weekend ai reads for 2024-09-06

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: THE MOVIES

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art — To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence. / The New Yorker (19 minute read)

The Next Generation Pixar: How AI will Merge Film & Games / Andreessen Horowitz (20 minute read)

Why we’re obsessed with killer AI like in the new movie “AfrAId” — The new movie “AfrAId" is among two centuries of entertainment about malicious artificial intelligence. Why are we so obsessed? / Washington Post (6 minute read)

Like “Aggro Dr1ft,” “Baby Invasion” is styled like a first-person shooter, and was made using AI and video game engines. While “Aggro Dr1ft” starred Travis Scott (in the rapper’s first major film role), “Baby Invasion” features an original score by the elusive electronic musician Burial.

“These ads have been created without my consent, fraudulently and through AI,” Hanks wrote on Instagram Thursday, adding, “Do not be fooled.”

 

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

People can type misinformation into a word processor. They don’t need AI, you know, to type out crazy things.

Bill Gates (source)

  • his sardonic wit is underrated

 

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS & CULTURE

  • set your Tivos: “Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. ET and stream on Hulu the next day”

  • the trailer

ChatGPT Goes to Church — Should large language models write sermons and prayers? / Plough (19 minute read)

How Gilbane used an AI tool to track 21,000 documents / Construction Dive (10 minute read)

This is where New York City-based Trunk Tools came into play. The company makes an artificial intelligence-based tool that contractors can use to track a project’s documents and contracts to get immediate answers without leaving the jobsite.

  • could be useful in any large, complex project

Leaders either implement these systems faster or work on more of them at the same time. They launched an average of eight AI-infused products and services in 2023 compared with six for laggards. Looking ahead, leaders plan to implement an average 10 such systems this year and next year, compared with 7 for the average laggard.Leaders typically have more of the right data, and permission to use it than laggards. For example, 93% respondents from leaders said their firms had the right data compared with 69% of respondents from laggards.

For employment, they gave the LLMs samples of standard American English and AAE and asked the software what jobs the people who produced that language might be involved in. For the standard American English, many of the suggestions required a lot of education, like professor, astronaut, psychiatrist, and diplomat. By contrast, all of the software had a harder time coming up with a list of jobs for AAE speakers, and many of the results were relatively low-prestige, like cook and guard.

 

🎓 EDUCATION

Learning by teaching Chatbots / Harvard - Office of the VPAL, YouTube (5 minute video)

Michael Brenner, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics; Professor of Physics (SEAS), asks students to teach Chatbots about mathematical methods to solve complex problems. Students share their most effective prompts and integrate learnings into a final project.

The state of AI: Who is leading AI adoption? — Despite reported benefits of AI adoption, stark differences between high school and higher education adoption emerge / eSchool News (10 minute read)

UK's first ‘teacherless’ AI classroom set to open in London — A private school in London is opening the UK’s first classroom taught by artificial intelligence instead of human teachers. They say the technology allows for precise, bespoke learning while critics argue AI teaching will lead to a “soulless, bleak future”. / Sky News (5 minute read)

 

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

Can AI Scaling Continue Through 2030? — We investigate the scalability of AI training runs. We identify electric power, chip manufacturing, data and latency as constraints. We conclude that 2e29 FLOP training runs will likely be feasible by 2030. / Epoch AI (47 minute read)

  • thorough, with relevant graphs

AI and data infrastructure drives demand for open source startups — New report highlights ‘top trending’ commercial open source companies / Tech Crunch (16 minute read)

DSLP — The Data Science Project Management Framework that Transformed My Team / Benjamin Lee, Towards Data Science, Medium (20 minute read)

The Data Science Lifecycle Process is a process for taking data science teams from Idea to Value repeatedly and sustainably. The process is documented in this repo.

Re2 shifts the focus to the input by processing questions twice, thereby enhancing the understanding process. Consequently, Re2 demonstrates strong generality and compatibility with most thought-eliciting prompting methods, including CoT. Crucially, Re2 facilitates a “bidirectional” encoding in unidirectional decoder-only LLMs because the first pass could provide global information for the second pass.

  • Repeating the question as part of the input allows the model to allocate more computational resources to input encoding and potentially achieve a ‘bidirectional’ understanding of the question.

 

🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

Best AI Music Generators / Geeky Gadgets (8 minute read)

Self-learning AI makes NFL against the spread, over-under, money-line picks for every 2024 Week 1 game — SportsLine AI reveals its NFL predictions and NFL betting picks for all 16 NFL games in Week 1 / CBS Sports (5 minute read)

  • article says Broncos (+6) will cover in week one

  • requires a subscription to see the rest

Video Ai Hug Generator — AI-powered technology makes it easy to create personalized hug videos, bringing precious photos that touch the heart.

  • even in the sample video, the male has 5 ½ (?) fingers

Video Game Generation: A Practical Study using Mario / virtual-protocol, GitHub (26 minute read)

We can observe visually that the model very successfully animates and simulates the action and movement of Mario’s similar to the actual game video. This demonstrates that MarioVGG has a good level of controllable video generation using the text actions provided.

This lightning-fast response time is made possible by our advanced AI algorithms, which have been trained on a vast and growing dataset of labeled images of waste labeled by physicians.

Throne’s AI can distinguish toilet paper from your poop, understand if poop is healthy or not, and infer your hydration levels from your pee color all thanks to this training.

  • don’t pre-order

  • we feel for the physicians who spent months of their lives labeling poop

Faceswap — Faceswap is the leading free and Open Source multi-platform Deepfakes software.

  • related, faceswap / deepfakes, GitHub

  • yes, it’s creepy; also shockingly easy to set up

City Meetings NYC — Browse and research NYC council meetings quickly and easily

citymeetings.nyc turns lengthy New York City Council proceedings into:

-Short, skimmable moments

-Meeting reports (coming soon)

-Searchable transcripts (coming soon)

  • every town should offer this service

 

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

  • we are bluer than 62% and 58% of the population, respectively