Beauty Is in the AI of the Perceiver

Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news, including an upgraded version of OpenAI’s CoPilot, called, Codex, which can not only complete code but creates it as well (based on natural language inputs from its users). The National Science Foundation is providing $220 million in grants to 11 new National AI Research Institutes (including two fully funded by the NSF). A new DARPA program seeks to explore how AI systems can share their experiences with each other, in Shared-Experience Lifelong Learning (ShELL). The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs introduces two AI-related bills: the AI Training Act (to establish a training program to educate the federal acquisition workforce), and the Deepfake Task Force Act (to task DHS to produce a coordinated plan on how a “digital content provenance” standard might assist with decreasing the spread of deepfakes). And the Inspectors General of the NSA and DoD partner to conduct a joint evaluation of NSA’s integration of AI into signals intelligence efforts. In research, DeepMind creates the Perceiver IO architecture, which works across a wide variety of input and output spaces, challenging the idea that different kinds of data need different neural network architectures. DeepMind also publishes PonderNet, which learns to adapt the amount of computation based on the complexity of the problem (rather than the size of the inputs). Research from MIT uses the corpus of US patents to predict the rate of technological improvements for all technologies. The European Parliamentary Research Service publishes a report on Innovative Technologies Shaping the 2040 Battlefield. Quanta Magazine publishes an interview with Melanie Mitchell, which includes a deeper discussion on her research in analogies. And Springer-Verlag makes available for free An Introduction to Ethics in Robotics and AI (by Christoph Bartneck, Christoph Lütge, Alan Wagner, and Sean Welsh).