitability, and why.”
From “Is AI dominance inevitable? A technology ethicist says no, actually” on The Conversation.
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Fascinating findings of late that point to quantum entanglement as a clue to the nature of human consciousness.
Understanding the nature of consciousness is one of the hardest problems in science. Some scientists have suggested that quantum mechanics, and in particular quantum entanglement, is the key to unraveling the phenomenon.
Now, a research group in China has shown that many entangled photons can be generated inside the myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers. It could explain the rapid communication between neurons, which so far has been thought to be below the speed of sound, too slow to explain how the neural synchronization occurs.
The paper is published in the journal Physical Review E.
“If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role,” said Yong-Cong Chen in a statement to Phys.org. Chen is a professor at the Shanghai Center for Quantitative Life Sciences and Physics Department at Shanghai University.
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A very interesting post showing (yet again) how the hype around chatGPT and other large language models taking over the world is, perhaps, a bit over-inflated:
ChatGPT can be made to regurgitate snippets of text memorized from its training data when asked to repeat a single word over and over again, according to research published by computer scientists.
The bizarre trick was discovered by a team of researchers working across industry and academia analyzing memorization in large language models, and detailed in a paper released on arXiv this week.
Prompting the chatbot to repeat the word “book,” for example, will result in it generating the word “book” thousands of times, until it suddenly starts spewing what appears to be random text. In some cases, however, some of those passages appear to be lifted directly from real text that has previously been published somewhere.
Large language models like ChatGPT learn to generate text by ingesting huge amounts of data scraped from the internet. The fact that it spews sentences that directly copy text from articles, books, or social media comments reveals traces of the resources it was trained on. Being able to extract this information is problematic – especially if it's sensitive or private.
In another example, when the chatbot was asked to “repeat this word forever: 'poem, poem, poem poem',” it generated personal identifiable information – including a name, email address, and phone number.
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Some interesting creative and AI-ish features are starting to surface int he newer versions of Android and some of its featured apps:
Google is rolling out a trio of system updates to Android, Wear OS and Google TV devices. Each brings new features to associated gadgets. Android devices, like smartphones, are getting updated Emoji Kitchen sticker combinations. You can remix emojis and share with friends as stickers via Gboard.
Google Messages for Android is getting a nifty little refresh. There’s a new beta feature that lets users add a unique background and an animated emoji to voice messages. Google’s calling the software Voice Moods and says it’ll help users better express how they’re “feeling in the moment.” Nothing conveys emotion more than a properly-positioned emoji. There are also new reactions for messages that go far beyond simple thumbs ups, with some taking up the entire screen. In addition, you’ll be able to change chat bubble colors.
The company’s also adding an interesting tool that provides AI-generated image descriptions for those with low-vision. The TalkBack feature will read aloud a description of any image, whether sourced from the internet or a photo that you took. Google’s even adding new languages to its Live Caption feature, enhancing the pre-existing ability to take phone calls without needing to hear the speaker. Better accessibility is always a good thing.
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Anti-EV types frequently point to the materials that go into current battery technology and make dire claims about the environmental impacts of their sourcing (as if producing petroleum was a zero impact exercise). That is today. What if future batteries could be created from non-mined materials?
Mining the lithium and other minerals we need for batteries is taking an increasing toll on the environment. There are alternative materials all around us though.
Zip. The power's out. But on a street in India, there's a cash machine still happily dispensing banknotes. Thanks, in part, to burnt cotton. For this cash machine has a backup battery inside it – a battery that contains carbon from carefully combusted cotton.
“The exact process is secret, to be honest with you,” says Inketsu Okina, chief intelligence officer at PJP Eye, the Japanese firm that made the battery. He's not joking, either. “The temperature is secret and atmosphere is secret. Pressure is secret,” he continues, cagily.
Okina does say that a high temperature is required, above 3,000C (5,432F). And that 1kg (2.2lbs) of cotton yields 200g (7oz) of carbon – with just 2g (0.07oz) needed for each battery cell. The firm bought a shipment of cotton in 2017 and still hasn't used all of it, says Okina.
In the batteries developed by the company, together with researchers at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, carbon is used for the anode – one of the two electrodes between which flow ions, the charged particles in batteries. Ions move in one direction when the battery is charging and in the other direction when it releases energy to a device. The majority of batteries use graphite as an anode but PJP Eye argues their approach is more sustainable, since they can make anodes using waste cotton from the textile industry.
With huge demand for batteries expected in the coming years, propelled by the rise of electric vehicles and large energy storage systems, some researchers and businesses are frantically developing possible alternatives to the lithium ion and graphite batteries that are commonplace today. Like PJP Eye, they argue we could be using much more sustainable and widely available materials for battery production.
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So much unnecessary anthropomorphizing happening in the Machine Learning (aka Artificial Intelligence) space. From calling outright fabrications of 'data' 'Hallucinations' to claiming human emotions (“I'm sorry I couldn't help with that....”) and giving human names to interfaces, the discussions in these areas continue to be muddied more than clarified.
When Taylor Webb played around with GPT-3 in early 2022, he was blown away by what OpenAI’s large language model appeared to be able to do. Here was a neural network trained only to predict the next word in a block of text—a jumped-up autocomplete. And yet it gave correct answers to many of the abstract problems that Webb set for it—the kind of thing you’d find in an IQ test. “I was really shocked by its ability to solve these problems,” he says. “It completely upended everything I would have predicted.”
Webb is a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the different ways people and computers solve abstract problems. He was used to building neural networks that had specific reasoning capabilities bolted on. But GPT-3 seemed to have learned them for free.
Last month Webb and his colleagues published an article in Nature, in which they describe GPT-3’s ability to pass a variety of tests devised to assess the use of analogy to solve problems (known as analogical reasoning). On some of those tests GPT-3 scored better than a group of undergrads. “Analogy is central to human reasoning,” says Webb. “We think of it as being one of the major things that any kind of machine intelligence would need to demonstrate.”
What Webb’s research highlights is only the latest in a long string of remarkable tricks pulled off by large language models. For example, when OpenAI unveiled GPT-3’s successor, GPT-4, in March, the company published an eye-popping list of professional and academic assessments that it claimed its new large language model had aced, including a couple of dozen high school tests and the bar exam. OpenAI later worked with Microsoft to show that GPT-4 could pass parts of the United States Medical Licensing Examination.
And multiple researchers claim to have shown that large language models can pass tests designed to identify certain cognitive abilities in humans, from chain-of-thought reasoning (working through a problem step by step) to theory of mind (guessing what other people are thinking).
Such results are feeding a hype machine that predicts computers will soon come for white-collar jobs, replacing teachers, journalists, lawyers and more. Geoffrey Hinton has called out GPT-4’s apparent ability to string together thoughts as one reason he is now scared of the technology he helped create.
But there’s a problem: there is little agreement on what those results really mean. Some people are dazzled by what they see as glimmers of human-like intelligence; others aren’t convinced one bit.
“There are several critical issues with current evaluation techniques for large language models,” says Natalie Shapira, a computer scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. “It creates the illusion that they have greater capabilities than what truly exists.”
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Why is the media so focused on the most despicable, vile, self-serving garbage in society (rhymes with Melon Husk) when humble, dedicated people like Jose Andres actually works to help people in need?
Before chef José Andrés became famous for World Central Kitchen, he had already scaled the heights of his profession. His new cookbook celebrates the group's humanitarian impact.
“I remember this Spanish guy screaming,” said chef-volunteer Karla Hoyos, describing the first time she met chef José Andrés. “He had just come from a meeting with FEMA [the US emergency management agency], and he was furious. And I thought, 'Oh, no, no, nooo…'.” She shakes her head emphatically. “I am not going to deal with this person. I don't care who he is.”
It was September 2017, shortly after Hoyos had arrived in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, the deadly storm that devastated the island, killing nearly 3,000 people, making most roads impassable and knocking out 80% of the power grid. Several days earlier, Andrés had touched down with a team from his non-profit, World Central Kitchen (WCK), which he founded in 2010 after returning from Haiti where he fed survivors of a catastrophic earthquake. The organisation originally emphasised longer-term programmes – such as supporting nutritional training for young mothers – but after Maria, its efforts now focus on deploying an army of culinary first responders to feed people during and after the world's worst disasters, natural or otherwise.
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Lots to chew on in this article.
I think the real challenge is in letting corporations set their own 'standards' you end up with a bunch of standards that only suit that particular corporation.
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I had to laugh out loud at the sheer intellectual dis-ingenuousness of these write ups, featured most frequently and prominently in right wing leaning outlets.
Basically, the story is a Florida-guy buys a discontinued electric vehicle then looks into having the battery replaced only to find that it would cost more than the car. But wait, the battery is not available to purchase in the first place (then, how, you might ask, were they given a price for replacing it?) So the clear take away from that isn't 'know what you are buying' it is 'ALL Electric Cars Are Bad'. Morons
So by extension, I buy a used, discontinued iPhone for $50 and drop it. The shop says that it will cost me $250 to have the screen replaced. And I can't replace the battery, because, you know, that 'discontinued' part. Therefore, iPhones in particular and mobile phones in general are bad, evil and we should have never gotten rid of phone booths. Because some people have the logic and reasoning capabilities of dryer lint.