July 1, 2022
This month, large models are even more in the news than last month: the open source Bloom model is almost finished, Google’s LaMDA is good enough that it can trick people into thinking it’s sentient, and DALL-E has gotten even better at drawing what you ask.
The most important issue facing technology might now be the protection of privacy. While that’s not a new concern, it’s a concern that most computer users have been willing to ignore, and that most technology companies have been willing to let them ignore. New state laws that criminalize having abortions out of state and the stockpiling of location information by antiabortion groups have made privacy an issue that can’t be ignored.
Artificial Intelligence
- Big Science has almost finished training its open source BLOOM language model, which was developed by volunteer researchers and trained using public funds. Bloom will provide an open, public platform for research into the capabilities of large language models and, specifically, issues like avoiding bias and toxic language.
- AI tools like AlphaFold2 can create new proteins, not just analyze existing ones; the unexpected creation of new artifacts by an AI system is playfully called “hallucination.” The proteins designed so far probably aren’t useful; still, this is a major step forward in drug design.
- Microsoft is limiting or removing access to some features ...
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