Daily Archives: May 15, 2023

In a leaked internal memo, a Google exec expressed serious fears about losing the ongoing AI arms race but the competition that the exec fears most, according to an NBC report, might be a little unexpected.

"We've done a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI," reads the memo, which a Google spokesperson confirmed as authentic to NBC but cautioned were only the thoughts of one person at the company. "But the uncomfortable truth is, we arent positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI."

"I'm talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us," it continued. "While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly."

In other words, according to this exec, though Google and its Silicon Valley competitors like Microsoft-slash-OpenAI and Meta still have a narrow upper hand, open-source models are quickly catching up.

And that, per the memo, is reason for concern.

The Google exec makes a pretty good case. Aided in large part by a major leak of Meta's advanced language model, LLaMa, small and scrappy open-source models like AutoGPT have made major strides in recent months.

And to that end, it's one thing to have visible, tangible competition like Meta and Microsoft-slash-OpenAI. Fighting an arms race against what's effectively the open web, where users can learn and borrow from each other and tailor development to their personal needs, is another beast entirely.

"I don't think I need something as powerful as GPT-4 for a lot of things that I want to do," Simon Willison, a programmer and tech analyst and blogger, told NBC.

"The open question I have right now is, how small can the model be while still being useful?" he added. "That's something which the open source community is figuring out really, really quickly."

"Largely, I think people are trying to do good with these things, make people more productive or are making experiences better," added Mark Riedl, a computer scientist and professor at Georgia Tech. "You don't want a monopoly, or even a small set of companies kind of controlling everything. And I think youll see a greater level of creativity by putting these tools into the hands of more people."

But while there might be some merits to a decentralized approach to AI, there are also some dangers. In addition to a number of more philosophical ethical questions, AI poses a lot of very real threats, and in the hands of theoretically unlimited bad actors, systems built by way of open-source channels may well do a lot of harm.

"It really now becomes the question of what are people going to use these things for," Riedl told NBC. "There's really no restrictions on making specialized versions of models that are designed specifically to create toxic material, or misinformation, or to spread hate on the internet."

More on Google: Google Staff Warned Its AI Was a "Pathological Liar" Before They Released It Anyway

Visit link:
Leaked Google Memo Shows Fear of Losing the AI Race, But Not to ... - Futurism

Our Spider-Senses are tingling.Doctor Octavius

A Japanese robotics company called Jizai has come up with a strange robotic limb contraption called, appropriately, Arms that can give the wearer extra sets of arms like Marvel's iconic Spider-Man villain Doctor Octopus well, sort of.

An artfully shot promotional video shows two models demonstrating the system's capabilities by dancing to some classical music, allowing the appendages to mimic the movements of their human arms.

It's a beautiful exploration of human augmentation that takes a considerable step back from the conventional approach to developing cyborg appendages, most of which have a concrete use case in mind, like allowing those with limited mobility to make use of robotic arms.

Jizai's stated goals are quite a bit more abstract than simply having the arms pick up objects.

"The system was designed to enable social interaction between multiple wearers, such as an exchange of arm(s), and explore possible interactions between digital cyborgs in a cyborg society," reads the company's website.

The team was inspired by a 1963 short story written by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabatain which a girl decides to lend her suitor one of her arms for the night.

"This novel is obviously a work of fiction, yet, half a century since its writing, emerging human-machine integration technologies have begun to allow us to physically experience Kawabatas world," the team wrote in a recently published paper about the system.

"From our role-playing sessions, we found that our bodies could precisely sense the attachment/detachment of arms, and we especially felt a strong impact when detaching or reducing the number of robotic arms worn," it continues.

In short, while we're still far away from having a mad scientist using robotic appendages to take on Spider-Man, scientists are already exploring what it means to augment the human body. And heck, we're intrigued.

More on cyborg arms: Scientists Working on Third Arm You Control Using Your Brain

Read this article:
God Help Us! They Built Real Doctor Octopus Arms - Futurism

"It has the capability to go to locations where other robots cant go."EELS Pit

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is testing out a snake-like robot that is meant to one day climb into the icy vents of Saturn's moon Enceladus and take a dip into its subsurface ocean below to look for signs of life.

Before it can travel all the way to Saturn's moon, the team at JPL is hoping to deploy the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor(EELS, get it?) robotin other hard-to-access locations on Earth, the Moon, and beyond.

The team's aim is to create the ultimate jack-of-all-trades with a unique wheels-coming-off approach to robot building.

"It has the capability to go to locations where other robots cant go," said JPLs Matthew Robinson, EELS project manager, in a statement. "Though some robots are better at one particular type of terrain or other, the idea for EELS is the ability to do it all."

In a new video, the robot can be seen slithering across a variety of surfaces, including an iceskating rink, a snowy mountainside, and a beach. They even put it through its paces at the JPL's Mars Yard, a simulated Martianlandscape.

The 13-foot robot moves by rotating its ten identical segments, which are outfitted with threads that allow it to propel itself forward. These individual segments can even act as propellers, allowing EELS to explore its surroundings underwater.

That's important, as JPL is hoping to have the robot eventually explore the habitable subsurface oceans of Saturn's moon Enceladus. To get to this ocean, the robot will have to snake itself through one of the many icy geysers that erupt from the moon's surface before dropping into the depths below.

It will also have to do all of this entirely on its own.

"Imagine a car driving autonomously, but there are no stop signs, no traffic signals, not even any roads," said the projects autonomy lead, Rohan Thakker, in the statement. "The robot has to figure out what the road is and try to follow it."

"Then it needs to go down a 100-foot drop and not fall," he added. The team is hoping to send EELS down a vertical shaft, or a crevasse, in the Canadian Rockies later this year, which will act as an analog for Enceladus' vents.

It's an immense engineering challenge, especially given how little we know about the icy moon's environment.

"When youre going places where you dont know what youll find, you want to send a versatile, risk-aware robot thats prepared for uncertainty," Robinson said, "and can make decisions on its own."

More on JPL's robots: NASA Shows Off Transforming Rover for Exploring Steep Cliffs on Mars

See original here:
NASA Tests Snake Robot Designed to Look for Alien Life on Icy ... - Futurism

"It was not clear to me how the United States, at that level of technological development of the 60s of the last century, did what they still cannot do now?"Rogozin a Stink

Dmitry Rogozin, the former head of Russia's space corporation Roscosmos, is no stranger to making head-scratching remarks.

The outspoken politician, who was sacked from his post as the director of the country's space program last year, is now taking to Telegram to cast doubt on the fact that NASA landed a dozen astronauts on the Moon over half a century ago, as spotted by Ars Technica.

According to his post, Rogozin asked Roscosmos during his tenure to provide him with "documentary evidence of the Americans' stay on the Moon."

Despite his best efforts, he says, he found no evidence at the time.

"It was not clear to me how the United States, at that level of technological development of the 60s of the last century, did what they still cannot do now?" he wrote.

Rogozin's comments are characteristically evocative and brazen, and demonstrate denialist conspiracy theories surrounding NASA's Apollo Moon landings that persist to this day.

Ironically, the Soviet Union even had a spacecraft of its own in orbit around the Moon while NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their historic first steps back in 1969, Ars points out, meaning that Russia has plenty of detailed data to corroborate the Moon landings, which are incredibly well documented overall.

That mountain of evidence clearly has not made enough of an impression on this particular member of Putin's inner circle, though.

Rogozin has made plenty of enemies over the years. Last year, he famouslyseemed to threaten to crash the International Space Station into the US.

During his tenure, he also maintained that Russia would soon abandon the station, despite the fact that the country later agreed to cooperate with its international partners until the station's demise in 2030.

He has also butted heads with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on a number of occasions.

"If I die under mysterious circumstances, it's been nice knowin ya," Musk tweeted last year after Rogozin told him he'd be held accountable for providing Ukrainian forces with Starlink internet terminals.

Now that Rogozin has been deployed to the front lines of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he's no longer in charge of the country's space program which, given these latest remarks, is probably for the best.

More on Rogozin: Retired NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly Dishes on Ukraine, Russia, and Moon Mission

Go here to read the rest:
Former Roscosmos Head Refuses to Believe NASA Landed on the ... - Futurism

"He doesn't take the limelight from Elon."CFO in Chief

Tesla CEO Elon Musk might still be the public face of Tesla but according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, Musk isn't actually the person who's really running the show.

Per the report, the person who's really in charge is Zach Kirkhorn, who was named chief financial officer of the EV maker roughly four years ago.

When Kirkhorn became CFO, Tesla was valued at about $50 billion. Today, it's worth over $500 billion.

Tesla's successes are privately being credited to Kirkhorn, according to the report, who has learned to connect with Musk without stealing his thunder a winning strategy that could explain the carmaker's rise, despite Musk's chaotic management style.

Though he's kept a very low profile since his appointment Kirkhorn only has 63 followers on Twitter and keeps his account private the elusive CFO has apparently been instrumental in implementing a number of manufacturing efficiencies, which have, as the WSJ put it, "helped the company deliver 15 consecutive profitable quarters and amass a $22 billion war chest."

That's no small accomplishment and it's even more impressive when you consider Kirkhorn has had to deal with Musk all this time which, presumably, has been a particularly difficult job as of late.

Musk is currently in charge of a number of companies, which means he has to split his time among them all. Last year, following his disastrous acquisition of Twitter in particular, Tesla investors accused him of abandoning his duties at Tesla.

Per the report, Kirkhorn has become exceptionally good at serving as a mediator between Musk and other staffers.

"He doesn't take the limelight from Elon," Kurt Kelty, a vice president at battery-materials company Sila and former senior director of battery technology at Tesla, told the WSJ.

Perhaps most importantly, Kirkhornh is reportedly good at balancing Musk's more absurd and grandiose requests and can break down any "seemingly unattainable demand," as the WSJ put it, into smaller and achievable steps.

Despite Kirkhorn's considerable contributions,Musk is still very much the CEO of Tesla, and any of Tesla's successes are still widely attributed to him.

And considering how things are going over at Twitter, we're not exactly shocked to learn that someone else has had their hand on the proverbial wheel or steering yoke, if you will.

For one, we're sure the stockholders are grateful.

More on Tesla: Tesla Hit with Lawsuit over Reports about Employees Watching Car Cameras

Here is the original post:
The Guy Really Running Tesla Isn't Elon Musk, Report Claims - Futurism