weekend ai reads for 2024-04-05

“The joy of creating music is that there are no rules,” said Beyoncé. “The more I see the world evolving the more I felt a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments.”

“The best music will be the most original use of AI. It won’t be a fake Drake singing a Nirvana song. It will be a 14-year-old kid [making] something that’s totally unique,” says Stringer. But almost in the same breath, he warns tech companies off the use of AI to create music based on existing artists and their music, highlighting the delicate dance that the music industry is facing in dealing with new technology.

The task at hand for the entire quantum ecosystem is to increase the fidelity of qubits and enable fault-tolerant quantum computing so that we can use a quantum machine to unlock solutions to previously intractable problems. In short, we need to transition to reliable logical qubits — created by combining multiple physical qubits together into logical ones to protect against noise and sustain a long (i.e., resilient) computation.

So... I wanted to know what the big themes, trends and takeaways were from #sxsw2024 over the last few days. And as I didn't go to Austin, I had to make a 3 little ai-agents to (1) listen to about 150 of the top talks, (2) analyze the talks (phew) and (3) build a (rather massive) deck.

The U.S. House has set a strict ban on congressional staffers' use of Microsoft Copilot, the company's AI-based chatbot, Axios has learned.

Most decisions in life are reversible. But some are one-way doors. Jeff Bezos talks about these: “Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible—one-way doors—and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.”

Our results indicate that working under algorithmic rather than human management has substantial consequences on the way workers approach and carry out the job. Specifically, workers who receive positive feedback from human managers put significantly more care and effort into their tasks and perform more accurately, compared to workers who receive identical feedback from algorithmic management.

The 2024 MAD landscape features 2,011 logos in total.That number is up from 1,416 last year, with 578 new entrants to the map.

The only voice of the customer that really matters is what actual customers — with eyeballs and index fingers and wallets — have said. Verbatim.

Execs often recoil when they hear this, claiming “we need to stay broad to maximize our market” — but that is a 101-level mistake. Focusing on one person’s understanding of their problem isn’t constraining your solution’s appeal. In fact, it is the opposite.

Universities can also help their faculty manage the changed competitive landscape by encouraging and allowing them to be more risk-taking. The comparative advantage of academic researchers in AI is to do more high-risk exploration, and incentive structures at universities must change to account for this.

The Data Provenance Initiative is a large-scale audit of AI datasets used to train large language models. As a first step, we've traced 1800+ popular, text-to-text finetuning datasets from origin to creation, cataloging their data sources, licenses, creators, and other metadata, for researchers to explore using this tool. The purpose of this work is to improve transparency, documentation, and informed use of datasets in AI.

Onscreen Entities: These are entities that are currently displayed on a user’s screen

Conversational Entities: These are entities relevant to the conversation. These entities might come from a previous turn for the user (for example, when the user says “Call Mom”, the contact for Mom would be the relevant entity in question) or from the virtual assistant (for example, when the agent provides a user with a list of places or alarms to choose from).

Background Entities: These are relevant entities that come from background processes that might not necessarily be a direct part of what the user sees on their screen or their interaction with the virtual agent; for example, an alarm that starts ringing or music that is playing in the background

Microsoft insists that Copilot runs on the NPU instead of the GPU to minimize the impact on battery life.

Every journey begins with a prompt. Terra’s sophisticated AI translates your intentions, available time, and precise location into a tailored trail of GPS coordinates. Users don't know where Terra will take them; the only certainty is finding their way back to the starting point.

This project utilizes a chain of GPT-4, Stable Diffusion, and Anthropic API calls to generate an original fantasy novel. Users can provide an initial prompt and enter how many chapters they'd like it to be, and the AI then generates an entire novel, outputting an EPUB file compatible with e-book readers.

A 15-chapter novel can cost as little as $4 to produce, and is written in just a few minutes.