Generative AI
The big tech firms want an AI monopoly โ but the UK watchdog can bring them to heel John Naughton
"Monopoly," said Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley's answer to Darth Vader, "is the condition of every successful business." This aspiration is widely shared by Gamman, the new acronynm for the Valley's giants โ Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia. And the arrival of AI has sharpened the appetite of each for attaining that blessed state before the others get there. One symptom of their anxiety is the way they have been throwing unconscionable amounts of money at the 70-odd generative AI startups that have mushroomed since it became clear that AI was going to be the new new thing. Microsoft reportedly put 13bn (about 10.4bn) into OpenAI, for example, but it was also the lead investor in a 1.3bn funding round for Inflection, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman's startup.
Where do we draw the line on using AI in TV and film?
Though last year's writers' and actors' strikes in Hollywood were about myriad factors, fair compensation and residual payments among them, one concern rose far above the others: the encroachment of generative AI โ the type that can produce text, images and video โ on people's livelihoods. The use of generative AI in the content we watch, from film to television to large swaths of internet garbage, was a foregone conclusion; Pandora's box has been opened. But the rallying cry, at the time, was that any protection secured against companies using AI to cut corners was a win, even if only for a three-year contract, as the development, deployment and adoption of this technology will be so swift. In the mere months since the writers' and actors' guilds made historic deals with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the average social media user has almost certainly encountered AI-generated material, whether they realized it or not. Efforts to curb pornographic AI deepfakes of celebrities have reached the notoriously recalcitrant and obtuse US Congress.
A Multi-Faceted Evaluation Framework for Assessing Synthetic Data Generated by Large Language Models
Yuan, Yefeng, Liu, Yuhong, Cheng, Liang
The rapid advancements in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have opened up new avenues for producing synthetic data, particularly in the realm of structured tabular formats, such as product reviews. Despite the potential benefits, concerns regarding privacy leakage have surfaced, especially when personal information is utilized in the training datasets. In addition, there is an absence of a comprehensive evaluation framework capable of quantitatively measuring the quality of the generated synthetic data and their utility for downstream tasks. In response to this gap, we introduce SynEval, an open-source evaluation framework designed to assess the fidelity, utility, and privacy preservation of synthetically generated tabular data via a suite of diverse evaluation metrics. We validate the efficacy of our proposed framework - SynEval - by applying it to synthetic product review data generated by three state-of-the-art LLMs: ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama. Our experimental findings illuminate the trade-offs between various evaluation metrics in the context of synthetic data generation. Furthermore, SynEval stands as a critical instrument for researchers and practitioners engaged with synthetic tabular data,, empowering them to judiciously determine the suitability of the generated data for their specific applications, with an emphasis on upholding user privacy.
Meta Is Already Training a More Powerful Successor to Llama 3
On Thursday morning, Meta released its latest artificial intelligence model, Llama 3, touting it as the most powerful to be made open source so that anyone can use it. The same afternoon, Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, said an even more powerful successor to Llama is in the works. He suggested it could potentially outshine the world's best closed AI models, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini. Meta released two versions of Llama 3 today, one with 8 billion parameters--an industry term that roughly conveys a model's power--and another with 70 billion parameters. LeCun said that bigger models are in the works and that the most powerful, with more than 400 billion parameters, is currently in training.
What Generative Artificial Intelligence Means for Terminological Definitions
This paper examines the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT on the creation and consumption of terminological definitions. From the terminologist's point of view, the strategic use of GenAI tools can streamline the process of crafting definitions, reducing both time and effort, while potentially enhancing quality. GenAI tools enable AI-assisted terminography, notably post-editing terminography, where the machine produces a definition that the terminologist then corrects or refines. However, the potential of GenAI tools to fulfill all the terminological needs of a user, including term definitions, challenges the very existence of terminological definitions and resources as we know them. Unlike terminological definitions, GenAI tools can describe the knowledge activated by a term in a specific context. However, a main drawback of these tools is that their output can contain errors. For this reason, users requiring reliability will likely still resort to terminological resources for definitions. Nevertheless, with the inevitable integration of AI into terminology work, the distinction between human-created and AI-created content will become increasingly blurred.
Robust CLIP-Based Detector for Exposing Diffusion Model-Generated Images
Santosh, null, Lin, Li, Amerini, Irene, Wang, Xin, Hu, Shu
Diffusion models (DMs) have revolutionized image generation, producing high-quality images with applications spanning various fields. However, their ability to create hyper-realistic images poses significant challenges in distinguishing between real and synthetic content, raising concerns about digital authenticity and potential misuse in creating deepfakes. This work introduces a robust detection framework that integrates image and text features extracted by CLIP model with a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifier. We propose a novel loss that can improve the detector's robustness and handle imbalanced datasets. Additionally, we flatten the loss landscape during the model training to improve the detector's generalization capabilities. The effectiveness of our method, which outperforms traditional detection techniques, is demonstrated through extensive experiments, underscoring its potential to set a new state-of-the-art approach in DM-generated image detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Robust_DM_Generated_Image_Detection.
Food Development through Co-creation with AI: bread with a "taste of love"
Sera, Takuya, Kuwata, Izumi, Taya, Yuki, Shimura, Noritaka, Motohashi, Yosuke
This study explores a new method in food development by utilizing AI including generative AI, aiming to craft products that delight the senses and resonate with consumers' emotions. The food ingredient recommendation approach used in this study can be considered as a form of multimodal generation in a broad sense, as it takes text as input and outputs food ingredient candidates. This Study focused on producing "Romance Bread," a collection of breads infused with flavors that reflect the nuances of a romantic Japanese television program. We analyzed conversations from TV programs and lyrics from songs featuring fruits and sweets to recommend ingredients that express romantic feelings. Based on these recommendations, the bread developers then considered the flavoring of the bread and developed new bread varieties. The research included a tasting evaluation involving 31 participants and interviews with the product developers. Findings indicate a notable correlation between tastes generated by AI and human preferences. This study validates the concept of using AI in food innovation and highlights the broad potential for developing unique consumer experiences that focus on emotional engagement through AI and human collaboration.
Meta steps up AI battle with OpenAI and Google with release of Llama 3
Meta Platforms on Thursday released early versions of its latest large language model, Llama 3, and an image generator that updates pictures in real time while users type prompts, as it races to catch up to generative AI market leader OpenAI. The models will be integrated into virtual assistant Meta AI, which the company is pitching as the most sophisticated of its free-to-use peers. The assistant will be given more prominent billing within Meta's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps as well as a new standalone website that positions it to compete more directly with Microsoft-backed OpenAI's breakout hit ChatGPT. The announcement comes as Meta has been scrambling to push generative AI products out to its billions of users to challenge OpenAI's leading position on the technology, involving an overhaul of computing infrastructure and the consolidation of previously distinct research and product teams. The social media giant equipped Llama 3 with new computer coding capabilities and fed it images as well as text this time, though for now the model will output only text, Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, said in an interview.
The AI hype bubble is deflating. Now comes the hard part.
A year and a half into the AI boom, there's growing evidence that the hype machine is slowing down. Drastic warnings about AI posing an existential threat to humanity or taking everyone's jobs have mostly disappeared, replaced by technical conversations about how to cajole chatbots into helping summarize insurance policies or handle customer service calls. Some once-promising start-ups have already cratered and the suite of flashy products launched by the biggest players in the AI race -- OpenAI, Microsoft and Google -- have yet to upend the way people work and communicate with each other. While money keeps pouring into AI, very few companies are turning a profit on the tech, which remains hugely expensive to build and run.
AI buttons are being forced into your tech, whether you want it or not
Fortunes are being made on that interest, in a way hauntingly reminiscent of the crypto boom and subsequent bust. And absolutely everyone wants to get in on the former and avoid the latter. "Everyone" in this case includes pretty much every possible technology company. While OpenAI is at the center of this particular gold rush, and Nvidia is selling the shovels to digital forty-niners, more conventional players aren't resting on their haunches. As happens with buzzwords, it's quickly becoming diluted -- every new PC is an "AI PC," which means very little for actual users.