Lifeboat Foundation

On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker’s emotional tone.

Microsoft calls VALL-E a “neural codec language model,” and it builds off of a technology called EnCodec, which Meta announced in October 2022. Unlike other text-to-speech methods that typically synthesize speech by manipulating waveforms, VALL-E generates discrete audio codec codes from text and acoustic prompts.

On Friday, Koko co-founder Rob Morris announced on Twitter that his company ran an experiment to provide AI-written mental health counseling for 4,000 people without informing them first, The Verge reports. Critics have called the experiment deeply unethical because Koko did not obtain informed consent from people seeking counseling.

On Discord, users sign into the Koko Cares server and send direct messages to a Koko bot that asks several multiple-choice questions (e.g., “What’s the darkest thought you have about this?”). It then shares a person’s concerns—written as a few sentences of text—anonymously with someone else on the server who can reply anonymously with a short message of their own.

StrongPity APT group targeting Android users with a Trojanized Telegram app distributed through a fake Shagle video chat service website.

This blog post was co-authored with Guy Eyal, an NLP team leader at Gong.

TL;DR: In 2022, large models achieved state-of-the-art results in various tasks and domains. A significant breakthrough in natural language processing (NLP) was achieved when models were trained to align with user intent and human preferences, leading to improved generation quality. Looking ahead to 2023, we can expect to see new methods to improve the alignment process (such as reinforcement learning with AI feedback), the development of automatic metrics for understanding alignment effectiveness, and the emergence of personalized aligned models, even in an online manner. There may also be a focus on addressing factuality issues as well as developing open-source tools and specialized compute resources to allow the industrial scale of aligned models. In addition to NLP, there will likely be progress in other modalities such as audio processing, computer vision, and robotics, and the development of multimodal models.

2022 was an excellent year for machine learning, with numerous large language models (LLMs) published and achieving state-of-the-art results across various benchmarks. These LLMs demonstrated their superior performance through few-shot learning, surpassing smaller models that had been fine-tuned on the same tasks [1–3]. This has the potential to reduce the need for specialized, in-domain datasets. Techniques like Chain of Thoughts [4] and Self Consistency [5] also helped to improve the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, leading to significant gains on reasoning benchmarks.

Comprehensive database of AIs available for every task.

The eerie new capabilities of artificial intelligence are about to show up inside a courtroom — in the form of an AI chatbot lawyer that will soon argue a case in traffic court.

That’s according to Joshua Browder, the founder of a consumer-empowerment startup who conceived of the scheme.

Continue reading “My lawyer, the robot” »

The next—and final?—step for artificial intelligence is on the horizon.

Not content with accelerating graphics performance with AI via its various DLSS technologies (opens in new tab) and in designing GPUs themselves, Nvidia is now using AI to improve graphics drivers and further boost performance by up to 30%. Well, that’s the latest rumour.

According to CapFrameX (opens in new tab) (via OC3D (opens in new tab) ), maker of frame time analysis tools, Nvidia is working on AI-enhanced graphics drivers. Performance boosts of up to 30% are mooted, with the average performance benefit a more modest 10%.

German drugmaker BioNTech has struck a deal to buy U.K.-based AI startup InstaDeep for £562mn ($683mn).