Last Week in AI

Weekly summaries and discussion about the most interesting developments in AI, deep learning, robotics, and more!

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Episodes

Friday Apr 07, 2023

Our 117th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out Jeremie's new book Quantum Physics Made Me Do It
Read out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessGoogle's Shuffles Assistant Leadership to Focus on Bard AIAlphabet’s Google and DeepMind Pause Grudges, Join Forces to Chase OpenAI
February 2023 Robotics Investments Total $620 MillionWith Human Metalworkers Hard to Come By, Robotic Blacksmiths Step Up
Lighting RoundMicrosoft’s Bing chatbot is getting ads
Yeah, of course, YC’s winter class is oozing with AI companies
Google Partners with AI Startup Replit to Take on Microsoft’s GitHub
Birth of a Salesman: OpenAI Sheds Its Lab Coat to Seek Big Deals
 
Research & Advancements
Introducing BloombergGPT, Bloomberg’s 50-billion parameter large language model, purpose-built from scratch for finance
The takeaways from Stanford’s 386-page report on the state of AI
Lighting Round
Robots Using Legs as Arms to Climb and Push Buttons
Policy & Societal Impacts
The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be
The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, explained
Lighting Round
How a tiny company with few rules is making fake images go mainstream
FTC Is Reviewing Competition in Artificial Intelligence
Midjourney ends free trials of its AI image generator due to 'extraordinary' abuse
Art & Fun StuffChinese creators use Midjourney’s AI to generate retro urban “photography”
Artificial intelligence deepfake video of Harry Potter characters in faux-Balenciaga fashion show goes viral

Friday Mar 31, 2023

Our 116th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessOpenAI is massively expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities to let it browse the web and more
NVIDIA's big AI moment is here
Lighting RoundFormer head of Google China joins ChatGPT frenzy by starting own venture
Cerebras Systems Releases Seven New GPT Models Trained on CS-2 Wafer-Scale Systems
Generative AI set to affect 300 million jobs across major economies
Agility’s Latest Digit Robot Prepares for its First Job
Research & AdvancementsLearning to grow machine-learning models
Researchers from UC Berkeley and Deepmind Propose SuccessVQA: A Reformulation of Success Detection that is Amenable to Pre-trained VLMs such as Flamingo
Lighting RoundNew virtual testing environment breaks the 'curse of rarity' for autonomous vehicle emergency decision-making 
Scientists are using machine learning to forecast bird migration and identify birds in flight by their calls 
New in-home AI tool monitors the health of elderly residents
Runway Gen-2 is the First Publicly Available Text-to-Video Generator
Policy & Societal Impacts
OpenAI co-founder on company’s past approach to openly sharing research: ‘We were wrong’
1,100+ notable signatories just signed an open letter asking “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months”
Lighting RoundIn San Francisco, some people wonder when A.I. will kill us all
Clearview AI used nearly 1m times by US police, it tells the BBC
Voice system used to verify identity by Centrelink can be fooled by AI
AI can draw hands now. That’s bad news for deep-fakes
Art & Fun StuffPeople Aren’t Falling for AI Trump Photos (Yet)
WGA Would Allow Artificial Intelligence in Scriptwriting, as Long as Writers Maintain Credit

Sunday Mar 26, 2023

Our 115th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessGPT-4GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why 
GPT-4’s new capabilities power a ‘virtual volunteer’ for the visually impaired
Google opens early access to its ChatGPT rival Bard — here are our first impressions
Lighting RoundConfirmed: the new Bing runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4
Microsoft and Google Unveil A.I. Tools for Businesses
Adept Raises $350 Million To Build AI That Learns How To Use Software For You
Introducing Claude
Research & AdvancementsMicrosoft Researchers Claim GPT-4 Is Showing "Sparks" of AGI
Alpaca: A Strong Instruction-Following Model
Lighting RoundOur latest health AI research updates
Machine learning takes starring role in exploring the universe 
A new method to boost the speed of online databases
MIT researchers uncover the structural properties and dynamics of deep classifiers, offering novel explanations for optimization, generalization, and approximation in deep networks
Policy & Societal Impacts
Core Views on AI Safety: When, Why, What, and How
Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams
Lighting RoundSome high-level thoughts on the DeepMind alignment team's strategy
Meta’s powerful AI language model has leaked online — what happens now?
AI Scams and Influencers
AI Generated Image from Text is not Human Authorship says US Copyright Office 
I’m an ER doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients 
Art & Fun StuffMidjourney V5 is Out Now – Next Steps in Photorealistic Experience with AI Art
Illustration competitions grapple with generative AI
Online storm erupts over AI work in Dutch museum’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ display
AI and Copyright: Human Artistry Campaign Launches to Support Songwriters and Musicians’ Rights 

Friday Mar 10, 2023

Our 114th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessLLM/ChatGPT roundupRadioGPT brings AI to the airwaves
Salesforce to add ChatGPT to Slack as part of OpenAI partnership
Microsoft integrates AI behind ChatGPT to more developer tools
Snapchat launches an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology
Meet DuckAssist, DuckDuckGo's New AI Feature
Shortwave email app introduces AI-powered summaries
Inside Claude: The ChatGPT Competitor that Just Raised Over $1 BillionAnthropic begins supplying its text-generating AI models to select startups
Lighting RoundMicrosoft now lets you change Bing’s chatbot personality to be more entertaining
OpenAI announces an API for ChatGPT and its Whisper speech-to-text tech
D-ID’s new web app gives a face and voice to OpenAI’s ChatGPT
OpenAI rival Stable Diffusion maker seeks to raise funds at US$4 billion valuation
Research & AdvancementsGoogle’s PaLM-E is a generalist robot brain that takes commandsPaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model
What Happens If You Run A Transformer Model With An Optical Neural Network?
Lighting RoundScientists Now Want to Create AI Using Real Human Brain Cells
Artificial Intelligence from a psychologist's point of view
Google’s one step closer to building its 1,000-language AI model
AI masters video game 6000 times faster by reading the instructions
Policy & Societal Impacts
OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit
As A.I. Booms, Lawmakers Struggle to Understand the Technology
Lighting Round A couple in Canada were reportedly scammed out of $21,000 after getting a call from an AI-generated voice pretending to be their son
TikTok’s trendy beauty filter ushers in new tech and new problems
UK Supreme Court hears landmark patent case over AI "invent
ChatGPT broke the EU plan to regulate AI
Art & Fun StuffAI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines — but not fooling anyoneSci-fi becomes real as renowned magazine closes submissions due to AI writers
ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon 
‘Hollywood 2.0’: How the Rise of AI Tools Like Runway Are Changing Filmmaking
The AI-powered Seinfeld spoof is set to return to Twitch with new guardrails in place

Saturday Mar 04, 2023

Our 113th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Check out our text newsletter at https://lastweekin.ai/
Stories this week:
Applications & Business
Meet the $10,000 Nvidia chip powering the race for A.I.
Generative AI Is Coming For the Lawyers 
Vicarious Surgical cuts 14% of staff
Alphabet Layoffs Hit Trash-Sorting Robots 
Spectrum uses generative AI to create TV commercials
Spotify’s new AI-powered DJ will build you a custom playlist and talk over the top of it
Amazon’s Cloud Partners With Startup Hugging Face as AI Deals Heat Up
Research & Advancements
Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools
Human-Timescale Adaptation in an Open-Ended Task Space
RT-1: Robotics Transformer
Meta heats up Big Tech's AI arms race with new language model
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that can enable a machine learning model to quantify how confident it is in its predictions
Machine learning makes long-term, expansive reef monitoring possible 
How AI Can Help Design Drugs to Treat Opioid Addiction
Policy & Societal Impacts
"AI alignment" and uncalibrated discourse on AI
What ChatGPT means for the new future of national security
How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice
AI-Human Romances Are Flourishing—And This Is Just the Beginning
Machine learning is helping police work out what people on the run now look like 
Planning for AGI and beyond
Art & Fun Stuff
Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) 
ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon 
‘Hollywood 2.0’: How the Rise of AI Tools Like Runway Are Changing Filmmaking
Sci-fi becomes real as renowned magazine closes submissions due to AI writers 
The AI-powered Seinfeld spoof is set to return to Twitch with new guardrails in place

Sunday Feb 26, 2023

Our 112th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Stories this week:
Applications & BusinessMicrosoft's Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It
Audiobook Narrators Fear Apple Used Their Voices to Train AI
Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈
Opera’s building ChatGPT into its sidebar
Exclusive: Microsoft's Bing plans AI ads in early pitch to advertisers
GitHub Copilot update stops AI model from revealing secrets
Roblox is working on generative AI tools 
Research & Advancements
BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Mining
MarioGPT - A new way to encode and generate Super Mario Bros levels
Machine learning techniques identify thousands of new cosmic objects
AI analyzes cell movement under the microscope
Accelerating Prime Editing: Machine Learning Helps Design the Best Fix for a Given Genetic Flaw
Enhance! Deep learning tool boosts X-ray imaging resolution and hydrogen fuel cell performance 
Policy & Societal Impacts
Beijing to support key firms in building ChatGPT-like AI models
Only you can stop an AI apocalypse
South Korea aims to join AI race as startup Rebellions launches new chip
GitHub Copilot update stops AI model from revealing secrets
U.S., China, other nations urge 'responsible' use of military AI
Art & Fun Stuff
Voice Actors are Having Their Voices Stolen by AI
Video Game Voice Actors Doxed and Harassed in Targeted AI Voice Attack
Keanu Reeves Says Deepfakes Are ‘Scary,’ Confirms His Film Contracts Ban Digital Edits to His Acting: ‘They Added a Tear to My Face! Huh?’
TikTokers are roasting McDonald's hilarious drive-thru AI order fails — and it shows that robots won't take over restaurants any time soon

Monday Feb 13, 2023

Our 111th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Listen with transcript
Stories this week:
Applications & Business
Chinese Search Giant Baidu to Launch ChatGPT-Style Bot
Google To Release ChatGPT-like Bot Named Bard
Alphabet Stock Loses $100 Billion After New AI Chatbot Gives Wrong Answer In Ad
Quora opens its new AI chatbot app Poe to the general public
You.com’s AI-infused Google rival provides a tantalizing glimpse of the future
Perplexity AI Challenges ChatGPT and Google With New Conversational Search Engine
Apptronik Developing General-Purpose Humanoid Robot
Lighting Round
Chatbot Startup Character Seeks $250 Million, Testing Investor Appetite for AI 
AI startup Cohere in talks to raise funding at $6 bln plus valuation 
OpenAI to Offer New Version of ChatGPT for a $20 Monthly Fee 
Instagram’s founders are back with a new app 
Google invests $300mn in artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic |… 
Research & Advancements
Stanford Researcher develops a simple prompting strategy that enables open-source LLMs with 30x fewer parameters to exceed the few-shot performance of GPT 
A dire forecast: Scientists used AI to find planet could cross critical warming threshold sooner than expected 
Lighting Round
Whispers of AI’s modular future
AI Spits Out Exact Copies of Training Images, Real People, Logos, Researchers Find 
AI-Powered FRIDA robot collaborates with humans to create art
Scaling laws for single-agent reinforcement learning
Policy & Societal Impacts
Amazing "Jailbreak" Bypasses ChatGPT's Ethics Safeguards 
Reddit users have created a ChatGPT alter-ego forcing it to break its own rules by threatening it with death
Conservatives Are Obsessed With Getting ChatGPT to Say the N-Word
Disinformation Researchers Raise Alarms About A.I. Chat
The current legal cases against generative AI are just the beginning
Lighting Round
Five Predictions for the Future of Learning in the Age of AI
A Judge Just Used ChatGPT to Make a Court Decision 
Netflix Made an Anime Using AI Due to a 'Labor Shortage,' and Fans Are Pissed 
Here are the schools and colleges that have banned the use of ChatGPT over plagiarism and misinformation fears
U.S. and EU to launch first-of-its-kind AI agreement
Developers Created AI to Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified
Art & Fun Stuff
AI has been generating an endless Seinfeld episode for more than a month now

Sunday Feb 05, 2023

Our 110th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
After a 4 month break, we're back with a new co-host, and will resume our regular weekly upload schedule.
If you are a fan, we'd appreciate your feedback on Apple Podcast.
Stories this week:
Applications & Business
BuzzFeed says it will use AI tools from OpenAI to personalize its content
related : CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI
CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy
CNET found errors in more than half of its AI-written stories
Who owns the generative AI platform?
Lighting Round
Here’s Why ChatGPT is just the start of the generative AI boom
Microsoft to Invest $10 Billion in OpenAI, the Creator of ChatGPT 
Generative AI funding exploded over the past 2 years
After inking its OpenAI deal, Shutterstock rolls out a generative AI toolkit to create images based on text prompts 
Research & Advancements
ChatGPT’s creator made a free tool for detecting AI-generated text
New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
Related:  Stanford introduces DetectGPT to help educators fight back against ChatGPT generated papers
Google created an AI that can generate music from text descriptions, but won’t release it
Lighting Round
Versatile robo-dog runs through the sandy beach at 3 mile/sec 
AI has designed bacteria-killing proteins from scratch – and they work
GraphGPT: Extrapolating knowledge graphs from unstructured text
Machine learning identifies drugs that could potentially help smokers quit 
Policy & Societal Impacts
4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hatespeech
AI-Generated Voice Firm Clamps Down After 4chan Makes Celebrity Voices for Abuse
Educator considerations for ChatGPT
Lighting Round
Scores of Stanford students used ChatGPT on final exams, survey suggests - “Stanford students and professors alike are grappling with the rise of ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, and the technology’s implications for education.”
When May a Robot Kill? New DOD Policy Tries to Clarify
AI-generated art a concern for local artists who say there’s still a need for human creativity
Robot Cars Are Causing 911 False Alarms in San Francisco 
Art & Fun Stuff
I wrote a short story! - I Think I Am Starting to Fear Death
Atlas Gets a Grip | Boston Dynamics 

Thursday Oct 13, 2022

Our 109th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
If you are a fan, we'd appreciate your feedback on Apple Podcast, or just via email to contact@lastweekin.ai - feel free to DM us on Twitter too!
Outline:
(00:00) Intro(03:08) Elon Musk shows off humanoid robot prototype at Tesla AI Day
(07:15) It’s not just floods and fires: This AI forecasts how climate change will impact your city 
(10:00) Artificial Intelligence Spending Grew 20.7% Worldwide in 2021, According to IDC
(10:52) Tesla is being sued over Autopilot and Elon Musk’s Full Self-Driving predictions 
(11:50) Uber Eats and Nuro sign a 10-year deal to do robot food delivery in California and Texas 
(13:00) Announcing the PyTorch Foundation: A new era for the cutting-edge AI framework
(13:45) Meta’s new text-to-video AI generator is like DALL-E for video , Google answers Meta’s video-generating AI with its own, dubbed Imagen Video
(19:05) OpenAI open-sources Whisper, a multilingual speech recognition system
(23:00) Can eyes on self-driving cars reduce accidents? Cues from moving eyes could help pedestrians anticipate vehicle's intentions
(24:00) Why DeepMind Is Sending AI Humanoids to Soccer Camp
(25:00) How Transformers Seem to Mimic Parts of the Brain 
(25:30) NVIDIA's new AI model quickly generates objects and characters for virtual worlds
(26:45) Clearview AI, Used by Police to Find Criminals, Now in Public Defenders’ Hands , House Democrats debut new bill to limit US police use of facial recognition
(30:30) Artist receives first known US copyright registration for generative AI art 
(33:14) Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of legal challenges
(34:00)  A.I. Is Making It Easier Than Ever for Students to Cheat
(34:50) There’s no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AI
(35:45) US to invest $50 billion in spring 2023 as it looks to counter Chinese chip development 
(36:25) Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine
(39:40) I Resurrected "Ugly Sonic" with Stable Diffusion Textual Inversion
(43:00) Artist uses AI to extract color palettes from text descriptions
(43:55) Hellblade developer Ninja Theory confirms it won’t replace voice actors with AI
(45:35) Outro

Saturday Sep 10, 2022

Our 108th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
If you are a fan, we'd appreciate your feedback on Apple Podcast, or just via email to contact@lastweekin.ai - feel free to DM us on Twitter too!
Outline
(00:00) Intro
(03:50) Using machine learning to identify undiagnosable cancers 
(08:30) North American companies send in the robots, even as productivity slumps 
(14:30) French tax officials use AI to spot 20,000 undeclared pools
(15:12) AI illuminates permanently shadowed regions on the moon
(15:40) Artificial intelligence can be used to better monitor Maine's forests 
(16:34) Panera Bread tests artificial intelligence technology in drive-thru lanes 
(17:45) Using AI to decode speech from brain activity
(23:20) Robots can be used to assess children’s mental wellbeing, study suggests
(27:50) Canadian researchers using machine learning to mitigate effects of climate change 
(29:25) Researchers Develop ‘TiCoder’ Framework For Code Generation Using User Feedback With 90.4% Consistency To User Intent 
(31:12) Artificial Intelligence Improves Treatment in Women with Heart Attacks 
(31:41) MIT Researchers use Machine Learning to Expedite Research on New Battery Materials 
(32:48) Review finds ‘paucity of robust evidence’ on impact of AI clinical outcomes 
(36:00) France puts healthcare at heart of $1.8B AI strategy 
(39:00) Clearview: Glasses With Facial Recognition Are Here—And The Air Force Is Buying
(40:00) New York City AI Bias Law Charts New Territory for Employers 
(40:37) U.S. officials order Nvidia to halt sales of top AI chips to China
(42:00) UK Government Releases New AI Security Guidance
(43:31) Everything Everything's AI-Derived 'Raw Data Feel' Tackles Mental Health, Conspiracy TheoriesEverything Everything - I Want A Love Like This
(47:05) Holly Herndon: How AI can transform your voice Holly Herndon - Eternal
(50:17) A LinkedIn Marketing Agency Acquired an AI That Writes Mega-Cringe LinkedIn Posts
(53:24) An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are Pissed
(57:00) Outro

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