Artificial Intelligence news

Forgive the scattered nature of this week’s Actuator. No big, overarching monologs this week — just a handful of things I’ve been thinking about lately that I’d like to get down on paper. I suppose that’s one of the perks of doing a weekly newsletter— it forces you to flesh out some bigger ideas.
Point number one is failure. Ingrained in the American psyche (as I’m sure is the case with many other cultures around the world) is an inability to reckon with

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral, AI-powered chatbot tech, is now available in a more enterprise-friendly package.
Microsoft today announced that ChatGPT is generally available through the Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, corporate-focused offering designed to give businesses access to OpenAI’s technologies with added governance and compliance features. Customers, who must already be “Microsoft managed customers and partners,” can apply here for special acc

Discord is the latest company to get in on the AI frenzy. The company announced today that it’s launching a set of new AI experiences to a number of servers.
Most notably, Discord is is updating its Clyde bot with OpenAI ChatGPT technology that will allow users to have extended conversations with the bot. You can type @Clyde in a server to chat with Clyde in any channel. You can also ask Clyde to start a thread for a group of your friends to hang out. Discord notes that Clyde can recommend

Mythic, an AI chip startup that last November reportedly ran out of capital, rose from the ashes today with an unexpected injection of fresh funds.
Mythic this morning announced that it closed a $13 million financing round led by existing investors Atreides Management, DCVC and Lux Capital alongside new investors Catapult Ventures and Hermann Hauser Investment. While the tranche is a fraction of the startup’s previous raise ($70 million), Mythic claims that the tranche will enable it to br

A new approach to vaccines with a machine learning twist could put an end to boosters and seasonal variant shots, according to MIT researchers. This “pan-variant” vaccine would ignore the virus itself but quickly control infections by cracking down on infected cells.
To be quite clear, this is still in animal testing and is nowhere near being deployed. But with COVID becoming a resident virus in the human population, longer-lasting solutions than occasional boosters for particularly

Ken Van Haren and Chris Stanley were data scientists at Google and Square, respectively, who found themselves frustrated by how much time they were spending wrangling infrastructure versus doing actual data science. In surveying their colleagues, they found that it was a common problem. According to one poll, data scientists spend over half their time cleaning and organizing data and the majority of the rest collecting datasets.
Aiming to streamline the grunt work, Van Haren and Stanley launched

For decades people have worried about the rise of robots coming for jobs but rarely does the reality match the concern. Then came ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that has gone viral, becoming the fastest-growing app with 100m active users just two months after launching. Technology reporter Chris Stokel-Walker explains how the latest chatbots could jeopardise the careers of anyone who interprets information and generates written reports or commands. Continue reading...

Move over, software. Prompts may well be the new oil.
Writing the text strings that instruct AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to generate essays, articles, images and more has become a veritable profession, commanding salaries well into the six-figure range. Anyone can come up with prompts, of course. But only certain prompts (e.g. “Create a watercolor of a solider standing in the middle of a field, in the style of John Singer Sargent) accomplish very specific, desirable (or undesirabl

Drone delivery is one of those ideas that’s been sold as “the next big thing” forever. Regardless of how bullish you happen to be on the technology, there’s undeniably a lot that has to be figured out before we can start having serious conversation about mainstream adoption. Regulator issues are a big box to be ticked, as are some big logistical questions.
Alphabet X-graduated Wing today showcased its work on the latter, in the form of a “delivery network.” Th

The automotive industry is starting to show some signs of recovery after a big contraction during the Covid-19 pandemic, and carmakers planning for the next five years are looking at what new features might help them eek out more sales. Envisics — a U.K. startup that designs holographic in-car technology that projects navigation, safety alerts and other data on the inside of the windscreen (commonly described as heads-up display, or HUD) — is today announcing $50 million in fund