How Scientists Predict Where Earthquakes Will Strike Next
The pair of earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria this week left the region grappling with death and destruction. Despite the region being seismically active, this particular area hadn’t seen an earthquake of this size for decades. There are ways of knowing where the next big earthquakes will happen. —but not when. Scientists use knowledge of fault lines and historical data to make their predictions, but saving areas from mass casualties often relies on infrastructure policies. Building codes that prioritize strong buildings can save lives, but older structures remain vulnerable.
Across the globe, in California, the health impacts of electric vehicles are beginning to be seen. A study published this month finds that for every 20 EVs in a zip code, asthma-related visits to the emergency room drop by 3.2%. This is a striking number for a technology that’s just now becoming more commonplace. Joining Ira to talk about these stories and more is Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, based in Washington, D.C.
The past few months have seen a flurry of new, easy-to-use tools driven by artificial intelligence. It’s getting harder to tell what’s been created by a human: Programs like ChatGPT can construct believable written text, apps like Lensa can generate stylized avatars, while other developments can make pretty believable audio and video deep fakes.
Just this week, Google unveiled a new AI-driven chatbot called Bard, and Microsoft announced plans to incorporate ChatGPT within their search engine Bing. What is this new generation of AI good at, and where does it fall short?
Ira talks about the state of generative AI and takes listener calls with Dr. Melanie Mitchell, professor at the Santa Fe Institute and author of the book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. They are joined by Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, founder and CEO of Parity Consulting and responsible AI fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.
Microsoft is rolling out an intelligent chatbot to live alongside Bing’s search results, putting AI that can summarise web pages, synthesise disparate sources, even compose emails and translate them into more consumers’ hands. — Reuters
REDMOND: Microsoft Corp is revamping its Bing search engine and Edge Web browser with artificial intelligence (AI), the company says, signalling its ambition to retake the lead in consumer technology markets where it has fallen behind.
The maker of the Windows operating system is staking its future on AI through billions of dollars of investment as it directly challenges Alphabet Inc’s Google, which for years has outpaced Microsoft in search and browser technology.
Now, Microsoft is rolling out an intelligent chatbot to live alongside Bing’s search results, putting AI that can summarise web pages, synthesise disparate sources, even compose emails and translate them into more consumers’ hands.
Microsoft expects every percentage point of share it gains will bring in another US$2bil (RM8.6bil) in search advertising revenue.
Working with the startup OpenAI, Microsoft is aiming to leapfrog its Silicon Valley rival and potentially claim vast returns from tools that generally speed up content creation by automating tasks, if not jobs themselves.
That would affect products for businesses, such as the cloud computing and collaboration tools Microsoft sells, as well as the consumer Internet.
“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told reporters in a briefing at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
The company’s share of search so far is about an estimated 10th of the market. Still, many investors see new technology as a win for all players. Microsoft’s stock closed 4.2% higher on Tuesday, while Alphabet gained 4.6%.
The power of so-called “generative AI” that can create virtually any text or image dawned on the public last year with the release of ChatGPT, the chatbot sensation from OpenAI.
Its human-like responses to any prompt have given people new ways to think about the possibilities of marketing, writing term papers, disseminating news or querying information online.
Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is live in limited preview on desktop computers and will be available for mobile devices in the coming weeks.
The company hopes user feedback will improve its AI, which Microsoft officials said may still produce factually inaccurate information known as hallucinations. Meanwhile, it has worked to prevent the misuse of its technology.
Underpinning the new Bing is what Microsoft is calling the Prometheus model - OpenAI’s most powerful technology, informed as needed by real-time web data from Bing.
That means Bing’s chatbot can brief consumers on current events, a step beyond ChatGPT’s answers that are currently limited to data as of 2021.
Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for search and AI, told Reuters the tech advances his team witnessed last summer emboldened the company to move ahead with an AI-infused Bing.
Microsoft’s chief financial officer also said OpenAI’s “new, next-generation” technology is powering its search engine, though officials declined to specify if this entailed the startup’s highly anticipated upgrade known as GPT-4.
Microsoft is aiming to market OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to its cloud customers and add the same power to its entire suite of products, not just search.
In the near term, Gartner analyst Jason Wong said Microsoft’s “partnership with OpenAI is more relevant for its business customers.
It could offer “disruptive opportunities” in consumer businesses as well.
“Except for gaming, Microsoft has not been a leader in key consumer technologies, such as search, mobile and social media,” he added.
Google has nonetheless taken note of Microsoft’s challenge.
On Monday, it unveiled a chatbot of its own called Bard, and it is planning to release its own AI in search that can synthesise material when no simple answer exists online.
Microsoft’s decision to update its Edge browser will likewise intensify competition – with Google’s Chrome competitor.
However, the Redmond-based company expects to roll out the updated Bing to other browsers eventually. — Reuters
A pilot policy of issuing travel endorsements for talent in mainland cities across the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater
Bay Area to the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions(SARs) will be implemented starting from February 20 to facilitate
personnel communication ...
OpenAI, which Elon Musk helped to co-found back in 2015, is the San Francisco-based startup that created ChatGPT. The company opened ChatGPT up for public testing in November 2022. In under a week, the artificial intelligence model amassed over a million users, according to OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman. By the end of January, ChatGPT was averaging about 13 million visitors per day. Users have had ChatGPT write everything from essays, to lyrics and even correct computer code. ChatGPT is part of a growing field of AI known as generative AI, which allows users to create brand new content including videos, music and text. But generative AI still faces a number of challenges, such as developing content that is inaccurate, biased or inappropriate. Now enterprises and the public are wondering what wide access to AI will mean for businesses and society.
Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
01:36 — Chatting with ChatGPT
03:03 — Understanding ChatGPT
06:39 — Use cases and limitations
10:09 — Future implications
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Driving innovation: Nigerian artist Malik Afegbua creates hyper-realistic pictures of African people using artificial intelligence at his home in Lagos. China leads the world in this technology, as well as in the number of AI journals and related publications. — Reuters
SHANGHAI: Chinese tech companies are upping the ante in the fast-growing artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content sector as ChatGPT, the latest chatbot launched by US-based artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, gains wide popularity since its November debut and revolutionises the field due to its advanced conversational capabilities.
Leveraging machine learning algorithms, ChatGPT is able to mimic humanlike responses with AI-generated content (AIGC) and assist people with tasks such as writing essays and scripts, making business proposals and even checking programme bugs, which it does within seconds.
AIGC-related stocks continued to rally in the A-share market, with Chinese AI companies, such as Cloudwalk Technology and Speechocean, seeing their shares surge by the daily limit of 20% on the science and technology innovation board on Monday.
Experts said that AIGC is likely to become a new engine driving innovation in digital content production and freeing human creators from tedious tasks, with a wide range of commercial applications in fields such as culture, media, entertainment and education.
Chinese tech heavyweight Baidu Inc announced yesterday that it will complete internal testing of its AI chatbot service, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, called “Ernie Bot” in March.
The Beijing-based company has invested large sums of money in developing its Ernie system, a large-scale machine-learning model that has been trained on massive data over several years and possesses in-depth semantic comprehension and generation capabilities.
Robin Li, co-founder and chief executive officer of Baidu, said in January that AIGC will subvert existing content production models in the next decade, and AI has the potential to meet massive demand for content at a 10th of the cost and a hundred or thousand times faster.
Jianying, an AI-powered short-video editing app launched by Chinese tech company Byte-Dance, allows users to generate creative videos by simply putting in a few keywords or a paragraph of text.
Online gaming company Net-Ease has released its AI music creation platform, Tianyin, where users can customise a song by entering lyrics.
Pan Helin, co-director of the Digital Economy and Financial Innovation Research Centre at Zhejiang University’s International Business School, said that ChatGPT, as a milestone in AIGC-related technologies, uses reinforcement learning from human feedback to train the data model, with significant enhancements in natural language processing capacities that improve the logic of responses.
Chinese enterprises should step up efforts to roll out indigenous versions of the AI-powered chatbot and increase investments to improve related algorithms and computing power, Pan said.
Chen Jia, an independent strategy analyst, said: “Chinese tech enterprises have unique advantages in expanding AI application scenarios globally.”
China has made significant progress in developing the AI industry.
A Stanford University report showed that China filed more than half the world’s AI patent applications in 2021 and continued to lead the world in the number of AI journals, conference papers and related publications.
Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba have invested heavily in promoting the commercial use of AI, and some Chinese AI unicorns have grown rapidly in recent years, Chen said.
But he noted that Chinese tech companies lag behind top-notch foreign competitors in fundamental research and development input and comprehensive innovation abilities.
“AIGC is in the initial stage of development, and there is still a long way to go to realise large-scale commercialisation, as the application scenarios and related laws and regulations are far from mature,” said Guo Tao, deputy head of the China Electronic Commerce Expert Service Centre.
Meanwhile, the use of AIGC-related technologies raises concerns about ethics, copyright protection and privacy, he added.— China Daily/ANN
