Pause on AI: No AGI for next six months 😱

Hey there 👋

The past week has witnessed an interesting turn of events in the world of artificial intelligence, as prominent AI advocates such as Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio, Gary Marcus, and over a thousand other influential figures have united to sign a petition calling for a temporary six-month halt on the training of large AI models. This initiative aims to prioritize safety and foster responsible AI development.

Despite these concerted efforts to curb AI advancement, the field continues to thrive. This week alone, more than 50 research papers were published, accompanied by significant model updates and announcements from both corporate and academic research institutions. Additionally, over 100 new AI tools were introduced to the market. Kudos to the AI community for their relentless progress! 👏

With that said lets dive deep into this week’s issue. It covers:

1. Latest Developments 🌍

2. News from the Industry 🧑‍🏫

3. Tools of the Trade ⚒️

4. Hot Takes 🔥

5. AI Meme of the Week 🤡

Latest Developments 🌍

Our Pick 👌

Artificial Visual Cortex (VC-1): A new approach called adaptive skill coordination (ASC) that allows robots to learn from videos of human interactions with the real world and simulated interactions within photorealistic simulated worlds.

• OpenFlamingo by LAION: Open-source framework for large multimodal models, includes OpenFlamingo-9B and evaluation benchmark.

• Mind-control Robots a Reality: Thought-controlled biosensor tech using graphene sensors for defense and manufacturing.

• Dolly by Databricks: Open-source, low-cost language model for accessible LLMs, similar to ChatGPT.

• PRESTO dataset: Google's multilingual dataset for parsing realistic task-oriented dialogues.

• Visual Language Maps: 3D environment reconstructions using pre-trained visual-language embeddings for robot navigation.

• ChatGPT or Grammarly: ChatGPT effective for grammar but inferior to Grammarly, tends to over-correct.

• Make-It-3D: High-quality 3D content from single images via two-stage optimization and 2D diffusion model.

• DreamBooth3D: Text-to-3D generation for personalized models with text-driven modifications.

• Anti-DreamBooth: Defense system against malicious text-to-image synthesis by adding image noise.

• LiGO (Linear Growth Operator): Accelerates transformer training by growing pretrained transformers, saves computational cost.

• AnnoLLM: A method to use LLMs as better crowdsourced annotators, and demonstrate its effectiveness for different tasks.

• Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: GPT-4 experiments hint at general intelligence and early AGI potential.

• TaskMatrix.AI: AI ecosystem connecting foundation models with APIs for diverse tasks.

• GPT4All by Nomic.ai: Chatbot with 800k prompt-response pairs, open access to data, code, and weights.

• Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems: Promising performance in medical challenges, useful in education and clinical practice.

News from the Industry 🧑‍🏫

Our Pick 👌

Anthropic has released the new Claude App for Slack, an AI assistant that can summarize threads, answer questions, and increase productivity during work.

• Microsoft has released Security Copilot which combines GPT-4 and security tech to empower cyber defenders.

• ChatGPT got banned in Italy over data breach concerns by data protection authorities. OpenAI has 20 days to comply.

• Watch Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI talk about GPT-4, ChatGPT and the future of AI in conversation with Lex Fridman. 

• ChatGPT + Wolfram Alpha integration enables nontrivial computations and curated knowledge..

• Replit and Google Cloud partnered to advance generative AI for software development.

• Zoom is evolving Zoom IQ, the AI-powered smart companion with features like summarizing chat threads, organizing ideas, and drafting content.

• Elon Musk and top AI researchers have called for a pause on the development of large-scale AI systems, citing fears over the "profound risks to society and humanity" they pose.

• ChatGPT Plugin but opensource!

• Luma Video-to-3D API offers NeRF 3D modeling at $1 per scene/object.

• Sourcegraph has open-sourced Cody, an AI-enabled editor assistant that fetches context from codebases and generates code.

• ChatGPT had an outage caused by a bug that allowed some users to see another user's chat history and payment information.

• Perplexity.ai: Raises $25.6M Series A, launches iPhone app for quick, accurate answers.

• Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI have found that Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) could impact the careers of accountants, interpreters, writers, and nearly 20% of the US workforce.

• GitHub Job Cuts: Lays off 100+ engineers in India amid weakening market conditions.

Tools of the Trade ⚒️

Our Pick 👌

AskYourPDF: Upload your PDFs, and instantly transform them into conversational chatbots that are just as knowledgeable as the content they're based on. Engage with your documents like never before, and extract valuable insights with ease.

• Wonder Studio: Automates animation, lighting, and composition of CG characters into live-action scenes using single-camera footage.

• Mindtrove: Simplifies complex business data analysis, providing instant insights and visualizations to streamline decision-making.

• Beakr AI: AI experimentation platform, allows users to combine LLMs, track latency, and access API for dynamic templates and prompt testing.

• Crystal: Provides personality-based guidance for sales, recruitment, and executive teams to improve communication and relationship-building.

• Abney: Produce written assets for podcasts including episode notes, titles, show posts, and social descriptions.

• Illustroke: Text to SVG AI tool that creates stunning vector illustrations from text prompts.

• Pickaxe: Build and deploy custom AI applications with various generative models and an intuitive no-code interface.

• Adrenaline: Helps understand codebases through Github import and code snippet.

• Reflect: Note-taking app with GPT-4 integration and instant syncing across devices for frictionless thought capture and easy recall.

• Hey GPT: iOS shortcut for replacing “hey Siri” with “hey GPT”.

• ChatGPT Wrapper: ChatGPT that is not affected by ChatGPT outages as long as the OpenAI platform services are functioning.

• Mini Course Generator: Create a comprehensive mini-course using AI with title, questions, images, videos, and more.

• FlowGPT: Multi-threaded chatbot tool for managing, improving, and researching conversations with instant access to documents.

• Wavel.ai: All-in-one AI-powered video assistant to generate human-like voiceovers, subtitles, and captions, edit and dub videos.

• ArxivGPT: A Chrome plug-in that summarizes arXiv papers, providing key insights, and allows asking follow-up questions.

Hot Takes🔥

AI Meme of the Week 🤡

That’s all for this week!

Will see you next Saturday with more such content. Don’t forget to subscribe and give your feedback below.

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