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- 🤖 Elon's AI plan
“Come with me if you want to live.” Welcome to the AllThingsAI newsletter. Let’s get into it.
Breakdown:
Elon really wants to save us from AI. Apparently.
18 billion reasons open-source AI is showing promise.
Apple could use AI to make Siri actually useful.
Google is pushing back against AI political ads.
Fake Drake wants a Grammy.
Plus, some great AI tools for you to check out.
Source: Leonardo AI. Prompt: An illustration of a robot Elon Musk.
Musk’s mission to save us all
I just told you how Elon Musk’s X is opening the door to using tweets and public information to train AI, and how I thought that could be even make its way into the ultra-billionaire’s xAI.
Well, it seems that hunch was right. But of course Musk being Musk, he isn’t stopping there.
According to Walter Isaacson, the famed biographer who is working on a book about Musk, the man has ambitions to give xAI access to footage captured by cameras on Tesla vehicles.
As Isaacson explains it in a piece for Time, the data from Tesla and X could teach “machines to navigate in physical space and to answer questions in natural language.”
If you’re thinking that sounds like the basis for a robot, well, yeah - Tesla has been working on those for some time. And while this all reads like an origin story for SkyNet from The Terminator, Isaacson suggests Musk’s intentions are good.
The writer recollects a conversation with Musk: “What can be done to make AI safe?” Musk asked. “I keep wrestling with that. What actions can we take to minimize AI danger and assure that human consciousness survives?”
Isaacson goes on to frame Musk’s AI efforts through that lens; this is his way of saving humanity from other people’s AI.
But Isaacson also notes Musk wants to eventually tie his myriad of companies together, which, presumably, would make data-sharing across those organizations even simpler. Considering Musk’s companies include Starlink internet satellites and Neuralink brain implants, it doesn’t take a polymath to see the moral complications that could arise.
Why it matters:
Right now, large language models (LLMs) are trained on websites and books. In the not-to-distant future, will we need to pay extra attention to terms and conditions in case LLMs are learning from the thoughts in our heads?
Results from our last poll: Is it useful to see how LLMs generate content?
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ✅ Yes. Understanding LLM decisions builds confidence in how they work.
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ❎ No. Rudimentary explanations aren't enough to fully trust LLM outputs.
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Falcon flying high
While companies such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI are making a lot of noise in the LLM space, the open-source community has not been resting on its laurels.
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has rolled out Falcon 180B on HuggingFace.
Professed to be the “largest openly available” LLM, it features 180 billion parameters (hence the name), and was trained on 3.5 trillion tokens provided by TII.
HuggingFace claims Falcon 180B “tops the leaderboard for (pre-trained) open-access models,” and holds its own against Google’s PaLM-2.
Why it matters:
Falcon 180B is seemingly extremely capable, outpacing OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 - though not quite GPT-4. And considering this is an open-source project, it’s an encouraging sign for the future of the technology.
Stories worth reading
The Information (paywall) | Apple Boosts Spending to Develop Conversational AI
Apple is reportedly spending millions of dollars a day to develop a suite of AI tools, covering everything from LLMs to image generation tools. The article suggests Apple could use an LLM to handle AppleCare customer service interactions, while another might make Siri more useful. (Tim Cook, if you’re reading this, please do this last one - we’ve waited long enough.)
Google is cracking down on political ads that contain AI elements. Starting in November, the tech behemoth will require marketers associated with campaigns to make clear when artificially generated images, video, and audio have been used. The move comes after some US political organizations put AI content in their ads without disclosing it.
Ghostwriter, the pseudonymous creator of “Heart on my Sleeve,” an AI generated track that went viral, is now chasing a Grammy. The song, which features a fake Drake and pretend Weeknd, has been put forward to the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences under the categories of best rap song and song of the year. And apparently the Academy is good with it because “Heart on my Sleeve” was written by a human. (Better luck next year, ChatGPT.)
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