AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning

At a dinner party the other night, a very accomplished business person told a story about how he and his wife were certain that their devices were listening to their conversations. “I was talking to my wife about a pair of designer shoes that she wanted to purchase, and not 10 minutes later while she was doing some online research for work, she saw an ad for that exact pair of shoes. She hadn’t searched for the shoes; the ad just appeared. Clearly, our computers or our phones are listening.” Some people nodded in agreement, and others began to chime in. Continue Reading →

Twitter is facing a lawsuit from the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), which is seeking more than $250 million in damages for alleged copyright infringement. The NMPA, representing artists such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, argues that Twitter profits from the use of unlicensed music in user-generated content. Continue Reading →

Sir Paul McCartney has announced the creation of a new Beatles song with the help of AI. Using a technique called "stem separation," the technology was employed to isolate John Lennon's voice from an old demo. Continue Reading →

Amazon is testing a new feature that uses generative AI to summarize customer reviews. It will provide a brief overview of what shoppers liked and disliked about a product, with a disclaimer that the summary is "AI-generated from the text of customer reviews." This could be great for customers who find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of reviews on popular products… or not. Continue Reading →

I read a white paper on the plane about a new small-scale language model called SimPLE (Simple Pseudo-Label Editing) that outperforms larger counterparts by up to 500 times in certain language understanding tests. Continue Reading →

Adobe has launched Firefly for Enterprise, a platform that enables users to generate images or copy from text-based descriptions. Accessible via either the standalone Firefly application, Adobe's Creative Cloud, or Adobe Express, the AI model can be trained with branded company assets to maintain brand consistency in content generation. Continue Reading →

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has introduced a new AI tool: the Jetpack AI Assistant. This plug-in is designed to generate and edit text, offering capabilities such as summarizing blog posts into headlines, adjusting the tone of text, and generating entire blog posts from a single prompt. Continue Reading →

You've probably read about the "existential threat" posed by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It's a dark future where super-intelligent machines outsmart us and cause humanity to go extinct. We may be mesmerized by this high-stakes narrative, but we’re also being misled. The real threats of AI are already here, lurking in our everyday digital experiences. While tech titans and the media tout a dystopian AI future, they’re drawing our attention away from the AI and related data privacy issues we need to solve right now. Continue Reading →

There's a news story (that will not go away) about a simulated "killer" drone that turns on its operator. You can read about it here. The short answer is that the drone was inadvertently programmed to optimize for an unexpected or unwanted result. Continue Reading →

Keiko Nagaoka, Japanese minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology has reaffirmed that it is legal to use the copyrighted work for information analysis regardless of the method, regardless of the content -- basically reaffirming that copyright will not be enforced on data used in AI training. Continue Reading →