AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[Time_Traveller]

Is superintelligent AI inevitable?

The current explosion of exciting commercial and open-source AI is likely to be followed, within a few years, by creepily superintelligent AI – which top researchers and experts fear could disempower or wipe out humanity. Scientist Max Tegmark describes an optimistic vision for how we can keep AI under control and ensure it's working for us, not the other way around.

[weatheriscool]

[firestar464]

[Powers]

I was going to make a joke about Japan

[wjfox]

AI: Scientists excited by tool that grades severity of rare cancer

5 hours ago

Artificial intelligence is nearly twice as good at grading the aggressiveness of a rare form of cancer from scans as the current method, a study suggests.

By recognising details invisible to the naked eye, AI was 82% accurate, compared with 44% for lab analysis.

Researchers from the Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research say it could improve treatment and benefit thousands every year.

They are also excited by its potential for spotting other cancers early.

AI is already showing huge promise for diagnosing breast cancers and reducing treatment times.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67264350

[Yuli Ban]

I've seen some delivery robots at my college when I stopped by the other day.
Makes me a bit jealous! I dreamed of the day of autonomous delivery robots being a thing when I was still attending college.... and only a few years later, here they are!

[Yuli Ban]

Hey, using robots to hunt ghosts is literally something I've been waiting for for over a decade now. Realtalk, if we're ever going to confirm or deny the paranormal, it'll be through robots and AI.

[caltrek]

President Biden Issues Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
October 30, 2023

Introduction:

(The White House) Today, President Biden is issuing a landmark Executive Order to ensure that America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence (AI). The Executive Order establishes new standards for AI safety and security, protects Americans’ privacy, advances equity and civil rights, stands up for consumers and workers, promotes innovation and competition, advances American leadership around the world, and more.

As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s comprehensive strategy for responsible innovation, the Executive Order builds on previous actions the President has taken, including work that led to voluntary commitments from 15 leading companies to drive safe, secure, and trustworthy development of AI.

Further Extract:

The Executive Order directs the following actions:

New Standards for AI Safety and Security

As AI’s capabilities grow, so do its implications for Americans’ safety and security. With this Executive Order, the President directs the most sweeping actions ever taken to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI systems:

• Require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government…

• Develop standards, tools, and tests to help ensure that AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy. The National Institute of Standards and Technology will set the rigorous standards for extensive red-team testing to ensure safety before public release. The Department of Homeland Security will apply those standards to critical infrastructure sectors and establish the AI Safety and Security Board. The Departments of Energy and Homeland Security will also address AI systems’ threats to critical infrastructure, as well as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cybersecurity risks….

• Protect against the risks of using AI to engineer dangerous biological materials by developing strong new standards for biological synthesis screening….

• Protect Americans from AI-enabled fraud and deception by establishing standards and best practices for detecting AI-generated content and authenticating official content….

• Establish an advanced cybersecurity program to develop AI tools to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical software, building on the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing AI Cyber Challenge. Together, these efforts will harness AI’s potentially game-changing cyber capabilities to make software and networks more secure.

• Order the development of a National Security Memorandum that directs further actions on AI and security, to be developed by the National Security Council and White House Chief of Staff. This document will ensure that the United States military and intelligence community use AI safely, ethically, and effectively in their missions, and will direct actions to counter adversaries’ military use of AI.
—

Read more of the White House News release here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-r ... lligence/

Read the new Executive Order here: https://www.federalregister.gov/docume ... elligence

[raklian]

It's hard to believe we're witnessing this today. It seemed like the prospect of a bona fide AI was a far off future breakthrough.

[wjfox]

(This is a press release, so I'm allowed to quote more than five paragraphs)

New techniques efficiently accelerate sparse tensors for massive AI models

October 30, 2023

Researchers from MIT and NVIDIA have developed two techniques that accelerate the processing of sparse tensors, a type of data structure that’s used for high-performance computing tasks. The complementary techniques could result in significant improvements to the performance and energy-efficiency of systems like the massive machine-learning models that drive generative artificial intelligence.

Tensors are data structures used by machine-learning models. Both of the new methods seek to efficiently exploit what’s known as sparsity — zero values — in the tensors. When processing these tensors, one can skip over the zeros and save on both computation and memory. For instance, anything multiplied by zero is zero, so it can skip that operation. And it can compress the tensor (zeros don’t need to be stored) so a larger portion can be stored in on-chip memory.

However, there are several challenges to exploiting sparsity. Finding the nonzero values in a large tensor is no easy task. Existing approaches often limit the locations of nonzero values by enforcing a sparsity pattern to simplify the search, but this limits the variety of sparse tensors that can be processed efficiently.

Another challenge is that the number of nonzero values can vary in different regions of the tensor. This makes it difficult to determine how much space is required to store different regions in memory. To make sure the region fits, more space is often allocated than is needed, causing the storage buffer to be underutilized. This increases off-chip memory traffic, which increases energy consumption.

The MIT and NVIDIA researchers crafted two solutions to address these problems. For one, they developed a technique that allows the hardware to efficiently find the nonzero values for a wider variety of sparsity patterns.

For the other solution, they created a method that can handle the case where the data do not fit in memory, which increases the utilization of the storage buffer and reduces off-chip memory traffic.

Both methods boost the performance and reduce the energy demands of hardware accelerators specifically designed to speed up the processing of sparse tensors.

https://news.mit.edu/2023/new-technique ... nsors-1030

[Vakanai]

Hey, using robots to hunt ghosts is literally something I've been waiting for for over a decade now. Realtalk, if we're ever going to confirm or deny the paranormal, it'll be through robots and AI.

Not really - part of the deal with the paranormal is you can't deny it, because it's one of those things where lack of evidence means nothing and evidence to deny it can't exist - we're talking about ghost stories really, people have believed in it for thousands of years despite there never having been any proof and no evidence beyond faulty eyewitness testimony and some hazy photos or worse EVPs (swear 99% of the time I never hear the voices or words ghost hunters claim are in their EVPs, I just hear static noise - like they are really stretching to make words out of nothing according to my ears, and yet a staggeringly large number of people seem to be falling for this).

[Yuli Ban]

Hey, using robots to hunt ghosts is literally something I've been waiting for for over a decade now. Realtalk, if we're ever going to confirm or deny the paranormal, it'll be through robots and AI.

Not really - part of the deal with the paranormal is you can't deny it, because it's one of those things where lack of evidence means nothing and evidence to deny it can't exist - we're talking about ghost stories really, people have believed in it for thousands of years despite there never having been any proof and no evidence beyond faulty eyewitness testimony and some hazy photos or worse EVPs (swear 99% of the time I never hear the voices or words ghost hunters claim are in their EVPs, I just hear static noise - like they are really stretching to make words out of nothing according to my ears, and yet a staggeringly large number of people seem to be falling for this).

I've studied a good bit of the stuff, and ultimately the thing I note about the paranormal and supernatural is that 99% of it is obviously human minds being fooled; it's the periphery of our senses, the glitches of human cognition being rationalized. There's maybe 1% at most of actual anomalies.
But ultimately, the fleeting nature of the paranormal makes it impossible to study on principle. Assuming that ghosts, cryptids, etc. do exist, why has research yielded no evidence of their existence after centuries of rigorous study? One reason I'm willing to entertain is that study hasn't actually been that rigorous; it only seems so because of how much it captures our imagination. But no one serious is going to invest heavily into camping out in a haunted penitentiary for a full year just to possibly find a disembodied shadow moving through a room. Furthermore, most humans get spooked by such things anyhow (indeed, that sort of "infrasound dread" is an inherent part of said "ghost sightings," and even if you take it seriously, the infliction of dread and high-strangeness is also an inherent part of the paranormal, further conveniently making it difficult to properly investigate). It's already a massive stretch that ghosts allegedly haunt certain locations regularly and yet never appear on the days the researchers with actual tools and equipment set up shop, but again, just entertaining the possibility that maybe we aren't searching hard enough and always just so happen to pick the days and nights the spirits aren't willing to show themselves, how do you mitigate that from happening and do research better? Automate the process, of course!

In my honest, very bad opinion, if ghosts are ever proven to exist, or if some Bigfoot-like creature is ever formally found, or if something like a repeatable curse or telepathy or whatever, if anything "Fortean" is formally proven to exist, it will have been discovered by an artificial intelligence system and investigated by robots. The first "proof" of ghosts will be readings and images captured by an AI, likely an advanced smarthome system set up in a "haunted" house that is always watching, always on, and can't be fooled by metabolically-driven cognitive glitches nor driven to flee by a sense of fear and self-preservation.

And as I've long said, if there's still no proof even after the rise of AGI and proliferation of robots, then that will be the final and ultimate point when we will know at last that it was nothing more than myths and legends after all.
It's already severely pushing the limit of believability when smartphones and CCTV cameras are everywhere, and if there are "real" instances of paranormal activity, they aren't in great number and are heavily muddied by legions of hoaxers— some just doing it for a laugh, some just trying to capitalize on spooky culture, others genuinely deluded into thinking they're "raising awareness" through fakery. But I'll still give it all the benefit of the doubt that maybe there is something out there beyond our immediate perception and only an Overmind can regularly perceive it.

[firestar464]

GPT-4 doesn't pass the Turing Test

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-11-gpt ... shold.html

[spryfusion]

https://x.ai/

[Vakanai]

Hey, using robots to hunt ghosts is literally something I've been waiting for for over a decade now. Realtalk, if we're ever going to confirm or deny the paranormal, it'll be through robots and AI.

Not really - part of the deal with the paranormal is you can't deny it, because it's one of those things where lack of evidence means nothing and evidence to deny it can't exist - we're talking about ghost stories really, people have believed in it for thousands of years despite there never having been any proof and no evidence beyond faulty eyewitness testimony and some hazy photos or worse EVPs (swear 99% of the time I never hear the voices or words ghost hunters claim are in their EVPs, I just hear static noise - like they are really stretching to make words out of nothing according to my ears, and yet a staggeringly large number of people seem to be falling for this).

I've studied a good bit of the stuff, and ultimately the thing I note about the paranormal and supernatural is that 99% of it is obviously human minds being fooled; it's the periphery of our senses, the glitches of human cognition being rationalized. There's maybe 1% at most of actual anomalies.
But ultimately, the fleeting nature of the paranormal makes it impossible to study on principle. Assuming that ghosts, cryptids, etc. do exist, why has research yielded no evidence of their existence after centuries of rigorous study? One reason I'm willing to entertain is that study hasn't actually been that rigorous; it only seems so because of how much it captures our imagination. But no one serious is going to invest heavily into camping out in a haunted penitentiary for a full year just to possibly find a disembodied shadow moving through a room. Furthermore, most humans get spooked by such things anyhow (indeed, that sort of "infrasound dread" is an inherent part of said "ghost sightings," and even if you take it seriously, the infliction of dread and high-strangeness is also an inherent part of the paranormal, further conveniently making it difficult to properly investigate). It's already a massive stretch that ghosts allegedly haunt certain locations regularly and yet never appear on the days the researchers with actual tools and equipment set up shop, but again, just entertaining the possibility that maybe we aren't searching hard enough and always just so happen to pick the days and nights the spirits aren't willing to show themselves, how do you mitigate that from happening and do research better? Automate the process, of course!

In my honest, very bad opinion, if ghosts are ever proven to exist, or if some Bigfoot-like creature is ever formally found, or if something like a repeatable curse or telepathy or whatever, if anything "Fortean" is formally proven to exist, it will have been discovered by an artificial intelligence system and investigated by robots. The first "proof" of ghosts will be readings and images captured by an AI, likely an advanced smarthome system set up in a "haunted" house that is always watching, always on, and can't be fooled by metabolically-driven cognitive glitches nor driven to flee by a sense of fear and self-preservation.

And as I've long said, if there's still no proof even after the rise of AGI and proliferation of robots, then that will be the final and ultimate point when we will know at last that it was nothing more than myths and legends after all.
It's already severely pushing the limit of believability when smartphones and CCTV cameras are everywhere, and if there are "real" instances of paranormal activity, they aren't in great number and are heavily muddied by legions of hoaxers— some just doing it for a laugh, some just trying to capitalize on spooky culture, others genuinely deluded into thinking they're "raising awareness" through fakery. But I'll still give it all the benefit of the doubt that maybe there is something out there beyond our immediate perception and only an Overmind can regularly perceive it.

It doesn't matter if you automate the process - believers will say that ghosts won't show themselves if humans aren't involved, or that ghosts can't be detected by whatever sensors the robots use, or some other random thing to justify their beliefs. You can't prove ghosts exist because they don't, but you also can't prove they don't exist because all you can do is show that there's no evidence supporting it - and a lack of evidence will never change the minds of all those who want to believe. "And as I've long said, if there's still no proof even after the rise of AGI and proliferation of robots, then that will be the final and ultimate point when we will know at last that it was nothing more than myths and legends after all" that's wishful thinking, that's not how humans work. People will still believe.

[Yuli Ban]

Xitter thread:

[spryfusion]

https://openai.com/blog/new-models-and- ... -at-devday

[spryfusion]

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

Tesla is hiring a bunch of designers so it can start selling humanoid robots by 2027

Jyoti Mann Nov 7, 2023, 12:34 PM GMT

Elon Musk has high aspirations for Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus.

The Tesla CEO said at its annual AI Day last year that it could be ready to take orders in three to five years, per Reuters, and that it's "expected to cost much less than a car," and "probably less than $20,000."

It seems that the billionaire is hiring more people to work on the project and make his vision a reality. Tesla's careers page shows there are more than 50 jobs advertised that have "Tesla Bot," also known as Optimus, in the job title, as EV news site Electrek reported.

Some of the roles listed, which are to be based in Palo Alto, California, include "Humanoid Controls Engineer, Tesla Bot," "Systems Design & Integration Engineer, Tesla Bot," and various other Tesla Bot engineers.

Musk said in May that the "Optimus Team is making excellent progress" in an X post. Tesla then posted a progress update of Optimus in a YouTube video last month with accompanying text saying it's "now capable of self-calibrating its arms and legs."

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-mu ... rs-2023-11