Last Week in AI
Weekly summaries of the AI news that matters!
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Episodes
Sunday Apr 23, 2023
Sunday Apr 23, 2023
Our 118th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Read out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Check out Jeremie's new book Quantum Physics Made Me Do It
Quantum Physics Made Me Do It tells the story of human self-understanding through the lens of physics. It explores what we can and can’t know about reality, and how tiny tweaks to quantum theory can reshape our entire picture of the universe. And because I couldn't resist, it explains what that story means for AI and the future of sentience
You can find it on Amazon in the UK, Canada, and the US — here are the links:
UK version | Canadian version | US version
Outline:
Applications & Business(04:15) Stability AI announces new open-source large language model + OpenAssistant RELEASED! The world's best open-source Chat AI!
(15:00) Stability AI is on shaky ground as it burns through cash and looks at a management overhaul
Lighting Round(23:12) Elon Musk Creates New Artificial Intelligence Company X.AI
(28:40) Google’s big AI push will combine Brain and DeepMind into one team
(30:36) Amazon AWS expands generative AI efforts with Bedrock and CodeWhisperer updates
(34:00) Samsung wants to release EX1, a human assistant robot, this year
Research & Advancements(36:32) The LLama Effect: How an Accidental Leak Sparked a Series of Impressive Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT
(44:00) Auto-GPT and BabyAGI: How ‘autonomous agents’ are bringing generative AI to the masses
Lighting Round(52:15) Researchers used machine learning to improve the first photo of a black hole
(53:42) Tennis Robot Could Pave Way for Advancement in Fast-Movement Robotics
(55:16) OpenAI Surprises Open-Source Community, Unveils Consistency Models
(58:28) Model that uses machine learning methods and patient data at hospital arrival predicts strokes more accurately than current system
Policy & Safety & Societal Impacts
(01:00:50) Finally, a realistic roadmap for getting AI companies in check
(01:07:00) China proposes measures to manage generative AI services
Lighting Round(01:13:00) A.I. could lead to a ‘nuclear-level catastrophe’ according to a third of researchers, a new Stanford report finds
(01:16:00) Inside the AI talent wars: Tech companies are ransacking university AI programs at Stanford, MIT, and Cornell in search of rare talent
(01:20:00) Photographer admits prize-winning image was AI-generated
Art & Fun Stuff(01:23:13) Exploring Creativity in Large Language Models: From GPT-2 to GPT-4
(01:27:32) AI-generated Drake and The Weeknd song goes viral
(01:30:30) Adobe launches AI-powered text-based video editing
(01:33:47) Meta has open-sourced an AI project that turns your doodles into animations
(01:35:15) Outro
Friday Apr 14, 2023
Friday Apr 14, 2023
Our 118th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out Jeremie's new book Quantum Physics Made Me Do It
Read out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessAnthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI
Doctors are drowning in paperwork. Some companies claim AI can help
Lighting RoundGoogle reveals its newest A.I. supercomputer, says it beats Nvidia
Elon Musk is moving forward with a new generative-AI project at Twitter after purchasing thousands of GPUs
Amazon tells employees it isn’t falling behind on AI
Bing Image Creator now has a home in the Edge Sidebar, at least for now
Research & AdvancementsDevelopers Are Connecting Multiple AI Agents to Make More ‘Autonomous’ AIRecursive Criticism and Improvement (RCI) Prompting: An Approach to Improve Large Language Models (LLMs) in Computer and Reasoning Tasks
Deep RL at Scale: Sorting Waste in Office Buildings with a Fleet of Mobile Manipulators
Lighting Round[Not an article] GPT-4 can compress and decompress prompts into non-human-readable forms
Researchers populated a tiny virtual town with AI (and it was very wholesome)
Meta releases AI model that can identify items within images
Another Large Language Model! Meet IGEL: An Instruction-Tuned German LLM Family
Meet AUDIT: An Instruction-Guided Audio Editing Model Based on Latent Diffusion Models
Policy & Societal Impacts
Machine Learning Expert Calls for Bombing Data Centers to Stop Rise of AI
AI Is Getting Powerful. But Can Researchers Make It Principled?
Lighting RoundCanada Opens Probe into OpenAI, the Creator of AI Chatbot ChatGPT
Pausing AI development would 'simply benefit China,' warns former Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Someone Asked an Autonomous AI to 'Destroy Humanity': This Is What Happened
Canada Opens Probe into OpenAI, the Creator of AI Chatbot ChatGPT
Art & Fun StuffThe beautiful, hilarious surrealism of early text-to-video AIs
Once More, With Feeling: Exploring Relatable Robotics at Disney
Someone keeps accusing fanfiction authors of writing their fic with AI, and nobody knows why
How Will AI Transform Photography?
Friday Apr 07, 2023
Friday Apr 07, 2023
Our 117th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out Jeremie's new book Quantum Physics Made Me Do It
Read out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessGoogle's Shuffles Assistant Leadership to Focus on Bard AIAlphabet’s Google and DeepMind Pause Grudges, Join Forces to Chase OpenAI
February 2023 Robotics Investments Total $620 MillionWith Human Metalworkers Hard to Come By, Robotic Blacksmiths Step Up
Lighting RoundMicrosoft’s Bing chatbot is getting ads
Yeah, of course, YC’s winter class is oozing with AI companies
Google Partners with AI Startup Replit to Take on Microsoft’s GitHub
Birth of a Salesman: OpenAI Sheds Its Lab Coat to Seek Big Deals
Research & Advancements
Introducing BloombergGPT, Bloomberg’s 50-billion parameter large language model, purpose-built from scratch for finance
The takeaways from Stanford’s 386-page report on the state of AI
Lighting Round
Robots Using Legs as Arms to Climb and Push Buttons
Policy & Societal Impacts
The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be
The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, explained
Lighting Round
How a tiny company with few rules is making fake images go mainstream
FTC Is Reviewing Competition in Artificial Intelligence
Midjourney ends free trials of its AI image generator due to 'extraordinary' abuse
Art & Fun StuffChinese creators use Midjourney’s AI to generate retro urban “photography”
Artificial intelligence deepfake video of Harry Potter characters in faux-Balenciaga fashion show goes viral
Friday Mar 31, 2023
Friday Mar 31, 2023
Our 116th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessOpenAI is massively expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities to let it browse the web and more
NVIDIA's big AI moment is here
Lighting RoundFormer head of Google China joins ChatGPT frenzy by starting own venture
Cerebras Systems Releases Seven New GPT Models Trained on CS-2 Wafer-Scale Systems
Generative AI set to affect 300 million jobs across major economies
Agility’s Latest Digit Robot Prepares for its First Job
Research & AdvancementsLearning to grow machine-learning models
Researchers from UC Berkeley and Deepmind Propose SuccessVQA: A Reformulation of Success Detection that is Amenable to Pre-trained VLMs such as Flamingo
Lighting RoundNew virtual testing environment breaks the 'curse of rarity' for autonomous vehicle emergency decision-making
Scientists are using machine learning to forecast bird migration and identify birds in flight by their calls
New in-home AI tool monitors the health of elderly residents
Runway Gen-2 is the First Publicly Available Text-to-Video Generator
Policy & Societal Impacts
OpenAI co-founder on company’s past approach to openly sharing research: ‘We were wrong’
1,100+ notable signatories just signed an open letter asking “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months”
Lighting RoundIn San Francisco, some people wonder when A.I. will kill us all
Clearview AI used nearly 1m times by US police, it tells the BBC
Voice system used to verify identity by Centrelink can be fooled by AI
AI can draw hands now. That’s bad news for deep-fakes
Art & Fun StuffPeople Aren’t Falling for AI Trump Photos (Yet)
WGA Would Allow Artificial Intelligence in Scriptwriting, as Long as Writers Maintain Credit
Sunday Mar 26, 2023
Sunday Mar 26, 2023
Our 115th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessGPT-4GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why
GPT-4’s new capabilities power a ‘virtual volunteer’ for the visually impaired
Google opens early access to its ChatGPT rival Bard — here are our first impressions
Lighting RoundConfirmed: the new Bing runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4
Microsoft and Google Unveil A.I. Tools for Businesses
Adept Raises $350 Million To Build AI That Learns How To Use Software For You
Introducing Claude
Research & AdvancementsMicrosoft Researchers Claim GPT-4 Is Showing "Sparks" of AGI
Alpaca: A Strong Instruction-Following Model
Lighting RoundOur latest health AI research updates
Machine learning takes starring role in exploring the universe
A new method to boost the speed of online databases
MIT researchers uncover the structural properties and dynamics of deep classifiers, offering novel explanations for optimization, generalization, and approximation in deep networks
Policy & Societal Impacts
Core Views on AI Safety: When, Why, What, and How
Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams
Lighting RoundSome high-level thoughts on the DeepMind alignment team's strategy
Meta’s powerful AI language model has leaked online — what happens now?
AI Scams and Influencers
AI Generated Image from Text is not Human Authorship says US Copyright Office
I’m an ER doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients
Art & Fun StuffMidjourney V5 is Out Now – Next Steps in Photorealistic Experience with AI Art
Illustration competitions grapple with generative AI
Online storm erupts over AI work in Dutch museum’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ display
AI and Copyright: Human Artistry Campaign Launches to Support Songwriters and Musicians’ Rights
Friday Mar 10, 2023
Friday Mar 10, 2023
Our 114th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessLLM/ChatGPT roundupRadioGPT brings AI to the airwaves
Salesforce to add ChatGPT to Slack as part of OpenAI partnership
Microsoft integrates AI behind ChatGPT to more developer tools
Snapchat launches an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology
Meet DuckAssist, DuckDuckGo's New AI Feature
Shortwave email app introduces AI-powered summaries
Inside Claude: The ChatGPT Competitor that Just Raised Over $1 BillionAnthropic begins supplying its text-generating AI models to select startups
Lighting RoundMicrosoft now lets you change Bing’s chatbot personality to be more entertaining
OpenAI announces an API for ChatGPT and its Whisper speech-to-text tech
D-ID’s new web app gives a face and voice to OpenAI’s ChatGPT
OpenAI rival Stable Diffusion maker seeks to raise funds at US$4 billion valuation
Research & AdvancementsGoogle’s PaLM-E is a generalist robot brain that takes commandsPaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model
What Happens If You Run A Transformer Model With An Optical Neural Network?
Lighting RoundScientists Now Want to Create AI Using Real Human Brain Cells
Artificial Intelligence from a psychologist's point of view
Google’s one step closer to building its 1,000-language AI model
AI masters video game 6000 times faster by reading the instructions
Policy & Societal Impacts
OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit
As A.I. Booms, Lawmakers Struggle to Understand the Technology
Lighting Round A couple in Canada were reportedly scammed out of $21,000 after getting a call from an AI-generated voice pretending to be their son
TikTok’s trendy beauty filter ushers in new tech and new problems
UK Supreme Court hears landmark patent case over AI "invent
ChatGPT broke the EU plan to regulate AI
Art & Fun StuffAI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines — but not fooling anyoneSci-fi becomes real as renowned magazine closes submissions due to AI writers
ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon
‘Hollywood 2.0’: How the Rise of AI Tools Like Runway Are Changing Filmmaking
The AI-powered Seinfeld spoof is set to return to Twitch with new guardrails in place
Saturday Mar 04, 2023
Saturday Mar 04, 2023
Our 113th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & Business
Meet the $10,000 Nvidia chip powering the race for A.I.
Generative AI Is Coming For the Lawyers
Vicarious Surgical cuts 14% of staff
Alphabet Layoffs Hit Trash-Sorting Robots
Spectrum uses generative AI to create TV commercials
Spotify’s new AI-powered DJ will build you a custom playlist and talk over the top of it
Amazon’s Cloud Partners With Startup Hugging Face as AI Deals Heat Up
Research & Advancements
Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools
Human-Timescale Adaptation in an Open-Ended Task Space
RT-1: Robotics Transformer
Meta heats up Big Tech's AI arms race with new language model
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that can enable a machine learning model to quantify how confident it is in its predictions
Machine learning makes long-term, expansive reef monitoring possible
How AI Can Help Design Drugs to Treat Opioid Addiction
Policy & Societal Impacts
"AI alignment" and uncalibrated discourse on AI
What ChatGPT means for the new future of national security
How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice
AI-Human Romances Are Flourishing—And This Is Just the Beginning
Machine learning is helping police work out what people on the run now look like
Planning for AGI and beyond
Art & Fun Stuff
Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon
‘Hollywood 2.0’: How the Rise of AI Tools Like Runway Are Changing Filmmaking
Sci-fi becomes real as renowned magazine closes submissions due to AI writers
The AI-powered Seinfeld spoof is set to return to Twitch with new guardrails in place
Sunday Feb 26, 2023
Sunday Feb 26, 2023
Our 112th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessMicrosoft's Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It
Audiobook Narrators Fear Apple Used Their Voices to Train AI
Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈
Opera’s building ChatGPT into its sidebar
Exclusive: Microsoft's Bing plans AI ads in early pitch to advertisers
GitHub Copilot update stops AI model from revealing secrets
Roblox is working on generative AI tools
Research & Advancements
BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Mining
MarioGPT - A new way to encode and generate Super Mario Bros levels
Machine learning techniques identify thousands of new cosmic objects
AI analyzes cell movement under the microscope
Accelerating Prime Editing: Machine Learning Helps Design the Best Fix for a Given Genetic Flaw
Enhance! Deep learning tool boosts X-ray imaging resolution and hydrogen fuel cell performance
Policy & Societal Impacts
Beijing to support key firms in building ChatGPT-like AI models
Only you can stop an AI apocalypse
South Korea aims to join AI race as startup Rebellions launches new chip
GitHub Copilot update stops AI model from revealing secrets
U.S., China, other nations urge 'responsible' use of military AI
Art & Fun Stuff
Voice Actors are Having Their Voices Stolen by AI
Video Game Voice Actors Doxed and Harassed in Targeted AI Voice Attack
Keanu Reeves Says Deepfakes Are ‘Scary,’ Confirms His Film Contracts Ban Digital Edits to His Acting: ‘They Added a Tear to My Face! Huh?’
TikTokers are roasting McDonald's hilarious drive-thru AI order fails — and it shows that robots won't take over restaurants any time soon
Monday Feb 13, 2023
Monday Feb 13, 2023
Our 111th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Listen with transcript
Stories this week:
Applications & Business
Chinese Search Giant Baidu to Launch ChatGPT-Style Bot
Google To Release ChatGPT-like Bot Named Bard
Alphabet Stock Loses $100 Billion After New AI Chatbot Gives Wrong Answer In Ad
Quora opens its new AI chatbot app Poe to the general public
You.com’s AI-infused Google rival provides a tantalizing glimpse of the future
Perplexity AI Challenges ChatGPT and Google With New Conversational Search Engine
Apptronik Developing General-Purpose Humanoid Robot
Lighting Round
Chatbot Startup Character Seeks $250 Million, Testing Investor Appetite for AI
AI startup Cohere in talks to raise funding at $6 bln plus valuation
OpenAI to Offer New Version of ChatGPT for a $20 Monthly Fee
Instagram’s founders are back with a new app
Google invests $300mn in artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic |…
Research & Advancements
Stanford Researcher develops a simple prompting strategy that enables open-source LLMs with 30x fewer parameters to exceed the few-shot performance of GPT
A dire forecast: Scientists used AI to find planet could cross critical warming threshold sooner than expected
Lighting Round
Whispers of AI’s modular future
AI Spits Out Exact Copies of Training Images, Real People, Logos, Researchers Find
AI-Powered FRIDA robot collaborates with humans to create art
Scaling laws for single-agent reinforcement learning
Policy & Societal Impacts
Amazing "Jailbreak" Bypasses ChatGPT's Ethics Safeguards
Reddit users have created a ChatGPT alter-ego forcing it to break its own rules by threatening it with death
Conservatives Are Obsessed With Getting ChatGPT to Say the N-Word
Disinformation Researchers Raise Alarms About A.I. Chat
The current legal cases against generative AI are just the beginning
Lighting Round
Five Predictions for the Future of Learning in the Age of AI
A Judge Just Used ChatGPT to Make a Court Decision
Netflix Made an Anime Using AI Due to a 'Labor Shortage,' and Fans Are Pissed
Here are the schools and colleges that have banned the use of ChatGPT over plagiarism and misinformation fears
U.S. and EU to launch first-of-its-kind AI agreement
Developers Created AI to Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified
Art & Fun Stuff
AI has been generating an endless Seinfeld episode for more than a month now
Sunday Feb 05, 2023
Sunday Feb 05, 2023
Our 110th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
After a 4 month break, we're back with a new co-host, and will resume our regular weekly upload schedule.
If you are a fan, we'd appreciate your feedback on Apple Podcast.
Stories this week:
Applications & Business
BuzzFeed says it will use AI tools from OpenAI to personalize its content
related : CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI
CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy
CNET found errors in more than half of its AI-written stories
Who owns the generative AI platform?
Lighting Round
Here’s Why ChatGPT is just the start of the generative AI boom
Microsoft to Invest $10 Billion in OpenAI, the Creator of ChatGPT
Generative AI funding exploded over the past 2 years
After inking its OpenAI deal, Shutterstock rolls out a generative AI toolkit to create images based on text prompts
Research & Advancements
ChatGPT’s creator made a free tool for detecting AI-generated text
New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
Related: Stanford introduces DetectGPT to help educators fight back against ChatGPT generated papers
Google created an AI that can generate music from text descriptions, but won’t release it
Lighting Round
Versatile robo-dog runs through the sandy beach at 3 mile/sec
AI has designed bacteria-killing proteins from scratch – and they work
GraphGPT: Extrapolating knowledge graphs from unstructured text
Machine learning identifies drugs that could potentially help smokers quit
Policy & Societal Impacts
4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hatespeech
AI-Generated Voice Firm Clamps Down After 4chan Makes Celebrity Voices for Abuse
Educator considerations for ChatGPT
Lighting Round
Scores of Stanford students used ChatGPT on final exams, survey suggests - “Stanford students and professors alike are grappling with the rise of ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, and the technology’s implications for education.”
When May a Robot Kill? New DOD Policy Tries to Clarify
AI-generated art a concern for local artists who say there’s still a need for human creativity
Robot Cars Are Causing 911 False Alarms in San Francisco
Art & Fun Stuff
I wrote a short story! - I Think I Am Starting to Fear Death
Atlas Gets a Grip | Boston Dynamics