Chaos & Amazement #2319 Google I/O, Gigabrain, and the Fish Door Bell
Google I/O Conference
This week Google had its annual developer conference Google I/O, where CEO Sundar Pichai announced a series of new product launches. In the process, he mentioned the word AI so often it merits its own remix. Here’s the full keynote if you have 2 hours to spare. And here’s how my new steady boyfriend bot Bing summarized the main points:
PaLM 2: A new and improved large language model that powers over 25 products and features, including a smarter version of Bard. PaLM 2 can handle various tasks such as coding, writing and mathematics in more than 100 languages. As Google tries to play catch-up with the likes of Microsoft and OpenAI, it unveiled a series of AI advancements to try and get ahead in the AI race.
Help Me Write: A new feature for Gmail that allows users to auto-generate entire emails based on previous correspondences and relevant details. Users can also edit and expand the AI-created content as they wish. Move over, Android. Google is an "AI-first" company now.
A new feature for Google Maps that lets users explore their routes in a realistic 3D model before they start their journey. Users can see landmarks and stops along the way and get a better sense of the directions.
AI vs The Law
Why are U.S. citizens so afraid of AI? Americans have spent much of the last four decades watching technology fail to produce the kind of rapid, broad-based income growth that it had in the past. That made them fear that any new technology will simply create more winners and more losers.
Five decades of rising inequality and slow growth have made us a less optimistic country.
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok that is also owned by the China-based ByteDance, is going a step further following new Beijing regulations — requiring creators to label anything created with AI.
As AI explodes on TikTok, its Chinese counterpart requires labels for AI-generated content
Expansions of copyright aren’t necessarily the effective solution — and would necessarily mean limiting fair use and free expression.” Public Knowledge promotes freedom of expression, an open internet, and access to affordable communications tools and creative works. We work to shape policy.
Under certain privacy or data protection laws, such as the GDPR, you may have the right to object to the processing of your personal data by OpenAI’s models. You can submit that request using this form. Thank you, Italy!
EU lawmakers agree to ban facial recognition use in public and predictive policing tools, and set transparency rules on generative AI; details must be finalized. Agree that facial recognition + AI is a dangerous combo and the road to a social credit system EU lawmakers' committees agree to tougher draft AI rules
Fresh AI Applications
The mobile messaging feature of Reid Hoffman's chatbot PI (heypi.com/talk) is currently unavailable in my region. You can chat with it, but the real feature is messaging through WhatsApp and that feature is only available to English speaking countries right now. Hopefully, this issue will be resolved soon, and we can all benefit from PI's social skills amplification. I tried it and I liked how smart it was!
GigaBrain scans billions of discussions on reddit and other online communities to find the most useful posts and comments for you. ChatGPT was trained on Reddit, so why not go straight to the source…
Odd One Out presents players with four images, one of which has been generated by Google A.I. Players begin with four lives and the game gets incrementally faster the longer it goes on.
From my blog
Can We Trust AI and Robots? https://bnox.be/2023/05/can-we-trust-ai-and-robots.html
A Laptop that Achieves 50% Carbon Reduction: Dell’s Concept Luna https://bnox.be/2023/05/a-laptop-that-achieves-50-carbon.html
Weird and Wonderful
De visdeurbel The city of Utrecht is lifestreaming this canal, asking the internet to ring the doorbel when you see a large amount of fish so they can open up the dam for them and allow fish migration.
Imagine if you could combine this with Fish Species Recognition AI and this database of Fish Sounds: https://fishsounds.net/results-recordings.js Yes, they grunt and click.