"My views are my own, as are my biases." That's how Leslie Miley, investor, ex-Googler, and former CTO of the Obama Foundation, kicked off his QCon London keynote. But can the same be said for generative artificial intelligence (AI)? Not likely, as collective biases are baked in at scale, influencing everyone's views. If it keeps going unchecked, it will have devastating effects both on the Earth and the people living on it.

ChatGPT, OpenAI's text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. It's able to write essays, code and more given short text prompts, hyper-charging productivity. But it also has a more…nefarious side. In any case, AI tools are not going away -- and indeed has expanded dramatically since its launch just a few months ago. Major brands are experimenting with it, using the AI to generate ad and marketing copy, for example.

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. The sprint to develop LinkedIn's recently released generative AI tools took only three months, Ya Xu, VP of engineering and head of data and artificial intelligence (AI), told VentureBeat in an interview. The timeline, she said, was "unprecedented" for a large company like LinkedIn, given the many changes engineering and product teams implemented based on OpenAI's latest GPT models, including ChatGPT and GPT-4, as well as some open-source models. These include generative AI-powered collaborative articles, job descriptions and personalized writing suggestions for LinkedIn profiles. For example, she explained, her teams were able in just one month to generate job descriptions automatically and serve live traffic.

This has led to impressive results like producing Bach chorals,[ reference-5][ reference-6] polyphonic music with multiple instruments,[ reference-7][ reference-8][ reference-9] as well as minute long musical pieces.[ But symbolic generators have limitations--they cannot capture human voices or many of the more subtle timbres, dynamics, and expressivity that are essential to music. A different approach[ footnote-approach] is to model music directly as raw audio.[ For comparison, GPT-2 had 1,000 timesteps and OpenAI Five took tens of thousands of timesteps per game. Thus, to learn the high level semantics of music, a model would have to deal with extremely long-range dependencies.

You may have noticed some impressive video memes made with AI in recent weeks. Harry Potter reimagined as a Balenciaga commercial and nightmarish footage of Will Smith eating spaghetti both recently went viral. They highlight how quickly AI's ability to create video is advancing, as well as how problematic some uses of the technology may be. These videos remind me of the moment AI image-making tools became widespread last year, when programs like Craiyon (formerly known as DALL-E Mini) let anyone conjure up recognizable, if crude and often surreal, images, such as surveillance footage of babies robbing a gas station, Darth Vadar courtroom sketches, and Elon Musk eating crayons. Craiyon was an open source knockoff of the then carefully restricted DALL-E 2 image generator from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The tool was the first to show AI's ability to take a text prompt and turn it into what looked like real photos and human-drawn illustrations.

Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI's website from its schools' network. By January, school districts across the English-speaking world had started banning the software, from Washington, New York, Alabama, and Virginia in the United States to Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. Several leading universities in the UK, including Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, issued statements that warned students against using ChatGPT to cheat. "While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success," Jenna Lyle, a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education, told the Washington Post in early January. This initial panic from the education sector was understandable.

OpenAI on Thursday did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent overnight. In an earlier statement in response to the chatbot's false claims about the law professor, OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said: "When users sign up for ChatGPT, we strive to be as transparent as possible that it may not always generate accurate answers. Improving factual accuracy is a significant focus for us, and we are making progress."

We show how to use unlabeled data and a deep belief net (DBN) to learn a good covariance kernel for a Gaussian process. We first learn a deep generative model of the unlabeled data using the fast, greedy algorithm introduced by Hinton et.al. If the data is high-dimensional and highly-structured, a Gaussian kernel applied to the top layer of features in the DBN works much better than a similar kernel applied to the raw input. Performance at both regression and classification can then be further improved by using backpropagation through the DBN to discriminatively fine-tune the covariance kernel.

Now that AI program speak with us in natural language, turn our thoughts into illustrations, and embody our voices, a major conflict over their ethics is en route. And if you thought the content moderation fight was intense, just wait for this one. At stake is how chatbots address political issues, how AI illustrators portray the world, and whether some applications like voice emulators should even exist. Given the scale and power of this blossoming technology, the activists won't be subtle. They've had their practice fighting over human speech online, and they'll bring that experience to this war.

An Australian mayor has threatened a defamation suit against OpenAI, alleging that its chatbot, ChatGPT, made some false claims about him, probably the first of its kind action in the generative AI space. Called "Segment Anything", this AI model can detect objects from photos and videos, and allows users to select those objects by clicking them or using text prompts. Italian regulators said last Friday that the firm had no legal basis to engage in massive data collection and questioned the way it was handling the information it had gathered.