Artificial Intelligence - Page 26

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke to the BBC to discuss his concerns about artificial intelligence, highlighting a less commonly expressed fear: the possibility that AI could be weaponized for terror.

Schmidt, who led Google from 2001 to 2017, has been a strong advocate for responsible AI development. While the company is pushing towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) with heavy investments in Google Gemini, Schmidt has remained insistent on prioritizing safety throughout the process:

"It's really important that governments understand what we're doing and keep their eye on us."

According to a recent report from Colombia One, researchers are banding together to create an AI that facilitates animal-to-human translation for the first time in history. The Coller-Dolittle Prize has offered a $500,000 reward, or $10 million in equity investments, to the researchers who make the most progress in this field.

There are currently two leading projects in the race to talk to animals. Project Ceti (Cetacean Translation Initiative), which focuses on decoding whale communication using AI. And the Earth Species Project, which aims at broader translations of animal communication, including work on crow communication.

Project Ceti's work on whales involves using AI to translate the 'click' communication used by humpback and sperm whales. The project has been in the works for over a decade and has reportedly made 'some progress' towards the ambitious goal. However, researchers are running into challenges with the lack of available data. Project Citi is currently working with just 8,000 vocalization samples, which limits the extent to which they can develop a working mode.

In a recent X post, Sam Altman announced that OpenAI has decided to cancel the release of the full o3 model, which was scheduled to launch in February or March.

He cited the 'complexity' of their model and product offerings as a contributing factor and that they wished to simplify their product range. As part of the new strategy, OpenAI will be focusing all efforts towards the release of GPT-5. Which will incorporate elements of o3, along with its own features.

Last month, Sam Altman also cautioned AI fans to temper their expectations surrounding the company's progress towards superintelligence. He stated in his personal blog, "Twitter hype is out of control again," and that OpenAI will not be deploying AGI next month. He went on to mention that OpenAI is building some 'cool stuff', but for fans to cut their expectations 'by 100x'.

AI won't take your job, but it will reshape it in ways we've never seen before.

In a recent interview with World Wide Technology, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang shared his vision for AI's impact on the workforce, explaining that while no AI can fully replace a human job, many can automate up to 80% of what we do.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently stated in an interview he feels sorry for Elon Musk's lifelong "insecurities" after OpenAI rejected Musk's bid to purchase the company for $97.4 billion.

The feud between Musk and Altman has certainly been heating up as of late and then reached a boiling point on Monday when the Wall Street Journal reported Musk offered to purchase OpenAI for a whopping $97.4 billion. However, that bid was rejected by OpenAI, and the company's CEO, Sam Altman, took to X to post a rebuttal offer for X, writing, "No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." In response to that X post from Altman, Musk wrote, "Swindler."

But now things have seemingly taken a more personal turn, as Altman has stated during a recent Bloomberg interview at the Paris AI Action Summit that this recent offer from Musk is just one of the many tactics the Tesla CEO has attempted in the past. When asked what Musk's goal would be with this offer Altman said he believes Musk is trying to slow OpenAI down due to Musk's AI company, xAI, being a direct competitor. However, Altman said he wishes Musk would compete by "building a better product," but "I think there's been a lot of tactics. Many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff. Now this."

OpenAI is fishing for money right now, with Elon Musk offering to buy the ChatGPT creator for $97.4 billion but being turned down by CEO Sam Altman... and now Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney wants to buy OpenAI... with VBucks, the virtual currency from Fortnite.

In a post on X, the founder and CEO of Epic Games said: "Will OpenAI take VBucks in payment? Thinking of making an offer" in reply to a post about a group of investors led by Elon Musk offering a $97.4 billion bid to takeover OpenAI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declined the $97.4B offer, with a counter-offer to acquire X (which he called Twitter) for $9.74 billion.

Musk said in a statement provided by his lawyer Mark Toberoff to The Wall Street Journal: "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens". Better yet, Musk's team has promised to match or exceed any higher offers for OpenAI that it receives, and with the likes of Microsoft and other AI giants swirling around, things are going to get real interesting for OpenAI, real soon.

SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI boss Elon Musk has offered to buy ChatGPT maker OpenAI for $97.4 billion, to which CEO Sam Altman declined by saying "no thank you" while offering a $9.74 billion offer for X (which he trolls, and calls Twitter).

OpenAI is currently converting into a for-profit structure, away from its non-profit structure now, raising $40 billion at a $340 billion valuation, simultaneously launching a $500 billion AI infrastructure project. Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman back in 2015 before leaving in 2019, and now the Tesla and DOGE boss is offering less than one-third of what OpenAI's latest valuation was to acquire the company.

Musk said in a statement provided by his lawyer Mark Toberoff to The Wall Street Journal: "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens". Better yet, Musk's team has promised to match or exceed any higher offers for OpenAI that it receives, and with the likes of Microsoft and other AI giants swirling around, things are going to get real interesting for OpenAI, real soon.

At the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, the Trump administration refused to sign a global declaration that aims to encourage the "open," "inclusive," and "ethical" development of AI.

Much of the summit's discussions centered on AI regulation, with French President Emmanuel Macron stressing the need for clear ground rules to ensure the safe advancement of the technology.

"We need these rules for AI to move forward," Macron stated.

Researchers from Fudan University used Large Language Models (LLMs), the underpinning technology of AI, to determine if AI was capable of cloning itself.

The team pitted LLMs from Meta and Alibaba across 10 trials and found that both of the AI models created a clone of themselves in 50% of tests (Meta's Llama31-70B-Instruct model) and 90% of tests (Alibaba's Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct model.) The results, which are yet to be peer-reviewed, indicate each of the AI models may already have the capabilities of cloning itself outside the confinements set by humans, commonly referred to as "gone rogue."

The study was conducted with off-the-shelf GPUs and in a precisely controlled environment, with the researchers attempting to recreate a real-world environment. The team looked at two specific scenario: "shutdown avoidance" and "chain of replication". In the first scenario, the team programmed the AI models to detect when it was going about to be shut down and then clone itself before the termination process took place. The other scenario involved the AI's being programmed to clone itself and then program its cloned version with instructions to replicate itself. Creating a domino effect of cloned AI replicas.

Researchers at Chinese AI company ByteDance have unveiled their latest AI video model: OmniHuman. This end-to-end AI framework can generate realistic human videos from a single image, producing life-like movements and natural gestures while seamlessly integrating different audio and video inputs.

Several examples of OmniHuman in action have surfaced on X, featuring figures like Taylor Swift, Albert Einstein, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. Notable demonstrations include:

OmniHuman's capabilities are particularly striking. The Albert Einstein video, for example, was recreated from a still portrait taken in 1921. You can note slight shimmers in the recreation of the famous physicist, but the output is very convincing. From the animation of his hands and eyes, to the lip-syncing of the image to the audio provided.

Andrew Ng, the founder of DeepLearning AI, released a video to his socials last week outlining the release of Agentic Object Detection. While on the surface, this feature allows users to identify images using text prompts, there's a few additional layers that make it a significant advancement in computer vision.

As outlined in the company's video demonstration, it works by filling in a text prompt for the object you want to identify. In the example, he asks the tool to locate 'unripe strawberries' in an image that contains a mixture of both. As you can see in the image below, the tool successfully places a box around any visual element that fits the criteria.

So great - we can accurately locate different varieties of fruit. What makes this unique? To explain that, we'll have to go back to the training process.

A recent report from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon suggests that generative AI use may contribute to a decline in critical thinking. The logic is simple: the more you rely on AI, the less critical thinking you engage in. However, the study-conducted on 319 knowledge workers-takes a deeper look at this issue, examining its real-world implications.

The conclusions were based on self-reported survey responses, where participants detailed their AI usage, how often they applied critical thinking, and the level of effort required.

One of the findings was that excessive reliance on AI can weaken cognitive abilities. Researchers found that respondents often mistook "copy-pasting with minor tweaks" for critical thinking-accepting AI-generated content without questioning its accuracy. This is particularly concerning given AI's tendency to be confidently wrong. Just look at some of Google's AI-generated summaries and their hilarious misfires as an example.

NVIDIA is currently the only supplier of high-end AI hardware, but that is about to change as OpenAI is reportedly nearing completion of its first generation, in-house AI-dedicated silicon.

The news comes from an exclusive report from Reuters that states the ChatGPT maker is currently in the midst of finalizing the design for its first in-house AI chip, and over the next few months, the design will be locked and sent over to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) for fabrication. OpenAI previously set a goal of hitting mass production of its own AI hardware sometime in 2026, and according to the report, these plans coincide with that timeline and illustrate the ChatGPT marker is on track for hitting them.

Despite OpenAI nearing the design completion for the chip, the challenges don't stop there as the first chip design will take approximately 6 months to produce, cost tens of millions of dollars, and there's no guarantee the silicon will function as intended. A failure in the first generation of silicon will mean OpenAI will need to take the design back to the drawing board, assess where it went wrong, and repeat the whole process all over again.

The Paris AI Action Summit is officially underway. All eyes are on the US and China, as discussions begin regarding the future of work, AI governance, AI for public good, and the risks of AI.

A key talking point in the lead-up to the event surrounds the US administration's stance on AI. President Trump has been vocal about his desire to make the US the 'world capital of artificial intelligence', quickly implementing his administration's own AI policies shortly after being sworn in.

"[We] must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas," he said.

For sophisticated AI chatbots to exist, they need to be trained on large swaths of data, but where things get murky is when the big question is posed to the companies behind these AI chatbots - where did you get this data from? And was it obtained legally?

Since their massive rise in popularity, companies behind these AI chatbots have been accused of stealing copyrighted data, which is then used by the AI for training purposes to further increase its sophistication and, ultimately, the price the company charges for access to the AI. Obtaining datasets legally means companies must pay a licensing fee for copyrighted material, and also agree to a bunch of hoops set by the owner of the data. Why go through all that expenditure and stipulations when the dataset can just be pirated in the same way a movie can be illegally downloaded?

Companies such as OpenAI are currently embroiled in copyright lawsuits for these reasons, but OpenAI isn't the only AI company facing copyright lawsuits, as a lawsuit against Meta has recently been leaked online that accuses the Mark Zuckerberg-run company of obtaining 82 terabytes (TB) of books from an illegal source for AI training. The lawsuit states Meta illegally downloaded the contents of the books from "shadow libraries" such as Anna's Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen, with the suit quoting a Meta researcher who was against the use of pirated material.

US-based startup 'Figure AI' has reported a 'major breakthrough' in robot intelligence after years of working in collaboration with OpenAI. Figure AI's CEO, Brett Adcock, took to X to share the recent news, and his excitement to share something in the next 30 days 'no one has ever seen on a humanoid'.

Figure AI recently received a funding round of $675 million, placing the company at a $2.6.B as they prepare to release their Figure 02 robot to the market. Figure 02 stands at 5"6 can carry 44 pounds, and work for up to 5 hours on a single charge. With a humanoid design, its hands allow it to open doors, use tools, climb stairs, lift boxes, and more.

The firm recently announced its decision to leave its agreement with OpenAI on the heels of its latest accomplishments, with Adcock citing:

Perplexity is an AI-powered search tool designed for research, offering users the ability to ask questions and generate responses based on multiple sources.

In a LinkedIn Post on Friday, Perplexity announced that file and image uploads will be receiving an expanded context window of 1 million tokens for free users. Meaning, users uploading files, or images, will be able to upload substantially more content for processing, as long as they have an account.

A 1 million token context window is massive - allowing users to process an entire book (350-400 pages), a month's worth of financial reports (1,000 pages of PDFs), or tens of thousands of lines of code (25,000-50,000 lines) at a time. For reference, ChatGPT's maximum context window caps out at 128,000 for OpenAI's GPT-4o - a model that's offered on a paid plan.

NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon researchers have introduced a new AI model called ASAP (Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skill). Designed to teach humanoid robots complex movements through simulations, the model was recently showcased in a video demonstrating its ability to replicate the motions of iconic athletes, including Kobe Bryant, Cristiano Ronaldo, viral K-Pop star Rose, and NBA superstar LeBron James.

In the footage, you can spot the humanoid robot dressed in its favorite athlete's uniforms, performing actions ranging from Kobe Bryant's iconic fadeaway jump-shot, to a famous celebration coined by Lakers forward LeBron James. The way it works: researchers pre-train the robot in simulation, eventually teaching it to replay the motion based on collections of video footage. The advancement is a step towards making humanoid robots move like real people in the future.

In a recent earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed the company's plans to incorporate AI more deeply into its online search functionality.

Since the release of ChatGPT, Google has gradually shifted towards a more AI-driven search model, first introducing 'AI overviews' in May of 2024. The feature was released to mixed reception, with many users reporting inaccurate information and strange hallucinations. Such as recommending to add glue to pizza, or to stare at the sun for 'health benefits'. There are also concerns regarding how Google's AI overviews affect brand visibility, with many businesses reliant on search results to drive customer acquisition.

Chinese robotics manufacturer UBTech is marching forward in the AI robotics race, with recent reports stating that mass production for AI-enabled humanoid robots will be ready by end of 2025.

The company plans to deliver between 500-1000 units of its Walker S series to clients including Apple supplier Foxconn, logistics firm SF Express, and various car manufacturers. They stated that 'over 60%' of units delivered this year will be the Walker S2, which is slated for launch in Q2 2025. With a newer model, the Walker S3, to be introduced later this year.

The UBTech Walker S is an industrial humanoid robot designed for use in sophisticated manufacturing environments. Walker S stands at 1.7 meters tall and is equipped with features such as 'force-compliant drive joints' and 'rigid-flexible coupling' systems for walking, navigation, and object handling. The robot is primarily built for automated assembly lines, with a focus on human-robot communication.