Welcome to Nural's newsletter focusing on how AI is being used to tackle global grand challenges.
Packed inside we have
- Chinese Search Giant Baidu to Launch ChatGPT-Style Bot
- Toolformer - language models that teach themselves to use external tools via simple API calls
- and optimizing prompts for image and text models through gradient descent
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Marcel Hedman
Key Recent Developments
Alphabet's stock plunges $100 billion after it's chatbot provides incorrect answer
What: "Shares of Alphabet slipped on Wednesday after reports that promotional material for the Google parent's new artificial intelligence chatbot contained inaccurate information"
Chinese Search Giant Baidu to Launch ChatGPT-Style Bot
What: The ChatGPT craze continues! Baidu, China's answer to Google, have announced their response to ChatGPT named ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration). Quoting Baidu’s spokesperson, “what sets Ernie apart from other language models is its ability to integrate extensive knowledge with massive data, resulting in exceptional understanding and generation capabilities.”
Technical summary:
Ernie is a pretrained language model with 260 billion parameters. For context, ChatGPT uses the 175-billion parameter GPT3 model. However, bigger does not always mean better so it is yet to be seen if they have replicated the effectiveness of ChatGPT. Ernie was trained on unstructured data and a knowledge graph.
Text-to-4D: Meta AI Proposes a Novel System for Text-to-4D (3D+time) Generation by Combining the Benefits of Video and 3D Generative Models
AI Ethics
🚀 For the first time, A.I.-generated deepfakes, were detected in a state-aligned information campaign
🚀 A Categorical Archive of ChatGPT Failures [Paper]
🚀 Optimizing prompts for image and text models through efficient gradient-based optimization [Paper]
Interesting AI developments
🚀 Instagram’s founders are back with a new AI powered app
🚀 Perplexity AI Challenges ChatGPT and Google With New Conversational Search Engine
🚀 Quora opens its new AI chatbot app Poe to the general public
Cool companies found this week
AI safety
Anthropic - Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that is working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. They recently received a $300m investment from Alphabet via a cash-for-computing investment. I.e. the investment must be spent on Google cloud.
Generative AI
Character.AI - Character, a ChatGPT alternative, lets you have live chats with all sorts of characters in real time. Whether these are tech heroes like Elon Musk or interviewers for your upcoming role.
Best,
Marcel Hedman
Nural Research Founder
www.nural.cc
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