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Is computer vision the cure for school shootings? Likely not

Gun-detecting AI outfits want to help while root causes need tackling

Brandon Vigliarolo Tue 28 Jun 2022 // 18:58 UTC

Comment More than 250 mass shootings have occurred in the US so far this year, and AI advocates think they have the solution. Not gun control, but better tech, unsurprisingly.
Machine-learning biz Kogniz announced on Tuesday it was adding a ready-to-deploy gun detection model to its computer-vision platform. The system, we're told, can detect guns seen by security cameras and send notifications to those at risk, notifying police, locking down buildings, and performing other security tasks.
In addition to spotting firearms, Kogniz uses its other computer-vision modules to notice unusual behavior, such as children sprinting down hallways or someone climbing in through a window, which could indicate an active shooter.

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Cerebras sets record for 'largest AI model' on a single chip

Plus: Yandex releases 100-billion-parameter language model for free, and more

Katyanna Quach Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 04:16 UTC

In brief US hardware startup Cerebras claims to have trained the largest AI model on a single device powered by the world's largest Wafer Scale Engine 2 chip the size of a plate.
"Using the Cerebras Software Platform (CSoft), our customers can easily train state-of-the-art GPT language models (such as GPT-3 and GPT-J) with up to 20 billion parameters on a single CS-2 system," the company claimed this week. "Running on a single CS-2, these models take minutes to set up and users can quickly move between models with just a few keystrokes."
The CS-2 packs a whopping 850,000 cores, and has 40GB of on-chip memory capable of reaching 20 PB/sec memory bandwidth. The specs on other types of AI accelerators and GPUs pale in comparison, meaning machine learning engineers have to train huge AI models with billions of parameters across more servers.

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Microsoft promises to tighten access to AI it now deems too risky for some devs

Deep-fake voices, face recognition, emotion, age and gender prediction ... A toolbox of theoretical tech tyranny

Katyanna Quach Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 22:54 UTC

Microsoft has pledged to clamp down on access to AI tools designed to predict emotions, gender, and age from images, and will restrict the usage of its facial recognition and generative audio models in Azure.
The Windows giant made the promise on Tuesday while also sharing its so-called Responsible AI Standard, a document [PDF] in which the US corporation vowed to minimize any harm inflicted by its machine-learning software. This pledge included assurances that the biz will assess the impact of its technologies, document models' data and capabilities, and enforce stricter use guidelines.
This is needed because – and let's just check the notes here – there are apparently not enough laws yet regulating machine-learning technology use. Thus, in the absence of this legislation, Microsoft will just have to force itself to do the right thing.

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If AI chatbots are sentient, they can be squirrels, too

Plus: FTC warns against using ML for automatic content moderation, and more

Katyanna Quach Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 15:00 UTC

In Brief No, AI chatbots are not sentient.
Just as soon as the story on a Google engineer, who blew the whistle on what he claimed was a sentient language model, went viral, multiple publications stepped in to say he's wrong.
The debate on whether the company's LaMDA chatbot is conscious or has a soul or not isn't a very good one, just because it's too easy to shut down the side that believes it does. Like most large language models, LaMDA has billions of parameters and was trained on text scraped from the internet. The model learns the relationships between words, and which ones are more likely to appear next to each other.

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Amazon can't channel the dead, but its deepfake voices take a close second

Megacorp shows Alexa speaking like kid's deceased grandma

Richard Currie Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 13:46 UTC

In the latest episode of Black Mirror, a vast megacorp sells AI software that learns to mimic the voice of a deceased woman whose husband sits weeping over a smart speaker, listening to her dulcet tones.
Only joking – it's Amazon, and this is real life. The experimental feature of the company's virtual assistant, Alexa, was announced at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa AI, described the tech as a means to build trust between human and machine, enabling Alexa to "make the memories last" when "so many of us have lost someone we love" during the pandemic.

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AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

It's time to toss the Turing test – it's not really about the machines at all

Rupert Goodwins Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 09:15 UTC

Opinion The Turing test is about us, not the bots, and it has failed.
Fans of the slow burn mainstream media U-turn had a treat last week.
On Saturday, the news broke that Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer charged with monitoring a chatbot called LaMDA for nastiness, had been put on paid leave for revealing confidential information.

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Train once, run anywhere, almost: Qualcomm's drive to bring AI to its phone, PC chips

Software toolkit offered to save developers time, effort, battery power

Dylan Martin Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 18:51 UTC

Qualcomm knows that if it wants developers to build and optimize AI applications across its portfolio of silicon, the Snapdragon giant needs to make the experience simpler and, ideally, better than what its rivals have been cooking up in the software stack department.
That's why on Wednesday the fabless chip designer introduced what it's calling the Qualcomm AI Stack, which aims to, among other things, let developers take AI models they've developed for one device type, let's say smartphones, and easily adapt them for another, like PCs. This stack is only for devices powered by Qualcomm's system-on-chips, be they in laptops, cellphones, car entertainment, or something else.
While Qualcomm is best known for its mobile Arm-based Snapdragon chips that power many Android phones, the chip house is hoping to grow into other markets, such as personal computers, the Internet of Things, and automotive. This expansion means Qualcomm is competing with the likes of Apple, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and others, on a much larger battlefield.

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Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Blake Lemoine began to believe that LaMDA, Language Model for Dialogue Applications, exhibited self-awareness

Richard Currie Mon 13 Jun 2022 // 13:00 UTC

Google has placed one of its software engineers on paid administrative leave for violating the company's confidentiality policies.
Since 2021, Blake Lemoine, 41, had been tasked with talking to LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his job on Google's Responsible AI team, looking for whether the bot used discriminatory or hate speech.
LaMDA is "built by fine-tuning a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, with up to 137 billion model parameters, and teaching the models to leverage external knowledge sources," according to Google.

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GPUs aren’t always your best bet, Twitter ML tests suggest

Graphcore processor outperforms Nvidia rival in team's experiments

Tobias Mann Thu 16 Jun 2022 // 00:25 UTC

GPUs are a powerful tool for machine-learning workloads, though they’re not necessarily the right tool for every AI job, according to Michael Bronstein, Twitter’s head of graph learning research.
His team recently showed Graphcore’s AI hardware offered an “order of magnitude speedup when comparing a single IPU processor to an Nvidia A100 GPU,” in temporal graph network (TGN) models.
“The choice of hardware for implementing Graph ML models is a crucial, yet often overlooked problem,” reads a joint article penned by Bronstein with Emanuele Rossi, an ML researcher at Twitter, and Daniel Justus, a researcher at Graphcore.

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AMD’s AI strategy comes into view with Xilinx, GPU, software plans

Chip designer hopes to have broad inference and training coverage from the edge to the cloud

Dylan Martin Mon 13 Jun 2022 // 19:30 UTC

Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.
It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.
But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.

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