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AI is helping to solve communication challenges in fascinating ways. Welcome to the AllThingsAI newsletter. Let’s get into it.
Breakdown:
IBM is going to save you from COBOL.
Meta will help you understand Frenglish.
Using AI to give a woman her voice back.
AI might be able to spot Parkinson’s disease before humans.
Salesforce is showing love to Hugging Face.
Source: Stable Diffusion. Prompt: A dog and a cat talking to each other with speech bubbles above their heads.
Brewing Java
Perhaps we’ve become so used to the times in which we live, but what can seem groundbreaking one minute can quickly fall out of fashion the next. (My sympathies if you spent money on a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT.)
Unfortunately, some tech becomes so ingrained that moving on isn’t always simple - even if you want to. I mean, just ask all those sys admins still having to jerry-rig networks because of a legacy Windows XP app.
But an archaic operating system isn’t the only problem out there - sometimes it’s a programming language.
Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) dates back to the late 1950s - a time when computers were the size of vending machines (and about as smart). But as tech progressed, COBOL hitched a ride, making its way into countless organizations. And so, much like the XP situation, rather than ditching COBOL, many companies just built on top it.
But as might be expected, there fewer and fewer people working with COBOL these days; COBOL vendor Micro Focus puts the number at 2 million - which is significantly lower than the roughly 10 million coding with Java.
Now IBM says it has a fix for those that want to drag their COBOL apps into the 21st century. Code Assistant for IBM Z is an upcoming AI-powered tool that promises to translate COBOL into Java code.
According to IBM Research chief scientist Ruchir Puri, Code Assistant’s model was trained with 1.5 trillion tokens and has 20 billion parameters, which should provide for a “more efficient COBOL to Java transformation.”
TechCrunch notes the tool will be commercially available in the coming months. So can we now get some AI brains on the Windows XP situation?
Why it matters:
The cost of re-architecting legacy systems can be prohibitive, but so can the expense of maintaining them. And considering poorly cared-for networks are catnip for hackers, an AI tool that can mitigate such risks may prove to be a big deal for the more than 40,000 companies still using COBOL.
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Say what?
Meta is continuing to elbow its way into the AI arena.
After rolling out its LLaMA 2 large language model and its AudioCraft music tools, Meta is going after translations.
Meta, the company that has just shy of 4 billion users around the world, has announced SeamlessM4T, which it calls “the first all-in-one multimodal and multilingual AI translation model.” Or in lay terms, this is the kind of technology Captain Kirk would rock so he could talk with aliens.
The multimodal aspect of SeamlessM4T breaks down as follows; it can interpret speech and text, and then output it in another language - again as speech or text.
As things stand, SeamlessM4T can output almost 100 languages as text, and about 35 as speech. (No word if Klingon is covered.)
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this AI wizardry is that Meta says that, when a multilingual person swaps between languages while talking, SeamlessM4T can still keep up. It’s clear to see how this feature might be useful in countries where multiple languages are commonly spoken, or even immigrant households where someone may code-switch between their parents and siblings.
As with its previous AI models, Meta is making SeamlessM4T publicly available (this time under a research license), along with a dataset of about 270,000 hours of text and speech audio. And for those that want to give it a shot, Meta has set up a Hugging Face space here.
Why it matters:
Translation tools have existed for a while (Google Translate, Microsoft Translator), and they can be fine for dealing with foreign-language restaurant menus or working out if you just inadvertently offended someone by wishing they would fall down a well, rather than wishing them well. But with AI under-the-hood, it could be exciting to see just how far translation technology might go.
Results from our last poll | Should LLMs be free to scrape copyrighted books?
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yes - they're not recreating people's work, just learning from it 🤖
đźź©đźź©đźź©đźź©đźź©đźź© No - not without paying authors and publishersđź’°
Featured comment | “In my view, for-profit organisations shouldn't be able to generate revenue from the work of others without there being recourse for those others to share in that revenue. LLMs completely remove the link between the source data and the resulting output, thus consolidating all generated revenue to the company building the LLM.”
In the wild | Stories worth reading
The New York Times (paywall) | A Stroke Stole Her Ability to Speak at 30. AI Is Helping to Restore It Years Later.
Ann Johnson suffered a major stroke at the age of 30. Now 48, Johnson has spent much of the last two decades partially paralyzed and unable to speak. But Johnson is participating in some groundbreaking AI research that utilizes a brain implant and a digital avatar to give back her voice.
The researchers involved have created a clone of Johnson’s voice using footage from her wedding. Then, by connecting wired electrodes to her brain, they are able to capture signals as Johnson silently talks. This activity is then transmitted to a computer, where AI translates that information into words spoken by her avatar, in a voice similar to the one she lost.
Of the myriad ways that AI might impact our lives, perhaps there is nothing more valuable in how it can help us to communicate. After all, we’re a species of storytellers, and language is at the center of so much of what we do.
Researchers in the UK have developed an AI-powered process that they suggest may help medical experts diagnose Parkinson’s disease before patients show physical symptoms. The study - which used AI to process 3D optical scans - identified differences between the eyes of volunteers with Parkinson’s and those without. A member of the research team noted the process is cheaper and quicker than a brain scan.
The Information (paywall) | Salesforce Leads Financing of AI Startup at More Than $4 Billion Valuation
Hugging Face is reportedly raising $200 million from Salesforce and others. The AI testing platform is currently valued at $2 billion, but this latest round is expected to double its worth to $4 billion. Hugging Face has certainly seized mindshare in the AI industry, having raised $160 million since 2016. Not bad for what started out as a chatbot aimed at teenagers.
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