15 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2024 Eliza Strickland | IEEE Spectrum Each year, the AI Index lands on virtual desks with a louder virtual thudthis year, its 393 pages are a testament to the fact that AI is coming off a really big year in 2023. For the past three years,IEEE Spectrum has read the whole damn thing and pulled out a selection of charts that sum up the current state of AI.

The Next Frontier for Brain Implants Is Artificial Vision Emily Mullin | Wired Elon Musks Neuralink and others are developing devices that could provide blind people with a crude sense of sight. This is not about getting biological vision back, says Philip Troyk, a professor of biomedical engineering at Illinois Tech, whos leading the study Bussard is in. This is about exploring what artificial vision could be.'

Microsofts VASA-1 Can Deepfake a Person With One Photo and One Audio Track Benj Edwards | Ars Technica On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and dont require video feedsor allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.

Meta Is Already Training a More Powerful Successor to Llama 3 Will Knight | Wired On Thursday morning, Meta released its latestartificial intelligencemodel, Llama 3, touting it as the most powerful to bemade open sourceso that anyone can use it. The same afternoon,Yann LeCun, Metas chief AI scientist, said an even more powerful successor to Llama is in the works. He suggested it could potentially outshine the worlds best closed AI models, includingOpenAIs GPT-4andGoogles Gemini.

Intel Reveals Worlds Biggest Brain-Inspired Neuromorphic Computer Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist Hala Point contains 1.15 billion artificial neurons across 1152 Loihi 2 achips, and is capable of 380 trillion synaptic operations per second. Mike Davies at Intel says that despite this power it occupies just six racks in a standard server casea space similar to that of a microwave oven. Larger machines will be possible, says Davies. We built this scale of system because, honestly, a billion neurons was a nice round number, he says. I mean, there wasnt any particular technical engineering challenge that made us stop at this level.'

US Air Force Confirms First Successful AI Dogfight Emma Roth | The Verge Human pilots were on board the X-62A with controls to disable the AI system, but DARPA says the pilots didnt need to use the safety switch at any point. The X-62A went against an F-16 controlled solely by a human pilot, where both aircraft demonstrated high-aspect nose-to-nose engagements and got as close as 2,000 feet at 1,200 miles per hour. DARPA doesnt say which aircraft won the dogfight, however.

What If Your AI Girlfriend Hated You? Kate Knibbs | Wired It seems as though weve arrived at the moment in the AI hype cycle where no idea is too bonkers to launch. This weeks eyebrow-raising AI project is a new twist on theromantic chatbota mobile app calledAngryGF, which offers its users the uniquely unpleasant experience of getting yelled at via messages from a fake person.

Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare Dan Falk | Quanta For decades, theres been a broad agreement among scientists that animals similar to usthe great apes, for examplehave conscious experience, even if their consciousness differs from our own. In recent years, however, researchers have begun to acknowledge that consciousness may also be widespread among animals that are very different from us, including invertebrates with completely different and far simpler nervous systems.

Two Lifeforms Merge in Once-in-a-Billion-Years Evolutionary Event Michael Irving | New Atlas Scientists have caught a once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event in progress, as two lifeforms have merged into one organism that boasts abilities its peers would envy.Last time this happened, Earth got plants. A species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii was found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, cant normally dofixing nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.

Image Credit:Shubham Dhage / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 20) - Singularity Hub