Category: Scoop.it

From the advent of the player piano until modern-day streaming, new technologies have regularly disrupted and transformed the music industry.

From the advent of the player piano until modern-day streaming, new technologies have regularly disrupted and transformed the music industry.

Now, AI has the potential to transform once again how music is made and consumed. Many observers are watching the industry’s response and questioning whether we see a redux of the Napster saga from the late 1990s and early 2000s. I believe the industry’s (and our society’s) reaction to AI is markedly different from the Napster years, as we all learn some lessons from the past.

Read the full article at: www.forbes.com

The company believes its technology is approaching the second level of five on the path to artificial general intelligence

OpenAI has come up with a set of five levels to track its progress toward building artificial intelligence software capable of outperforming humans, the startup’s latest effort to help people better understand its thinking about safety and the future of AI.

Read the full article at: www.bloomberg.com

Disabled people are experts in using – and designing – assistive technologies. They have lessons to offer everyone about keeping control when help is offered.

You might have heard that artificial intelligence is going to revolutionize everything, save the world and give everyone superhuman powers. Alternatively, you might have heard that it will take your job, make you lazy and stupid, and make the world a cyberpunk dystopia.

Consider another way to look at AI: as an assistive technology – something that helps you function.

Read the full article at: theconversation.com

Amazon received critical headlines this year when reports questioned the “Just Walk Out” technology installed at many of its physical grocery stores.

The AI-powered system enables customers at many of its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go shops to simply pick their items, and then leave.

The AI uses lots of sensors to work out what you have chosen. You then get automatically billed.

However, back in April it was widely reported that rather than solely using AI, Just Walk Out needed around 1,000 workers in India to manually check almost three quarters of the transactions.

Amazon was quick to claim that the reports were “erroneous”, and that staff in India were not reviewing video footage from all the shops.

Instead it said that the Indian workers were simply reviewing the system. Amazon added that “this is no different than any other AI system that places a high value on accuracy, where human reviewers are common”.

Read the full article at: www.bbc.com

Researchers have developed an AI algorithm that can spot a deepfake video with 98% accuracy.

In a paper presented earlier this month, researchers from Multimedia and Information Security Lab (MISL) in Drexel’s College of Engineering explained that they had created the “MISLnet algorithm” which can detect telltale signs of deepfake and manipulated pieces of media with incredible accuracy.

Read the full article at: petapixel.com

 

Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.

 

Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S.

 

This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper  published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 

 

Read the full article at: news.ucr.edu

We didn’t stop climbing mountains when chair lifts were invented. Similarly, there will always be something uniquely special and valuable about human music-making.

Read the full article at: theconversation.com

 

Google has introduced a family of multimodal models, called Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that the most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks – notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. Thus, Google believes that the new capabilities of the Gemini family in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases. In this article the authors discuss their approach toward post-training and deploying Gemini models responsibly to users through services including Gemini, Gemini Advanced, Google AI Studio, and Cloud Vertex AI.

 

 

See more details in Google’s Gemini technical report.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org