Since Google's artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind published a paper a few weeks ago describing a generalist agent they call Gato (which can perform various tasks using the same trained model) and claimed that artificial general intelligence (AGI) can be achieved just via sheer scaling, a heated debate has ensued within the AI community. While it may seem somewhat academic, the reality is that if AGI is just around the corner, our society--including our laws, regulations, and economic models--is not ready for it. Indeed, thanks to the same trained model, generalist agent Gato is capable of playing Atari, captioning images, chatting, or stacking blocks with a real robot arm. It can also decide, based on its context, whether to output text, join torques, button presses, or other tokens. As such, it does seem a much more versatile AI model than the popular GPT-3, DALL-E 2, PaLM, or Flamingo, which are becoming extremely good at very narrow specific tasks, such as natural language writing, language understanding, or creating images from descriptions.

Everybody knows that large language models like GPT-3 and LaMDA have made tremendous strides, at least in some respects, and powered past many benchmarks, and Cosmo recently described DALL-E but most in the field also agree that something is still missing. A growing body of evidence shows that state-of-the-art models learn to exploit spurious statistical patterns in datasets... instead of learning meaning in the flexible and generalizable way that humans do." Since then, the results on benchmarks have gotten better, but there's still something missing. Reference: Words and sentence don't exist in isolation. Language is about a connection between words (or sentence) and the world; the sequences of words that large language models utter lack connection to the external world.

If you've spent any time on Twitter lately, you may have seen a viral black-and-white image depicting Jar Jar Binks at the Nuremberg Trials, or a courtroom sketch of Snoop Dogg being sued by Snoopy. These surreal creations are the products of Dall-E Mini, a popular web app that creates images on demand. Type in a prompt, and it will rapidly produce a handful of cartoon images depicting whatever you've asked for. More than 200,000 people are now using Dall-E Mini every day, its creator says--a number that is only growing. A Twitter account called "Weird Dall-E Generations," created in February, has more than 890,000 followers at the time of publication.

Recently, there have been more efforts and requests to make photo editing tools that can be used on devices with touch screens (DALL·E 2, Imagen and Co) Sketching is one of the easiest ways for people to show off their creative ideas and interact with apps because it is expressive and easy to change. Sketch-based image editing is a new area of AI art where the goal is to build models that can change the whole image or parts based on sketches drawn by the user. Sketching is an easy way to create a photo and can make more complex edits. In this video post, I explain the concept of making AI sketches, and how it could be used for editing photos. The dangers of this demo could be that it makes fake news easier to spread, and changes how people think about their bodies.

Is thinking of autonomous vehicles as AI systems rather than as robots the next step forward? A new wave of startups is trying techniques such as reinforcement learning to train AVs to drive safely. Generative Flow Networks may be the next major step in building better AI systems. The ethics of building AI bots that mimic real dead people seems like an academic question, until someone does it: using GPT-3, a developer created a bot based on his deceased fiancée. OpenAI objected, stating that building such a bot was a violation of its terms of service.

In 1950, the ingenious computer scientist Alan Turing proposed a thought experiment he called the Imitation Game. An interviewer converses via typewriter with two subjects, knowing one is human and the other a machine. If a machine could consistently fool the interviewer into believing it was the human, Turing suggested, we might speak of it as capable of something like thinking. Whether machines could actually think, Turing believed, was a question "too meaningless to deserve discussion." Nonetheless, the "Turing test" became a benchmark for machine intelligence.

On the internet, nightmare fuel just about everywhere you look. The latest source: Dall-E Mini, an AI tool capturing attention on social media thanks to the weird, funny and occasionally disturbing images it creates out of text prompts. Dall-E Mini lets you type a short phrase describing an image, one that theoretically exists only in the deep recesses of your soul, and within a few seconds, the algorithm will manifest that image onto your screen. Odds are you've seen some Dall-E Mini images popping up in your social media feeds as people think of the wildest prompts they can -- perhaps it's Jon Hamm eating ham, or Yoda robbing a convenience store. This isn't the first time art and artificial intelligence have captured the internet's attention. There's a certain appeal to seeing how an algorithm tackles something as subjective as art.

For today's story, I will be comparing OpenAI's Dall-E2 and MidJourney AI art generator tool with identical prompts. I have tried several other art generators out there but these two are the most powerful ones so far. Both are still in closed beta, so if you want to try them out, better get on the waitlist now if you haven't already.

Artificial intelligence can answer questions, simplify ideas, come up with product names, make up horror movies and even be sarcastic (when asked). In the past few months, there has been a suite of new artificial intelligence products that go far beyond what has been made available to the public before. Last week, the high-profile suspension of a Google employee after he went public about an AI chat bot that he thought was (almost certainly incorrectly) sentient put a spotlight on just how far AI has come. One major advancement has been the new AI model Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3 (GPT-3) by research firm OpenAI, released in 2020. Since its initial release, OpenAI has slowly rolled out access to the model for various uses -- carefully allowing access to it due to fear of the powerful technology being misused.

I explain Artificial Intelligence terms and news to non-experts. Dalle mini is amazing -- and YOU can use it! I'm sure you've seen pictures like those in your Twitter feed in the past few days. If you wondered what they were, they are images generated by an AI called DALL·E mini. If you've never seen those, you need to watch this video because you are missing out.