Caterbot? Robatapillar? It crawls with ease through loops and bends

Caterbot? Robatapillar? It crawls with ease through loops and bends

Engineers at Princeton and North Carolina State University have combined ancient paperfolding and modern materials science to create a soft robot that bends and twists through mazes with ease. Soft robots can be challenging to guide because steering equipment often increases the robot's rigidity and cuts its flexibility. The new design overcomes those problems by building the steering system directly into the robot's body, said Tuo Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton. In an article published May 6 in the journal PNAS, the researchers describe how they created the robot out of modular, cylindrical segments. The segments, which can operate…
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China is flexing its missile arsenal in a new simulation for a mass Taiwan attack as the US watches Beijing’s Rocket Force closely

China is flexing its missile arsenal in a new simulation for a mass Taiwan attack as the US watches Beijing’s Rocket Force closely

China's Eastern Theater Command on Friday released a simulation video of its missile forces carrying out a mass attack on Taiwan, boasting its land, sea, and air launch capabilities.The 70-second hype video used a mix of computer-generated animation and live footage to depict warships, land-based rocket launchers, and jet fighters launching waves of missiles at the island."Destroy the pillar of Taiwanese independence! Strike the base camp of Taiwanese independence! Cut off the blood flow of Taiwanese independence!" the People's Liberation Army branch wrote in the video.Animated missiles — dubbed "independence killing weapons" in the video — descend upon a 3D…
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DETAIL: Task DEmonsTration Attribution for Interpretable In-context Learning

DETAIL: Task DEmonsTration Attribution for Interpretable In-context Learning

arXiv:2405.14899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) allows transformer-based language models that are pre-trained on general text to quickly learn a specific task with a few "task demonstrations" without updating their parameters, significantly boosting their flexibility and generality. ICL possesses many distinct characteristics from conventional machine learning, thereby requiring new approaches to interpret this learning paradigm. Taking the viewpoint of recent works showing that transformers learn in context by formulating an internal optimizer, we propose an influence function-based attribution technique, DETAIL, that addresses the specific characteristics of ICL. We empirically verify the effectiveness of our approach for demonstration attribution…
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Winamp: new music platform and source code release – gHacks Tech News

Winamp: new music platform and source code release – gHacks Tech News

Winamp used to be a popular audio player for Windows. Things went quiet after its heyday and rights changed hands several times in that period. Veteran users of the player had big hopes when a comeback of the player was announced in 2021. After a, mostly, bug fix release in 2022, a new Winamp Player was announced for release in 2023. The release turned things around significantly, as it was launched as as web-based application and not a traditional desktop app. Even worse, the web-based player did not support playing local files. Everything seemed to be designed to push the…
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Research Highlights Jul-Aug 2023: Llama 2, Flash-Attention 2, and More

Research Highlights Jul-Aug 2023: Llama 2, Flash-Attention 2, and More

Every month is a busy month for LLM research. However, this month has been particularly interesting due to the release of new state-of-the-art base models, such as Meta's Llama 2 model suite. Double kudos: this new iteration of Llama models comes without any major restrictions and a very detailed 77-page report on arXiv!I am still compiling all my notes and thoughts after reading through this 77-pager for the next main issue of this newsletter -- coming soon! However, in the meantime, I wanted to share some of the main takeaways in the monthly Research Highlights (next to many other interesting…
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Eat a rock a day, put glue on your pizza: how Google’s AI is losing touch with reality

Eat a rock a day, put glue on your pizza: how Google’s AI is losing touch with reality

Google has rolled out its latest experimental search feature on Chrome, Firefox and the Google app browser to hundreds of millions of users. “AI Overviews” saves you clicking on links by using generative AI — the same technology that powers rival product ChatGPT — to provide summaries of the search results. Ask “how to keep bananas fresh for longer” and it uses AI to generate a useful summary of tips such as storing them in a cool, dark place and away from other fruits like apples. But ask it a left-field question and the results can be disastrous, or even…
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Data Machina #238

Data Machina #238

Non-stop AI Innovation Every Single Week. Well yeah, thats’s right: There is no single week without something new, exciting, or amazing happening in AI. This is a selection of interesting, cool stuff that happened in the last 7 days or so:OpenAI introduced new, faster, and more efficient embedding models. Buried in the blog announcement, it says: “the new embedding models were trained with a technique that allows developers to shorten embeddings without the embedding losing its concept-representing properties.” Well - for some reason- it seems the blog fails to mention that the technique is called Matryoshka Representation Learning (paper, repo),…
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It’s Time To Be More Strategic About AI In Customer Service

It’s Time To Be More Strategic About AI In Customer Service

Generative AI has topped the list of customer inquiries and conversations that I have been having this year — no surprises there! Interestingly, at least half of them have been about AI in customer service and chatbots, virtual assistants, and knowledge bots for customers, which seem top of mind for most customer service leaders. This makes us wonder if this is the limit of what AI can do for customer service. I think not. These are the most obvious and simplest use cases that need the least amount of disruption in existing customer service operations, seen as easily done and…
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One year update: book submitted; TIME 100; Sep 21 online workshop

One year update: book submitted; TIME 100; Sep 21 online workshop

It’s almost exactly a year since we launched this newsletter and began writing our book. Earlier this week, we turned in our manuscript to our publisher! It’s now in the hands of peer reviewers.In the book, we dig into the ideas behind generative AI, tackle fears around artificial general intelligence, explain the scientific and ethical limitations of predictive AI, categorize the many types of AI harms, explore why AI has failed to fix social media, analyze how AI hype and misinformation are created and amplified, and argue that many AI problems in fact reflect problems with capitalism requiring deeper reforms.…
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