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🤖 ChineseGPT, Meta’s A.I. Pivot, and reading your mind with A.I.
3/17/23
Neon Pulse Team
March 17, 2023
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
Here's what we have for you today:
Chinese ChatGPT fails to impress
Zuckerberg confirms A.I. focus
China’s new “A.I.” News Anchor
Reading your mind with A.I.
Chinese ChatGPT “Competitor”
Chinese search engine giant Baidu revealed it’s ChatGPT competitor Ernie at a live-streamed press conference yesterday, although the presentation left many feeling underwhelmed with the products capabilities.
In contrast to this week’s live demonstration of ChatGPT-4, the Ernie demonstration was actually a livestream of a recorded presentation, leading many to speculate that the technology may not be as advanced as advertised.
Baidu's “Ernie” Presentation
“There is still a lot of uncertainty around Ernie’s capacity, especially given the lack of a live demo – a stark contrast to OpenAI’s GPT-4’s developer livestream a few days ago,” Chim Lee, a China tech analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, told Al Jazeera.
“Robin Li did not demonstrate Ernie’s capacity in a non-Chinese language environment,” Lee added. “He also admitted that Ernie’s capacity to comprehend and process English is not as good as that of Chinese comprehension. This puts it behind ChatGPT, which is able to generate responses in English, Chinese and other languages.”
Baidu’s Stock Drop Post-Presentation
Investor’s weren’t thrilled with the presentation either, with Baidu’s shares falling more than 10 percent during the demonstration and shaving off more than $3 billion dollars from the company’s market valuation.
"It seems like the presentation was more of a monologue and scripted rather than an interactive session that people were looking for. There was no soft launch date either which likely led to negative sentiments," said Kai Wang, an analyst from Morningstar.
Meta’s A.I. Pivot
To the relief of every Meta investor around the world, Mark Zuckerberg re-affirmed the companies pivot from the Metaverse into A.I. this week, announcing that “advancing the company’s AI strategy” will be the number one priority of the business moving forward.
Goodbye Metaverse and hello profits
“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products. We have the infrastructure to do this at unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing,” Zuckerberg said in his letter.
Zuckerberg also highlighted actions that the company is taking to improve profitability during the company’s “Year of Efficiency,” including flattening management structures and laying off additional workers.
“Part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision,” wrote Zuckerberg.
“Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired. Change is never easy, but I know we’ll get through this and come out an even stronger company.”
Investors have responded positively to the companies change in direction, with shares up close to 60 percent since the start of this year.
China’s “A.I.” News Anchor
The People’s Daily, which is the official news outlet of the Chinese Communist Party and is effectively regarded as a propaganda distribution center for the state, has released its new “A.I. powered” digital news anchor.
Hailed as the future, and claiming to contain the professional skill of “thousands of news anchors,” the capabilities of the news anchor are limited to providing pre-programmed answers to four (yes you read that right, four) questions about China’s recent political conference, making this even less impressive than the Ernie chatbot released this week.
And while the news anchor lacks any real A.I. functionality, that didn’t stop the hashtag “AI virtual anchor” from going viral on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, with clips of the news anchor amassing 76 million views in a matter of days.
A.I. mind reading
Researches in Japan have found a way harness A.I. to read your mind, with the team successfully transforming visual data from brain-waves into high-fidelity images.
“By combining visual structural information decoded from activity in the early visual cortex with semantic features decoded from activity in higher-order areas, and by directly mapping the decoded information to the internal representations of a latent diffusion model (Stable Diffusion), it is possible to decode (or generate) images from brain activity,” said the study.
In the study, images were presented to participants while their brain activity was monitored with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. This data was then fed in to Stable Diffusion, which was able to reconstruct the images with shocking accuracy.
“We show that our proposed method can reconstruct high-resolution images with high fidelity in straightforward fashion, without the need for any additional training and fine-tuning of complex deep-learning models,” said the researcher.
Time to break out those tin foil hats boys and girls!
You can learn more on the researcher’s website here.
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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