Data and AI newsletter: February 2023
This month's trending themes still include ChatGPT and generative AI. One of the fastest-growing apps in history, ChatGPT reportedly topped 100 million monthly active users in January.
This achievement puts further pressure on established businesses to include cutting-edge LLM (Large Language Model) technology in their products. Open AI has launched several integrations with Microsoft and details of its subscription plan for ChatGPT. Google has also announced the upcoming release of its new ChatGPT competitor called "Bard," which is built on its LaMDA model.
February's newsletter is jam-packed with all the news about data and AI and useful resources, not one to miss.
NEWS AND INSIGHTS
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▶️ Microsoft announces new A.I.-powered Bing homepage that you can chat with
The new Bing uses GPT technology to understand questions and generate answers in natural language. It runs on the next generation of OpenAI’s language model, which is significantly more capable than the version used by ChatGPT. You can join the waiting list to play with it here bing.com/new.
▶️ What to expect in 2023 in AI
Four Stanford HAI faculty members describe what they expect the biggest advances, opportunities, and challenges will be for the coming year.
▶️ Hinton’s Forward-Forward Algorithm
Geoff Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto, is working on a new algorithm that will reduce the memory requirements associated with backpropagation algorithms for similar computer vision tasks. Hinton’s forward-forward approach uses two forward passes - one positive and one negative - eliminating the need for a backwards propagation because each forward pass optimizes for an opposing objective function.
“Since the Research Preview launch of ChatGPT, we have been blown away by the excitement around ChatGPT and the desire from the developer community to have an API available.”
If you are interested in a ChatGPT API, stay up to date from here.
▶️ MusicML by Google is announced
MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modelling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes.
▶️ The introduction of lip-reading AI by Meta
Meta proudly announced its latest achievement, the lip-reading speech-recognition AI, whose word error rate is already down by 75% – the best results in this field so far. To develop its lip-reading AI, Meta uses AV-HuBERT, a unique multimodal learning system that combines audio and lip-movement cues to perceive language. Meta revealed that AV-HuBERT already captures "nuanced associations" between visual and auditory data, thanks to its ability to recognize the visual cues of speech and pair them with incoming auditory information.
INTERESTING AI STARTUPS AROUND
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🔍 Macedonian startup Pixyle AI
Founded in 2018, Pixyle uses AI to identify fashion apparel in images. The startup also helps fashion retailers with image recognition solutions and enables them to deliver a better online shopping experience, boost e-commerce sales, and improve efficiency in catalogue management through smart product data entry. At the end of 2022, the startup secures a €1M seed round. Read more at therecursive.com/.
LEARNING RESOURCES
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DSP (Demostrate-Search-Predict) is a framework for composing retrieval models and language models into powerful pipelines that tackle knowledge-intensive tasks.
💡 The v4.0 of Talking About Large Language Models (Jan 25, 2023) is out
The paper is written by Murray Shanahan @ Imperial College.
You can try this library with talking books for fun if you enjoy reading.
Worth-attending events in Bulgaria
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The Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT) is launching a series of lectures on the most sizzling topics, such as Neurosymbolic AI, Generative AI, and Geometric Deep Learning, directly from the technology leaders, researchers and entrepreneurs who create them. The speakers are leading in their fields.
The lectures are suitable for engineers, entrepreneurs, researchers, educators, interested students, students, and investors, and they are free. Registration opens on February 16 at techseries.insait.ai.
💡 PyData Sofia Meetup: “Bias-variance trade-off in statistical learning"
One of the most promising data scientists in Bulgaria and the region will give a talk at the monthly meetup of the PyData group. Happily, we'll be hosting it in the event space of our office at CampusX. Do not miss to say "hi" to our team. Learn more about it at meetup.com/pydata-sofia/events.
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