April 2024 - Antonios Bouris

27/04/2024

New AI music generator makes songs from text prompts

“AI music generators — AIs that create new music based on users’ text prompts — are lowering the bar for music creation, for better or worse …”

On April 10, a new release shook the world of music.

No, it wasn’t a new Frank Ocean album or even another Drake diss track (more on those later). This drop wasn’t actually a new piece of music at all. It was Udio, an app that uses AI to generate music from users’ text prompts — think ChatGPT for instrumentals.

Though not the first product of its kind, Udio is arguably the best of the bunch — so how exactly does it work, and what could it mean for the future of music?

Read the full article at: www.freethink.com

27/04/2024

How United Airlines uses AI to make flying the friendly skies a bit easier

“United has bet heavily on the cloud and is now looking how to optimize its cloud usage …”

When you board a United Airlines plane, the gate agents, flight attendants and others involved in making sure your plane leaves on time are in a chatroom coordinating a lot of the work that you, as a passenger, will hopefully never notice. Is there still space for carry-on bags? Did the caterer bring the missing orange juice? Is there a way to seat a family together?

When a flight is delayed, a message with an explanation will arrive by text and in the United app. Most of the time, that message is generated by AI. Meanwhile, in offices around the world, dispatchers are looking at this real-time data to ensure that the crew can still legally fly the plane without running afoul of FAA regulations. And only a few weeks ago, United turned on its AI customer service chatbot.

Read the full article at: techcrunch.com

21/04/2024

First AI outperforming international math olympiad gold medalist

Proving geometric theorems constitutes a hallmark of visual reasoning combining both intuitive and logical skills. Therefore, automated theorem proving of Olympiad-level geometry problems is considered a notable milestone in human-level automated reasoning. The introduction of AlphaGeometry, a neuro-symbolic model trained with 100 million synthetic samples, marked a major breakthrough. It solved 25 of 30 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) problems whereas the reported baseline based on Wu’s method solved only ten.

In this paper, the IMO-AG-30 Challenge introduced with AlphaGeometry was revisited, and the researchers found that Wu’s method is surprisingly strong. Wu’s method alone can solve 15 problems, and some of them are not solved by any of the other methods. This leads to two key findings: (i) Combining Wu’s method with the classic synthetic methods of deductive databases and angle, ratio, and distance chasing solves 21 out of 30 methods by just using a CPU-only laptop with a time limit of 5 minutes per problem. Essentially, this classic method solves just 4 problems less than AlphaGeometry and establishes the first fully symbolic baseline, strong enough to rival the performance of an IMO silver medalist. (ii) Wu’s method even solves 2 of the 5 problems that AlphaGeometry failed to solve. Thus, by combining AlphaGeometry with Wu’s method a new state-of-the-art for automated theorem proving on IMO-AG-30, solving 27 out of 30 problems, the first AI method which outperforms an IMO gold medalist is finally achieved.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

21/04/2024

An Electric New Era for Atlas

The electric version of Atlas will be stronger, with a broader range of motion than any of our previous generations. For example, our last generation hydraulic Atlas (HD Atlas) could already lift and maneuver a wide variety of heavy, irregular objects; we are continuing to build on those existing capabilities and are exploring several new gripper variations to meet a diverse set of expected manipulation needs in customer environments.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Robotics

Read the full article at: bostondynamics.com

21/04/2024

Amazon Music launches Maestro, an AI playlist creator

“Amazon Music is following hot on the heels of Spotify’s AI playlist feature with its own version known as Maestro …”

Earlier in April, Spotify launched a new feature that lets users create AI-based playlists. Starting today, Amazon now offering a similar feature known as Maestro within its Amazon Music service as a beta experience to a select set of users in the U.S.

Read the full article at: www.digitaltrends.com

05/04/2024

The iPhone may get a big dose of AI this year. Here’s what to expect.

“Apple’s iOS 18 update will likely be full of new AI features …”

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have played an important role in the iPhone for years, powering features like Portrait Mode for the camera and the ability to copy and paste text from photos. But at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, we’re expecting to learn about how Apple could take that to the next level by potentially bringing generative AI to the iPhone.

Generative AI, or AI models trained on large volumes of data that create content in response to prompts, has exploded in popularity following the success of ChatGPT. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Samsung and Amazon, among many others, have introduced generative AI into their biggest products over the past year. Apple, however, has been quiet about its plans for generative AI, although CEO Tim Cook teased updates for 2024.

Read the full article at: www.cnet.com

05/04/2024

Google publishes report on the opportunities of AI in developing regions

“The opportunities of AI also extend to developing regions, which is an important consideration …”

While the potential of generative AI has been discussed extensively over the past year, Google is now looking at AI from a different angle, in regards to how it will benefit developing regions.

As per Google:

“AI stands to benefit people worldwide. This is especially true for developing countries across Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa where it can provide game-changing solutions to unique challenges they face — like poor infrastructure, youth unemployment, uneven access to education and health care, and food insecurity.”

Read the full article at: www.socialmediatoday.com

05/04/2024

Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Synthetic Voices

We’re sharing lessons from a small scale preview of Voice Engine, a model for creating custom voices.

OpenAI is committed to developing safe and broadly beneficial AI. Today we are sharing preliminary insights and results from a small-scale preview of a model called Voice Engine, which uses text input and a single 15-second audio sample to generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles the original speaker. It is notable that a small model with a single 15-second sample can create emotive and realistic voices.

We first developed Voice Engine in late 2022, and have used it to power the preset voices available in the text-to-speech API as well as ChatGPT Voice and Read Aloud. At the same time, we are taking a cautious and informed approach to a broader release due to the potential for synthetic voice misuse. We hope to start a dialogue on the responsible deployment of synthetic voices, and how society can adapt to these new capabilities. Based on these conversations and the results of these small scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale.

Read the full article at: openai.com