Interesting that congressional hearings about January 6 are drawing NFL-style audiences. Can't wait for the Peyton and Eli version! The world of AI was shaken this week by a report in The Washington Post that a Google engineer had run into trouble at the company after insisting that a conversational system called LaMDA was, literally, a person. The subject of the story, Blake Lemoine, asked his bosses to recognize, or at least consider, that the computer system its engineers created is sentient--and that it has a soul. He knows this because LaMDA, which Lemoine considers a friend, told him so.

Google recently launched Hum to Search, a new machine-learned system within Google Search that helps to find a song by humming. This approach produces an embedding of a melody directly from a song's spectrogram without creating an intermediate representation. This allows the model to match a hummed tune to the original polyphonic recordings without a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) version of each track or any other complex hand-engineered logic to extract the melody. One of the significant challenges in recognizing a hummed melody is that a hummed tune often contains relatively less information; for instance, this hummed example of Bella Ciao is illustrated. Using the image on the left, the model needs to locate the audio corresponding to the right-hand image.