Taipei, Taiwan – Artificial intelligence poses a "risk of extinction" that calls for global action, leading computer scientists and technologists have warned. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," a group of AI experts and other high-profile figures said in a brief statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based research and advocacy group, on Tuesday. The signatories include technology experts such as Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, Geoffrey Hinton, known as the "godfather of AI", and Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister, as well as other notable figures including the neuroscientist Sam Harris and the musician Grimes. The warning follows an open letter signed by Elon Musk and other high-profile figures in March that called for a six-month pause on the development of AI more advanced than OpenAI's GPT-4. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said.

Generative large language models (LLMs) can be a powerful tool for augmenting text annotation procedures, but their performance varies across annotation tasks due to prompt quality, text data idiosyncrasies, and conceptual difficulty. Because these challenges will persist even as LLM technology improves, we argue that any automated annotation process using an LLM must validate the LLM's performance against labels generated by humans. To this end, we outline a workflow to harness the annotation potential of LLMs in a principled, efficient way. Using GPT-4, we validate this approach by replicating 27 annotation tasks across 11 datasets from recent social science articles in high-impact journals. We find that LLM performance for text annotation is promising but highly contingent on both the dataset and the type of annotation task, which reinforces the necessity to validate on a task-by-task basis. We make available easy-to-use software designed to implement our workflow and streamline the deployment of LLMs for automated annotation.

Code intelligence plays a key role in transforming modern software engineering. Recently, deep learning-based models, especially Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated remarkable potential in tackling these tasks by leveraging massive open-source code data and programming language features. However, the development and deployment of such models often require expertise in both machine learning and software engineering, creating a barrier for the model adoption. In this paper, we present CodeTF, an open-source Transformer-based library for state-of-the-art Code LLMs and code intelligence. Following the principles of modular design and extensible framework, we design CodeTF with a unified interface to enable rapid access and development across different types of models, datasets and tasks. Our library supports a collection of pretrained Code LLM models and popular code benchmarks, including a standardized interface to train and serve code LLMs efficiently, and data features such as language-specific parsers and utility functions for extracting code attributes. In this paper, we describe the design principles, the architecture, key modules and components, and compare with other related library tools. Finally, we hope CodeTF is able to bridge the gap between machine learning/generative AI and software engineering, providing a comprehensive open-source solution for developers, researchers, and practitioners.

There are just a handful of companies that have surpassed the $1 trillion market cap, including Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Amazon and Apple. On Tuesday, California-based Nvidia's market cap jumped high enough to be among their ranks. The chipmaker, which makes graphics processing units (GPUs) that help power generative artificial intelligence platforms, has seen its stock price soar as more companies look to expand their AI offerings. Nvidia hit a market cap of $1 trillion Tuesday with shares opening at $405.95, although it eased below that milestone by midday after shares dipped below $404.86. The company's valuation puts it above Facebook parent company Meta, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Elon Musk's Tesla.

Nvidia saw its valuation soar to $1tn on Tuesday, making it the fifth most valuable American company and one of the first major corporate beneficiaries of the hype around AI. The chipmaker has been a major and in some cases dominant player in several industries for years. But no development has raised its profile – and its potential windfall – as much as the current excitement around generative AI. Nvidia has been around for 30 years. The company got its start in 1993 building graphics processing units (GPUs) for video games.

A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT to prepare a court filing for his client is finding out the hard way that the artificial intelligence tool has a tendency to fabricate information. Steven Schwartz, a lawyer for a man suing the Colombian airline Avianca over a metal beverage cart allegedly injuring his knee, is facing a sanctions hearing on June 8 after admitting last week that several of the cases he supplied the court as evidence of precedent were invented by ChatGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI. Lawyers for Avianca first brought the concerns to the judge overseeing the case. "Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations," U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel said earlier this month after reviewing Avianca's complaint, calling the situation an "unprecedented circumstance." The invented cases included decisions titled "Varghese v. Schwartz ― an attorney with Levidow, Levidow & Oberman who's been licensed in New York for more than 30 years ― then confessed in an affidavit that he'd used ChatGPT to produce the cases in support of his client and was "unaware of the possibility that its content could be false."

A group of leading technology experts from across the globe have warned that artificial intelligence technology should be considered a societal risk and prioritised in the same class as pandemics and nuclear wars. The brief statement, signed by hundreds of tech executives and academics, was released by the Center for AI Safety on Tuesday amid growing concerns over regulation and risks the technology poses to humanity. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," the statement said. Signatories included the chief executives from Google's DeepMind, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI and AI startup Anthropic. The statement comes as global leaders and industry experts – such as the leaders of OpenAI – have made calls for regulation of the technology amid existential fears the technology could significantly affect job markets, harm the health of millions, and weaponise disinformation, discrimination and impersonation.

The CEOs of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, along with hundreds of other AI scientists and experts, made their most unified statement yet about the existential risks to humanity posed by the technology, in a short open letter released Tuesday. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," the letter, released by California-based non-profit the Center for AI Safety, says in its entirety. The CEOs of what are widely seen as the three most cutting-edge AI labs--Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic--are all signatories to the letter. So is Geoffrey Hinton, a man widely acknowledged to be the "godfather of AI," who made headlines last month when he stepped down from his position at Google and warned of the risks AI posed to humanity. Read More: DeepMind's CEO Helped Take AI Mainstream.

Taiwan's Asustek Computer plans to introduce one of the first services that lets companies tap into the potential of generative artificial intelligence while keeping control over their data. The novelty of the Taipei-based firm offering, called AFS Appliance, is that all of the hardware will be installed at the client's own facilities -- to maintain security and control. The AI computational platform, built on Nvidia Corp.'s chip technology, will be operated and updated with new data by Asustek, also known as Asus. A major concern around services like OpenAI is that they're operated through online data centers that can expose sensitive information. Samsung Electronics Co. banned employees from using OpenAI's ChatGPT after it found workers had uploaded sensitive code to the platform.

Steve Wozniak is no fan of Elon Musk. In February, the Apple co-founder described the Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter owner as a "cult leader" and called him dishonest. Yet, in late March, the tech titans came together, joining dozens of high-profile academics, researchers and entrepreneurs in calling for a six-month pause in training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4, the latest version of Chat GPT, the chatbot that has taken the world by storm. Their letter, penned by the United States-based Future of Life Institute, said the current rate of AI progress was becoming a "dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models". The "emergent capabilities" of these models, the letter said, should be "refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy and loyal".