The Memo - 17/Feb/2023
The Memo - 17/Feb/2023
Luminous Supreme Control 70B (instruct), Replit Ghostwriter, China's chatbot progress, and much more!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 17/Feb/2023
Welcome back to The Memo.
This is a big edition for people who love to read. There is the equivalent of several books worth of new AI content to digest here, and you’ll get enormous value if you make the time!
In the Toys to play with section, we look at a private Tim Ferriss chatbot (free), a new AI programming tool being called ‘ChatGPT for coders’, and my recommended MIT course on AI (free).
The BIG Stuff
Google Bard overview updated (Feb/2023)
I have spent some time expanding my overview of Google Bard. If all goes well, this model will absolutely change search for you and the rest of Google’s 4 billion+ users who perform 8 billion+ searches a day.
Take a look: https://lifearchitect.ai/bard/
The Interesting Stuff
Report: Language Models And Cognitive Automation For Economic Research by Anton Korinek (Feb/2023)
It was great to be cited in a paper this month for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US economic advisory think-tank linked to MIT, with members including Myron Scholes (yes, the Black-Scholes guy) and Bernanke.
LLMs have just crossed the threshold to become useful across a wide range of cognitive tasks—as was illustrated by the viral reception of ChatGPT, a version of OpenAI's GPT3.5 model that was released on November 28th, 2022, gained more than 100m users in its first two months, and is now estimated to produce a volume of text every 14 days that is equivalent to all the printed works of humanity (Thompson, 2023).
…a former Chairman for Mensa International reports that ChatGPT has a tested IQ of 147 (99.9th percentile) on a verbal-linguistic IQ test (Thompson, 2023). Moreover, whereas the level of human intelligence is relatively static, LLMs are advancing rapidly, becoming more accurate and powerful with every new iteration.
The full 35-page report provides 26 applications for GPT-3 with examples. It is an excellent read.
Download PDF: direct, archive.
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? by Dr Stephen Wolfram (14/Feb/2023)
Stephen is a former child prodigy, and we’ve mentioned his work already in several editions of The Memo.
His latest article is nearly 20,000 words, about the length of a small book. If you really want to understand ChatGPT and neural networks more deeply, and in plain-enough English (with pictures), this is a great resource.
Read it: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/
OpenAI investment report by Contrary.com (Jan/2023)
Some of the numbers need review, but for interest, this 22-page report summarizes most of the ‘need to know’ about OpenAI as a company.
View: https://research.contrary.com/reports/openai
Download PDF: https://app.box.com/s/vgwmimnkg7gfuafak4levm2lm8bsro16
Luminous Supreme Control 70B (instruct) released (14/Feb/2023)
Our steerable model Luminous-supreme-control [70B] has been optimized to work well with zero-shot instructions. This means that they do not necessarily need a set of examples like in few-shot learning.
Try it out: https://app.aleph-alpha.com/playground/completion
You can also use this new model via Riku.ai (discount code available to paid subscribers of The Memo in your ‘welcome’ email): https://riku.ai/
OpenAI working on a new version of ChatGPT (17/Feb/2023)
We believe that AI should be a useful tool for individual people, and thus customizable by each user up to limits defined by society. Therefore, we are developing an upgrade to ChatGPT to allow users to easily customize its behavior.
Read: https://openai.com/blog/how-should-ai-systems-behave/
Download OpenAI’s ChatGPT guidelines ‘snapshot’ (PDF, 3 pages).
OpenAI CEO on ethics and personalized AI (10/Feb/2023)
Where we are right now is not where we want to be. The way this should work is that there are extremely wide bounds of what these systems can do, that are decided by, not Microsoft or OpenAI, but society, governments, something like that, some version of that; people, direct democracy…
And then within those bounds, users should have a huge amount of control over how the AI behaves for them, because different users find very different things offensive or acceptable or whatever. And no company, certainly not either of ours [OpenAI or Microsoft], I think, is in a place where they want to, or should want to say, ‘here are the rules’.
…Again, it’s very new technology. We don’t know how to handle it. And so we’re being conservative. But the right answer, here, is very broad bonds, set by society, that are difficult to break, and then ‘user choice’.
And also, having a vibrant community of people who are trying to press on the limits of the technology, to find where it breaks and where it does unusual, interesting things, is good.
Listen via NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/podcasts/bings-revenge-and-googles-ai-face-plant.html
AI.com purchased for $11M, redirects to ChatGPT (15/Feb/2023)
This domain now redirects to chat.openai.com: ai.com
Where is China in all this rush for AI chatbots? (Feb/2023)
The Western media understandably focuses on the small pocket of Silicon Valley. However, there is a lot going on outside of those 5,000km2 (1,800miles2)…
Alibaba: chatbot based on M6 (10T sparse) or AliceMind coming soon.
Baidu: ERNIE Bot (260B) coming soon.
Huawei: chatbot based on PanGu-α (200B) patented.
JD.com: ChatJD coming soon.
PICO (Bytedance): chatbot rumoured.
Tencent: chatbot based on HunYuan rumoured.
Xiaoice (ex-Microsoft): chatbot rumoured.
I have some older visualizations (2021) of some of these models at: https://lifearchitect.ai/models/#contents-chinese
(I just realized how funny it is to refer to 2021 as ‘older’ in this fast-paced field!)
Read a related article by TechMonitor: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/ai-and-automation/china-generative-ai-revolution-is-only-just-beginning
ChatYuan: China’s first ChatGPT clone (11/Feb/2023)
Chinese technology companies are taking heed of the country’s strict online moderation policy, as they rush to develop their own versions of ChatGPT, the viral chatbot service of US firm OpenAI.
[CEO of Yuanyu said] “It’s different in China, compared with overseas… We need more layers of filtering and processing in terms of text review.”
Founded last year, Yuanyu Intelligent in January launched ChatYuan, touted as the first generative AI pre-trained by Chinese-language models, ahead of Baidu’s own “Ernie Bot”. Generative AI refers to algorithms that can be used to create new content, including text, audio, images, video and simulations.
ChatYuan ran as a mini-program on Tencent Holdings’ super app WeChat, where users accessed the technology without downloading separate software. Operations of ChatYuan were recently suspended for maintenance updates, but it is expected to resume next week [around 20/Feb/2023].
Related article by the controversial outlet SCMP: https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3209795/chinese-tech-firms-take-heed-countrys-strict-online-moderation-they-rush-bring-their-chatgpt
Website (Chinese): https://www.clueai.cn/
Try it out (model down for maintenance): https://www.clueai.cn/chat
The Great Flood (Dec/1997)
Nearly every time I speak with the media, I want to show them this graphic (and have done so in some video calls). It is a view of the AI landscape in 1997, in a section called ‘The Great Flood’ by the robotics researcher Hans Moravec. It was illustrated and appeared in Max Tegmark’s 2017 book, Life 3.0.
As of Feb/2023, AI has now flooded or encroached on most of this landscape, perhaps with the exception of full cinematography, social interaction, and management.
I’ve pulled together the original sources, with some narrative to bring it all together into 2023: https://lifearchitect.ai/flood/
Mega-engineer develops Copilot for piano (14/Feb/2023)
Dr Linxi ‘Jim’ Fan has a CV longer than mine! Former AI researcher at Google Cloud AI, OpenAI, Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab, Columbia University, and Mila-Quebec AI Institute, now AI scientist at NVIDIA, wrote the award-winning MineDojo paper, wrote the VIMA paper, and more…
This tech is based on RNN theory from 2018 (pre-Transformer), called Piano Genie (paper), but check out the absurd results.
There are eight colored keys for the human to play, and the neural network is mapping this to what would sound good on a full 88-key grand piano for an AI to play…
NASA using AI to design mission hardware (11/Feb/2023)