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The 7 Artificial Intelligence news that have shown their progress in 2022

Published

1 month ago

December 30, 2022

In this year that is about to end, Artificial intelligence has occupied a position prominent in terms of news and developments. They even just named it “word of the year.” Not only because of its abundance, but also because of its importance. Undoubtedly, this year we have reached a very outstanding level in terms of Artificial Intelligence capable of generating creative works with text, images, sound and video. Artificial Intelligence with deep learning has come to the fore after a decade of research, and has begun to enter commercial applications.

In this way, millions of people have been able to try this type of technology for the first time, achieving wonderful and controversial creations that have left few indifferent. Accompanied by news about AI that has generated quite a bit of controversy, these are the seven novelties in Artificial Intelligence of the year 2022.

DALL-E 2: Dreams in Pictures

Last April, OpenAI announced the image synthesis model with deep learning DALL-E 2, capable of generating images from requests made through text as if it were magic. Trained with hundreds of millions of images pulled from the Internet, DALL-E 2 knows how to combine them thanks to a technique called latent diffusion.

Shortly after her departure, social networks were filled with compositions made by the model, which surpassed all the difficulties of her first version. At its launch, OpenAI only allowed 200 beta testers to test it, also providing filters to the system to block violent and *text muted* requests. Little by little it was admitting more users until it reached a million people in a closed test phase, until it announced its general availability last September.

A Google engineer believes that LaMDA has a conscience

At the beginning of last July, the engineer Blake Lemoine, the company he worked for, Google, suspended him from employment (but not salary). Those of Mountain View made the decision after Lemoine be sure to believe that the LaMDA model (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), developed by Google, is awareand therefore deserves to have the same rights as a human.

While working as part of the Artificial Intelligence division responsible for Google, Lemoine began chatting with LaMDA about philosophy and religion, and came to believe that there was real intelligence behind the text. Speaking to the Washington Post, she noted that she saw a person when she talked to the model, and that “it doesn’t matter if they have a meat brain in their head. Or if you have a billion lines of code. I talk to them and listen to what they have to say. This is how I decide what is and is not a person.”

Google countered that LaMDA was only telling Lemoine what he wanted to hear and that he was not, in fact, a sentient being. Like the GPT-3 text generation tool, LaM;DA had received training with millions of websites and books. He would reply to Lemoine’s text entries by predicting the most likely words he should say, without any deep understanding.

Meanwhile, Lemoine allegedly violated Google’s privacy policy by telling third parties details about his work group. In late July, Google effectively fired Lemoine for violating its data security policies.

DeepMind AlphaFold predicts almost all known protein structures

Also last July, DeepMind announced that its Artificial Intelligence model AlphaFold had predicted the shape of virtually all proteins known from almost every organism on Earth that has its genome sequenced. This model was already announced in the summer of 2021, when it had predicted the shape of all human proteins. A year later, his protein database had grown to hold more than 200 million protein structures.

DeepMind has made these protein structures available to anyone who wants to examine them. They are in a public database at the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI). The institution allows researchers from anywhere in the world to access them and use their data for research related to biology and medicine.

The synthesis of images, open source by the hand of Stable Diffusion

In August, Stability AI and CompVis released the image synthesis model Stable Diffusion 1.4. It’s similar to DALL-E 2, but while it was released as a closed model with a lot of restrictions, Stable Diffusion was a open source project with source code and control files. Its opening level allows generate, without restrictions, any synthesized content. In addition, it can be used locally and privately on computers that have a powerful GPU.

This step of Stability AI, however, has not been received equally well by everyone. Since its announcement until now, it has received considerable criticism about its potential for the generation of political misinformation, non-consensual pornography, child abuse material and alternative stories.

Artists have complained that it can put them out of work, and the data field bias used in their training has also been criticized. In addition, the techniques used to develop their image data fields have caused other controversies. For example, when various people reported that their private medical photos had been taken off the Internet.

Regardless, a number of hobbyists have embraced the model and built an open source ecosystem around it very quickly. Some products have already integrated its engine into their apps and websites, while Stable Diffusion has continued to evolve, and version 2.1 is now available.

AI-generated art wins contest in Colorado

Also in August, Colorado resident Jason Allen submitted three AI-generated images, featuring the Midjourney business model, to the Colorado State Fair’s fine art contest.

At the end of the month, one such work won first prize in the Digitally Manipulated Photography category. When the news was made public, it caused a stir and an intense debate began on social networks about the nature of art and what it means to be an artist.

Cicero, from Meta, wins playing Diplomacy

In November Meta announced the Cicero Artificial Intelligence agent, capable of beating humans in the strategy board game Diplomacy in online matches played on webDiplomacy.net. It is a game that requires persuasion, cooperation and negotiation with other players in order to win. But Cicero did. To do this, Meta developed a bot that could trick humans into thinking they were playing against another human.

To hone his negotiating skills, Meta trained Cicero’s large-scale language model component with texts taken from the Internet, and with transcripts of 40,000 Diplomacy games played by humans on the aforementioned website. Additionally, Meta developed a strategic component that could observe the state of a game and predict how other players might behave in order to act accordingly.

Meta believes he can apply what he’s learned with Cicero to a new generation of games with smarter NPCs that can break down the barriers between humans and AI during multi-session conversations. The same technique applied to other social scenarios, yes, could manipulate or deceive humans when the AI pretends to be a person.

ChatGPT talks to the world

At the end of November, OpenAI announced ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the GPT-3 language model. OpenAI made it freely available to the public on its website, so it could collect data and feedback from the public on how to fine-tune the model to produce more accurate and potentially less harmful results. Five days after its launch, ChatGPT already had one million users.

People have used it to help with programming tasks, simulate a Linux console session, generate recipes, and write poetry, among other uses. He impresses with his apparent ability to understand complex questions, but the reliability of his answers has yet to improve. The CEO of OpenAI has admitted as much, noting that ChatGPT is evolving. However, he has already given us a first vision of what a future with the intervention of Artificial Intelligence could look like.

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Server sales forecasts fall in 2023 due to low demand

Published

35 seconds ago

February 1, 2023

Thomas Grimm

TrendForce forecasts in the server sector for 2023 have changed considerably. This firm is known worldwide as one of the most reliable in its sector, market analysis and forecasts within the technology sector, so all the information that we are going to see below is very reliable, although it is obviously an estimate and therefore it does not have to be fulfilled to the letter.

If we look at the attached table, we will realize that the original forecasts for the server sector in 2023 pointed to growth, year on year, of 6.9%. Now. with the latest changes that TrendForce has introduced in its report, we have a 4.4% growth estimate. There is no doubt that this data continues to be positive, especially taking into account the current economic situation at the international level, and that the analysis is limited to four technological giants: Meta, Microsoft, Google and AWS.

However, if we compare the results for 2022, we realize that this estimate actually reflects a major braking, and that in reality it is not as positive data as we might think a priori. These types of slowdowns in growth may be enough for many companies to decide to implement cuts and austerity measures, so we will have to wait and see what happens later this year, if TrendForce’s estimates are confirmed.

Taking a look at the individualized data we see that the most important drop comes from Meta (Facebook), which it will go from 19.7% in 2022 to -3% in 2023. The drop in demand from this giant in 2023 would be enormous, and is a clear reflection that the company is trying to cut costs to a large extent. Microsoft will go from 17.6% to 13.4%, a much more reasonable reduction compared to Meta, and Google will go from 8.1% to 5.2%. For its part, in the case of AWS the drop will be from 13.2 to 6.2%.

In comparative terms, Year-over-year growth in 2022, counting these four giants, was 15.1%, and in 2023 it will drop to 4.4%. These two figures allow us to clearly see the slowdown to which we referred at the beginning of the article, although we will have to wait and see how this affects the adoption rate of the new Intel Sapphire Rapids and AMD EPYC Genoa processors, aimed at the server sector and recently launched as next generation solutions.

Windows

PayPal will cut 2,000 positions, and NetApp, 960 jobs

Published

57 mins ago

February 1, 2023

Thomas Grimm

Lately not a week goes by without one or more technology companies announcing several hundred or thousands of layoffs. To date, many of the industry’s top heavyweights have already done so, including Meta, Alphabet, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM, and SAP. And now it’s their turn to PayPal and NetAppthat have confirmed that they will lay off, respectively, 2,000 and 960 employees.

Layoffs at PayPal account for 7% of its workforce, and according to the Company CEO Dan SchulmanThe layoffs will take place over the next few weeks. They will not affect all departments equally, although for now it is unknown which will bear the most staff cuts.

According to Schulman, they will treat those who lose their employment “with the utmost respect and empathy, giving them generous compensation, getting involved in consulting where necessary and supporting them in their transitions«. The manager also thanked them for the important contributions they have made to PayPal. On the other hand, he has blamed the layoffs on the “complicated macroeconomic environment” in which the company finds itself.

Schulman has further stressed that they have had no choice but to cut staff, because they have made notable progress in adjusting their «cost structure, and focused resources on strategic priorities“, they still have “work to do” about.

As for the layoffs at NetAppwill occur over the next three months, and will reach 8% of your workforce. The company confirmed this workforce reduction by sending the relevant documentation to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The NetApp CEO George Kurian has assured employees in an email that the layoffs are due to NetApp having to cut costs due to worsening economic conditions, which has led to technology spending.”more conservative«. More or less the reasons that other CEOs have given to justify the reduction in staff, Kurian has stressed that they are not «immune to these problems“, and that “against this background“, must be”agile, meet short-term commitments, and prepare for long-term success«.

When the company presented its results for the second quarter of 2022, at the end of last October, it already warned that the economic situation was experiencing a slowdown, and that they saw more reluctance in companies when approving budgets, and more completeness in terms of approval levels. They also began to face longer sales cycles, and deals deferred to other quarters. So, Kurian already pointed out that they had decided to freeze hiring and reduce spending. The situation, in view of the layoffs, has not improved.

Windows

Microsoft increases the staff of its artificial intelligence center in Barcelona by a hundred

Published

4 hours ago

February 1, 2023

Thomas Grimm

Microsoft aumenta en un centenar la plantilla de su centro de inteligencia artificial en Barcelona

After the company announced a total of 10,000 layoffs worldwide, representing 5% of its workforce, Microsoft is now announcing the hiring of 100 new employees for its artificial intelligence (AI) center in Barcelona. This new wave of hiring, which contrasts with the economic recession and job cuts in the technology sector, adds to the 80 people who have joined the center in recent months.

That Microsoft hires 100 new employees for its AI center is not trivial, since since its opening in September 2021 its activity and productivity based on the development of models on artificial intelligence have not stopped growing. And it is that this space, attached to the division WebXT (Web Experiences Team), works to improve services such as Azure, Bing or Windows.

Microsoft seeks to strengthen its technology hub in Barcelona by attracting talent in new vacancies for specialists in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Development and Data Science.

With implementations in software engineering, data science, and machine learning, new AI models and innovative web experiences can be developed. The goal is to create a diverse work team in gender, culture and nationalities.

The president of Microsoft Spain, Alberto Granadoshas appeared during an event organized by the New Economy Forum and has stated that the employment adjustment plan will not affect the data center projects that exist in our country, although they will give priority to certain areas in order to face new challenges and projects .

However, he values the global layoffs as a conservative and positive lineafter having increased its workforce by more than 50% in recent years.

Granados has assured that the layoffs from Microsoft will neither reach Spain nor will they affect the construction of data centers in Madridas well as the launch of his cloud region. Similarly, it ensures that the data centers of Meco, Algete and San Sebastián de los Reyes will have a impact of 15,000 million euros in the national economy and will generate 50,000 jobs.

A clear commitment to AI

The AI center in Barcelona is the fourth that Microsoft has opened in Europe, after those in London, Paris and Munich, the eighth in the world and the first in Spain. It must be taken into account that AI does not stop growing and that, in addition to having been declared ‘the word of the year’ by the FundéuRAE, it is expected to that ends up being fully integrated into the business structure and assuming a brutal transformative effect on the economy.

Since Microsoft announced its investment in Open AI, its commitment to the integration of all Technologys (such as ChatGPT) in its products is complete. Thus, it is sought that it can be applied in Azure or Power Point so that users could generate texts or images organically. The objective of the company in Spain, in the words of Granados himself, is to Mark new opportunities with various Ibex 35 companies.

The WebXT organization It works as a start-up environment where you work on challenges that allow you to improve the consumer experience through optimal products and services such as Bing, Edge and MS News.

Spain, core of digital talent

To speak of Spain is to do it one of the ten countries that most attract and retain digital talent, being the fourth country in Europe, after the United Kingdom, Germany and France, in number of professionals and developers in the cloud. All this represents 10% of professionals certified in advanced Technologys in Europe.

With its new AI center in Barcelona, Microsoft seeks to make Spain and Catalonia a reference in the sector. His plan is to continue working in partnership with universities, research centers and technology companies to promote training in AI and Machine Learning Technologys.