Radar Trends to Watch: August 2022

Developments in Security, Quantum Computing, Energy, and More

By Mike Loukides

August 2, 2022

The large model train keeps rolling on. This month, we’ve seen the release of Bloom, an open, large language model developed by the BigScience collaboration, the first public access to DALL-E (along with a guide to prompt engineering), a Copilot-like model for generating regular expressions from English-language prompts, and Simon Willison’s experiments using GPT-3 to explain JavaScript code.

On other fronts, NIST has released the first proposed standard for post-quantum cryptography (i.e., cryptography that can’t be broken by quantum computers). CRISPR has been used in human trials to re-engineer a patient’s DNA to reduce cholesterol. And a surprising number of cities are paying high tech remote workers to move there.

Artificial Intelligence

• Regardless of where a company is based, to avoid legal problems later, it’s a good idea to build AI and other data-based systems that observe the EU’s data laws.
• Public (beta) access to DALL-E is beginning! It might take a while to get in because there are over a million on the waitlist. Accepted users get 50 free credits the first month, 15/month thereafter; a credit allows you to give one prompt, which returns 4 images. Users can buy additional credits.
• Researchers have used reinforcement learning to build a robotic dog that learns to walk on its own in the real world (i.e., without prior training and use ...