Developmental psychologists have long-established the importance of socio-cognitive abilities in human intelligence. These abilities enable us to enter, participate and benefit from human culture. AI research on social interactive agents mostly concerns the emergence of culture in a multi-agent setting (often without a strong grounding in developmental psychology). We argue that AI research should be informed by psychology and study socio-cognitive abilities enabling to enter a culture too. We discuss the theories of Michael Tomasello and Jerome Bruner to introduce some of their concepts to AI and outline key concepts and socio-cognitive abilities. We present The SocialAI school - a tool including a customizable parameterized uite of procedurally generated environments, which simplifies conducting experiments regarding those concepts. We show examples of such experiments with RL agents and Large Language Models. The main motivation of this work is to engage the AI community around the problem of social intelligence informed by developmental psychology, and to provide a tool to simplify first steps in this direction. Refer to the project website for code and additional information: https://sites.google.com/view/socialai-school.

Recent work has proposed a methodology for the systematic evaluation of "Situated Language Understanding Agents"-agents that operate in rich linguistic and non-linguistic contexts-through testing them in carefully constructed interactive settings. Other recent work has argued that Large Language Models (LLMs), if suitably set up, can be understood as (simulators of) such agents. A connection suggests itself, which this paper explores: Can LLMs be evaluated meaningfully by exposing them to constrained game-like settings that are built to challenge specific capabilities? As a proof of concept, this paper investigates five interaction settings, showing that current chat-optimised LLMs are, to an extent, capable to follow game-play instructions. Both this capability and the quality of the game play, measured by how well the objectives of the different games are met, follows the development cycle, with newer models performing better. The metrics even for the comparatively simple example games are far from being saturated, suggesting that the proposed instrument will remain to have diagnostic value. Our general framework for implementing and evaluating games with LLMs is available at https://github.com/clembench .

This paper explores the application of Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in cryptocurrency price forecasting, specifically Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). Focusing on news and social media data, primarily from Twitter and Reddit, we analyse the influence of public sentiment on cryptocurrency valuations using advanced deep learning NLP methods. Alongside conventional price regression, we treat cryptocurrency price forecasting as a classification problem. This includes both the prediction of price movements (up or down) and the identification of local extrema. We compare the performance of various ML models, both with and without NLP data integration. Our findings reveal that incorporating NLP data significantly enhances the forecasting performance of our models. We discover that pre-trained models, such as Twitter-RoBERTa and BART MNLI, are highly effective in capturing market sentiment, and that fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) also yields substantial forecasting improvements. Notably, the BART MNLI zero-shot classification model shows considerable proficiency in extracting bullish and bearish signals from textual data. All of our models consistently generate profit across different validation scenarios, with no observed decline in profits or reduction in the impact of NLP data over time. The study highlights the potential of text analysis in improving financial forecasts and demonstrates the effectiveness of various NLP techniques in capturing nuanced market sentiment.

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. Improbably and dramatically, the ex-OpenAI CEO returned as CEO late Tuesday. Altman's counter-coup swept out three board members who sparked his firing and included an agreement to investigate what went down this past weekend. The new board--which now includes Larry Summers and Bret Taylor--will expand to up to nine members and likely include someone from Microsoft. The A.I. field will not go back to "normal" after this. OpenAI was already vulnerable coming into the chaos and will now have to work harder to maintain its lead while facing inspired competition.

Sam Altman's firing showed the influence of effective altruism and its view that AI development must slow down; his return marked its limits

Folks, if you predicted on Friday that the closely watched OpenAI power struggle would end in the most pointless-seeming way possible … well, just look. Late Tuesday night, four days after CEO Sam Altman's shocking ouster from the A.I. company, we found ourselves (mostly) back where we started: Altman is returning to OpenAI as its CEO, albeit not to its board of directors; Greg Brockman is once again president of OpenAI, but also will not be a member of the board; Mira Murati, who briefly took the helm as interim CEO, is just regular ol' CTO again; the three researchers who'd stepped down Friday in solidarity with Altman and Brockman are either back at the company or requesting to return; Altman & co. will once again operate with the backing of Microsoft, not as direct employees of the Big Tech pioneer. When it comes to the Main Characters of this saga and their loyalists, it seems most everyone's pretty happy. "[W]e are so back," Brockman exclaimed, sharing a selfie with his smiling team (who celebrated, according to the Information's Erin Woo, by setting off a false fire alarm at OpenAI HQ). Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear is no longer interim CEO but is "deeply pleased by this result, after 72 very intense hours of work," and is "glad to have been a part of the solution."

The turmoil at OpenAI over the past five days has captivated the tech industry and kept entrepreneurs, journalists, and anyone who still has an X account glued to their timelines for the latest emoji updates and lower-case missives. In the meantime, some of the most prominent AI companies--including OpenAI--continued to do what Silicon Valley is known for: Drop new products. The unexpected firing of Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, was followed by an avalanche of new AI features from competitors, including Anthropic and Stable Diffusion. On Tuesday afternoon, in the midst of turmoil, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT with voice capabilities for free to all users. OpenAI had pre-released this in late September, but only for paid users.

Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during a fireside chat at University College London (UCL) in London, UK, on Wednesday, May 24, 2023. Altman said part of the reason for his current tour of European cities is to discover a suitable location for a new office. ALTMAN RETURNS: OpenAI brings back former CEO, establishes new board days after ouster. EGG ON FACE: OpenAI board's days numbered as $90B company plunges into chaos. NO OVERSIGHT: Tech CEO's ouster demonstrates need for better regulation.

Folks who are still sticking with Windows 10 (or who can't install Windows 11 on their machine) may now be able to check out one of the most buzzed about features in years on their machine. Just a few days after Microsoft confirmed it would bring Copilot to Windows 10, users with eligible devices can install a Release Preview build that includes access to the generative AI-powered assistant. You'll need to be enrolled in the Windows Insider tester program to install the preview build and potentially try out Copilot on Windows 10 Home or Pro. There's no guarantee you'll get access to the chatbot immediately either. Microsoft says "It may take time for your device to be confirmed as eligible for Copilot on Windows so it may not show up right away."

Over five chaotic days that transfixed Silicon Valley and beyond, the world's leading artificial intelligence company, OpenAI, appeared to be on the verge of imploding in a power struggle. The maker of ChatGPT, the sensational chatbot, had a mission to safely develop smarter-than-human AI. But that mission looked in jeopardy on Friday when OpenAI's non-profit board of directors fired Altman, suggesting he had been dishonest in his communications with them. To many spectators, the future of not just AI but also humanity hung in the balance. Finally late on Tuesday night, after three CEO changes and a full-court press by Microsoft, the board gave Altman his old job back.