tiny ai
The Download: a CRISPR patent battle, and the promise of tiny AI
In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super-tool for modifying DNA, it's been common for lawyers to try to overturn patents held by competitors. But now, in a surprise twist, the team that earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing CRISPR is asking to cancel two of their own seminal patents, MIT Technology Review has learned. The request to withdraw the pair of European patents, by lawyers for Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, comes after a damaging August opinion from a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo's earliest patent filing didn't explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists to use it and doesn't count as a proper invention. The decision could have major ramifications regarding who gets to collect the lucrative licensing fees on using the technology.Read the full story. What's new: The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a research nonprofit, is releasing a family of open-source multimodal language models, called Molmo, that it says perform as well as top proprietary models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Tiny AI's which can supercharge voice assistants on your smartphones
OpenAI topped Bert with its own AI tool dubbed GPT2, which mimicked the writing style of humans with high accuracy. It used an astonishing 1.5 billion parameters to train its model. To address the issues of heavy resource utilization & climate toll, researchers have been actively pursuing an option where they can shrink these AI's in size, thus not only reducing their resource-intensive nature but at the same time making them more efficient. Two new research papers released recently, have come up with models that might be able to accomplish this. The first one is from researchers at Huawei Noah's Ark Lab called TinyBERT (figure below).