The Memo - 24/Mar/2023
Microsoft: ‘First Contact With an AGI System‘, KPMG KymChat, Agility Digit v4, and much more!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 24/Mar/2023
Welcome back to The Memo.
I wanted to wait until April to release the next edition, but that won’t be possible with the pace of AI progress and releases this month, so here’s yet another huge edition for March!
In the Toys to play with section, we look at an AI-generated short film by GPT-4, a new platform to compare LLM outputs side-by-side, a refresher on a 2019 article about AI that should provide some relief, and much more…
The BIG Stuff
Exclusive: Microsoft: ‘First Contact With an AGI System’ in GPT-4 (24/Mar/2023)
Microsoft chose to censor the original title of yesterday’s GPT-4 analysis paper, which was:
First Contact With an AGI System
The paper was edited, the title changed, and instead released as:
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
The paper is long—154 pages—but incredible reading, even taking into account the ‘marketing’ angle between Microsoft as investor and OpenAI as GPT-4 creator.
Microsoft: GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.
Read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
I’ve updated my AGI countdown from 42% to 48% based on the findings in this paper (and the release of the GPT-4 model), keeping in mind that we need full physical embodiment (GPT-n in an autonomous robot) to break the 60% mark. I stand by my assertion that this is a few months—not a few years—away. (And can already be seen in early prototypes at a few AI labs including those at Google and Microsoft.)
Read more: https://lifearchitect.ai/agi/
The Interesting Stuff
OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plugins including Wolfram Alpha (23/Mar/2023)
OpenAI today announced plugins for ChatGPT that allow it to search the web and do much more. Due to scaling issues, there is currently a waitlist.
Read more: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins
Dr Stephen Wolfram commented at length on the new ChatGPT Plugin functionality:
I see what’s happening now as a historic moment. For well over half a century the statistical and symbolic approaches to what we might call “AI” evolved largely separately. But now, in ChatGPT + Wolfram they’re being brought together. And while we’re still just at the beginning with this, I think we can reasonably expect tremendous power in the combination—and in a sense a new paradigm for “AI-like computation”…
Google Bard released to US and UK users (21/Mar/2023)
Waitlist: https://bard.google.com/
Read my summary of Bard and LaMDA 2: https://lifearchitect.ai/bard/
Bill Gates: Update on AI (21/Mar/2023)
Bill has waded in to the discussion on AI. I don’t agree with everything he writes here, but I’ve dotted some of my favourite parts of his ‘Gates Note’ quoted below…
‘The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.’
‘I think back to the early days of the personal computing revolution, when the software industry was so small that most of us could fit onstage at a conference. Today it is a global industry. Since a huge portion of it is now turning its attention to AI, the innovations are going to come much faster than what we experienced after the microprocessor breakthrough. Soon the pre-AI period will seem as distant as the days when using a computer meant typing at a C:> prompt rather than tapping on a screen.’
‘Superintelligent AIs are in our future. Compared to a computer, our brains operate at a snail’s pace: An electrical signal in the brain moves at 1/100,000th the speed of the signal in a silicon chip! Once developers can generalize a learning algorithm and run it at the speed of a computer—an accomplishment that could be a decade away or a century away [Alan: no, sorry, Bill! Give it a few months…]—we’ll have an incredibly powerful AGI. It will be able to do everything that a human brain can, but without any practical limits on the size of its memory or the speed at which it operates. This will be a profound change.’
‘…the world needs to establish the rules of the road so that any downsides of artificial intelligence are far outweighed by its benefits, and so that everyone can enjoy those benefits no matter where they live or how much money they have. The Age of AI is filled with opportunities and responsibilities.’
Read more: https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun
Microsoft releases Bing Image Creator (21/Mar/2023)
We’re excited to announce we are bringing Bing Image Creator, new AI-powered visual Stories and updated Knowledge Cards to the new Bing and Edge preview. Powered by an advanced version of the DALL∙E model from our partners at OpenAI, Bing Image Creator allows you to create an image simply by using your own words to describe the picture you want to see. Now you can generate both written and visual content in one place, from within chat.
Read release: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/21/create-images-with-your-words-bing-image-creator-comes-to-the-new-bing/
GitHub Copilot X (23/Mar/2023)
‘GitHub Copilot is evolving to bring chat and voice interfaces, support pull requests, answer questions on docs, and adopt OpenAI’s GPT-4 for a more personalized developer experience.’
Midjourney v5 relaxing video (23/Mar/2023)
The new Midjourney v5 is the state-of-the-art for public (not internal or research-only) text-to-image models. I’ve put together a few of my favourite images in this video.
Watch:
Runway releases Gen-2 (22/Mar/2023)
Gen-2 is ‘The Next Step Forward for Generative AI, A multi-modal AI system that can generate novel videos with text, images, or video clips.’
Read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03011
Take a look: https://research.runwayml.com/gen2
KPMG KymChat using GPT-4 (22/Mar/2023)
KPMG’s KymChat, which has been created by Microsoft, is a private version of the popular ChatGPT and uses the new and improved GPT-4 language model to generate responses to user prompts.
The tool can access KPMG’s internal database of partner and staff resumes and, depending on rank of the person, certain internal financial data about the firm, Mr Munnelly said. More databases will be added over time.
The data entered into the tool are kept within KPMG’s servers locally, although KymChat does access an overseas-based supercomputer to process queries.
Read more via The Fin (Aus): https://archive.is/tUsXS
Read more via KPMG’s announce.
Adobe Firefly text-to-image platform (21/Mar/2023)
Firefly is a conceptual (not-quite-released) text-to-image platform.
Take a look: https://firefly.adobe.com/
NVIDIA moving to ‘enterprise-first AI’ (22/Mar/2023)
NVIDIA’s Dr Jim Fan revealed that ‘Foundation Model as a Service is coming to enterprise, customized for your proprietary data… 2023 is an inflection point. NVIDIA is going beyond a pure hardware provider and becoming an enterprise-first AI provider.’
Read the (very long and very revealing) press release by NVIDIA.
Embodiment: Agility Robotics releasing Digit V4 (20/Mar/2023)
As mentioned earlier in this edition, I believe that embodiment is necessary to get to full AGI, where intelligence is translated into action in the real world.
There are many contenders in this space, some that have pushed the envelope in their research labs with real LLM integration (Google using PaLM, Microsoft using ChatGPT and GPT-4), while others come without large language model integration. This includes labs like Boston Dynamics, whose bipedal robots are pre-programmed. The latest contender is Agility Robotics’ Digit v4, which doesn’t yet feature LLM integration, but is being touted as ‘the first commercially available humanoid robot’.
Watch:
Read the press release: https://agilityrobotics.com/news/2022/future-robotics-l3mjh
Read more via IEEE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/agility-robotics-digit
Policy
AI in the classroom: Quick literature review by Alan (22/Mar/2023)
In response to a user question on the use of post-2020 AI in the classroom (especially ‘integrating’ versus ‘banning’), here are 3 key resources to explore…
Integrate example (Mollick, ChatGPT required in Wharton classes: ‘I expect you to use AI (ChatGPT and image generation tools, at a minimum) in this class’), as detailed in The Memo 27/Jan edition:
Ban example (NYC Ed, banned ‘the New York City Department of Education blocked access to it on school-owned networks and devices, citing negative impacts on student learning.’)
More. The Brookings Institution provides some further useful insight on these models in the classroom:
…ChatGPT is only a threat if our education system continues to “pursue rubric points and not knowledge.” It is critical for all educators to follow their colleague’s example. As we note in our recent book, “Making Schools Work,” the old education model in which teachers deliver information to later be condensed and repeated will not prepare our students for success in the classroom—or the jobs of tomorrow. We should allow that model to die a peaceful death. Used in the right way, ChatGPT can be a friend to the classroom and an amazing tool for our students, not something to be feared.
Toys to Play With
Re-read this article from 2019, ‘Don’t Fear the Terminator’ (26/Sep/2019)
A brilliant perspective from Meta AI scientist Yann LeCun and neuroscientist Prof Anthony Zador, published to Scientific American a few years ago.
The fear is that the intelligence of machines will soon match or even exceed that of humans. They could turn against us and replace us as the dominant “life” form on earth. Our creations would become our overlords—or perhaps wipe us out altogether. Such dramatic scenarios, exciting though they might be to imagine, reflect a misunderstanding of AI. And they distract from the more mundane but far more likely risks posed by the technology in the near future, as well as from its most exciting benefits.
Read more: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fear-the-terminator/
Compare many LLM model outputs side-by-side (Mar/2023)
Nat.dev lets the user run multiple generative models simultaneously, comparing outputs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Cohere, EleutherAI, and Aleph Alpha side by side. This helps evaluate which model (or prompt or hyperparameter) is more suitable for a particular use case.
Try it: https://nat.dev/compare
AI-generated film: GPT-4 + ElevenLabs + ModelScope Txt2Vid (23/Mar/2023)
This video was created by u/eposnix via Reddit.
Tech stack: GPT-4 for script, ElevenLabs AI for voice, ModelScope Txt2Vid (via AUTOMATIC1111's StableDiffusion WebUI) for the visuals.
Prompt to GPT-4: ‘Write a sitcom script starring Donald Trump and Joe Biden that is similar to Pinky and the Brain. Be sure to include the show's iconic humor and make sure there is an overarching story.’
View the original Reddit post.
Take an hour to watch two technical powerhouses talk (24/Mar/2023)
If you’ve read this far, you must love to invest time in understanding this revolution! Why do you think OpenAI paid their Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever $1,900,000 in salary (not equity or options) for his first year?
Check this out, it’s a hidden fireside chat at NVIDIA’s GTC conference. OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever in Conversation With Jensen Huang.
Watch the video:
Next
Bigger, faster, better! I’ll be keeping tabs on the progress of GPT-5’s training while the rest of the world wakes up to AI.
A reminder, the first (test, casual) roundtable for paid readers will be next week:
Life Architect - The Memo - Roundtable #1
Saturday 1/Apr/2023 at 5PM Los Angeles
Saturday 1/Apr/2023 at 8PM New York
Sunday 2/Apr/2023 at 8AM Perth
or check your timezone.
You don’t need to do anything for this; there’s no registration or forms to fill in, I don’t want your email, you don’t even need to turn on your camera or give your real name!
All my very best,
Alan
LifeArchitect.ai
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