AI Stuff

By Andrew R. Chow

Over the past few months, shiny metallic orbs have materialized cities around the world, from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. Its creators hail the orbs as revolutionary devices ushering in a new era of global humanity and financial stability. Its detractors slam them as invasive, dystopian and exploitative.

Welcome to the rollout of Worldcoin, an AI-meets-crypto project from OpenAI founder Sam Altman that has stirred endless controversy. The startup uses orbs to scan people’s eyes in exchange for a digital ID and possibly some cryptocurrency, depending on what country they live in.

Altman and his co-founder Alex Blania hope that Worldcoin will provide a new solution to online identity in a digital landscape rife with scams, bots and even AI imposters. But privacy experts are concerned about the Worldcoin’s collection of biometric data and how, exactly, the project will keep and protect that data going forward. On Aug. 2, Kenya became the first country to suspend Worldcoin’s activities and its government launched a multi-agency investigation into the project’s practices.

Here’s what to know about the new technology. What is the aim of Worldcoin?

Navigating the online world in 2023 can often feel like an endless obstacle course of lurking dangers. Many websites require a login and password. Scammers have all sorts of strategies to get you to click on links and send them money. Bots run rampant on social media platforms.

And with the rise of AI, our collective ability to discern who is a human online and who isn’t is about to become much worse. Earlier this year, OpenAI’s GPT-4 was even able to convince a human to solve a CAPTCHA—a technology designed to differentiate humans from bots—on its behalf.

As a founder and the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman bears responsibility for problems like this. Worldcoin, then, serves as his potential solution: a way to definitively distinguish between humans and AIs. If all humans online could prove that they were, in fact, humans, then scams and imposters would dramatically decrease, and the digital landscapes would become more accurate representations of us as a society.

So in order to prove that humans are humans, Worldcoin scans irises, which are unique to their owners. This technique is not unlike the biometric scans conducted by CLEAR or Apple’s Face ID.

Once Worldcoin has received a unique iris scan, the project issues a digital identity called a World ID. The ID is not a user’s biometric data itself, but an identifier created using a cryptography method called zero-knowledge proofs.

If World IDs catch on, then holders could theoretically use them to sign on to all websites, just like Google offers single sign-on services. The difference, Altman argues, is that a Worldcoin login will be more secure and unlinked to other information, including a user’s email, name or photograph. If the zero-knowledge proof aspect of the tech works properly, Worldcoin would allow ID holders to log into a website without that action being traceable by other people or any government.

In June, Okta became the first major company to allow users to sign in with Worldcoin. Why are people signing up?

Worldcoin officially launched in July, with the project embarking on a multi-city sign-up tour. Altman posted a video of long lines outside Orb centers, and said that the project was scanning in a new user every eight seconds.

Worldcoin claims that more than two million people have registered for World IDs. Some people have signed up out of curiosity or affinity for the technology. But many more, it seems, signed up for a simpler reason: money. In order to galvanize interest in the project, Worldcoin created its own crypto token, called WLD, and has offered 25 units (currently worth about $60) to anyone who scanned their eyes into an orb. That offer does not extend to the U.S., however, due to the country’s strict regulatory environment related to crypto products.

Worldcoin’s cryptocurrency element serves as a marketing ploy, a global financial infrastructure, and a way to entice continued venture capital funding. (Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, just raised $115 million in a funding round and was valued at $3 billion last year. Around 14% of all WLD tokens have been earmarked for investors.) Worldcoin, which Altman says he conceived of in 2019, has for years been entwined with the crypto ecosystem, for better or worse. It was publicly announced in the summer of 2021, when crypto was near its height, and the project’s original backers include Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, accused of perpetrating an $8 billion fraud, and the collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

Sam Altman says he hopes that Worldcoin’s financialized element could lead to universal basic income (UBI) for its users. Altman has long been interested in UBI. When he was the president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, he led a pilot trial that aimed to give $1,500 a month to Oakland families. But the project was significantly delayed and reduced in scale. Elizabeth Rhodes, project director of YC Research—the incubator’s nonprofit arm, which has since spun off—told Wired in 2018 that “it’s harder to give away money than you might think.”

Worldcoin also isn’t the first project to entwine digital identity with universal basic income. Last year, a project called Proof of Humanity attempted something similar—and for a while, was handing out $50 to $100 monthly in crypto to everyone who signed up. But the token’s value cratered along with the larger market.

Santiago Siri, a board member of Proof of Humanity, says that Worldcoin’s cryptographic mechanisms designed to protect identity represent a step forward from his project, which required new users to post a public video to verify their identity. Siri hopes that Altman will leverage Worldcoin and his growing revenue from OpenAI to redistribute wealth. “AI can certainly hold true the promise of delivering a global universal basic income, because it can generate that kind of sustainable wealth throughout time. And because it will displace jobs, they have the ethical obligation to actually support UBI initiatives,” he says.

How Altman plans to pay for Worldcoin’s UBI, however, remains murky. “The hope is that as people want to buy this token, because they believe this is the future, there will be inflows into this economy. New token-buyers is how it gets paid for, effectively,” Altman told Coindesk recently.

While Altman hopes that the price of WLD will go up, its value so far has been somewhat volatile. WLD debuted at $7.50 but has since dropped threefold, and has hovered between $2 and $3 over the last week. Why is Worldcoin facing criticism?

Many critics have called Worldcoin’s business—of scanning eyeballs in exchange for crypto—dystopian and some have compared it to bribery. Many people are understandably hesitant to surrender their biometric data to a private for-profit startup with uncertain aims; even Altman himself acknowledged a “clear ick factor.”

Worldcoin says the biometric information on the orbs is deleted after being processed and converted into cryptographic code. But a history of Silicon Valley companies mishandling data has left a sour taste in peoples’ mouths, and some fear that the iris scans could be used for surveillance or be sold to third parties. “Don’t use biometrics for anything,” Edward Snowden wrote on Twitter in response to Altman’s post about Worldcoin in 2021. “The human body is not a ticket-punch.”

Meanwhile, Worldcoin’s rollout has been plagued by troubling reports from around the world. An extensive 2022 article from the MIT Technology Review found evidence that the project used deceptive practices to sign people up in countries like Indonesia, Kenya and Chile. Spanish-language speakers, for instance, were given terms of service notices in English, and people in Sudan were enticed with AirPod giveaways without being told what exactly they were scanning their eyeballs for.

A representative for the Worldcoin Foundation responded to the Technology Review article in a statement to TIME, writing: “The article is not representative of the project's operations, included inaccurate information and offered a narrow, personal perspective of the incredibly early stages of the project. It is also not an accurate representation of the project’s global operations today.”

This year, hackers stole the login credentials of Worldcoin operators who are tasked with signing up new users, allowing the hackers to view internal information. An article by the crypto publication BlockBeats alleged that people in Cambodia and Kenya were selling their iris data for as little as $30 a pop to speculators on the black market, who hoped that the WLD they collected from the scans would increase in price.

“I think that there are important questions to be asked about whether or not this opens the path towards artificial intelligence colonialism,” Proof of Humanity’s Siri, who is Argentinian, says. “We have seen the orb being deployed in third-world developing countries whose rules about identity and privacy might not be as strong as they are in the European Union or in the United States.”

Regulators around the world have been watching Worldcoin’s rise closely. The French data protection watchdog announced a probe into the project over its “questionable” data collection and preservation. A U.K. regulator issued a similar warning. And the Kenyan government demanded Worldcoin cease its data collection activities there, writing the project posed “legitimate regulatory concerns that require urgent action.”

A Worldcoin Foundation representative responded to the news in Kenya in a statement to TIME, writing: “The demand for Worldcoin’s proof of personhood verification services in Kenya has been overwhelming, resulting in tens of thousands of individuals waiting in lines over a three-day period to secure a World ID…Worldcoin remains committed to providing an inclusive, privacy-preserving, decentralized on-ramp to the global digital economy and looks forward to resuming its services in Kenya while working closely with local regulators and other stakeholders.”

When Worldcoin co-founder Alex Blania was asked by Bloomberg News about login theft and black market sales, he dismissed their impact. “Of course there will be fraud,” he said. “It will not be a perfect system, especially early on.”

Eager early adopters recently descended upon a Mexico City cafe where their eyes were scanned by a futuristic sphere, part of an ambitious project that ultimately seeks to create a unique digital identification for everyone on the planet.

Mexico is one of nearly three dozen countries where participants are allowing the sphere, outfitted with cameras and dubbed an orb, to scan their iris. The project's goal is to distinguish people from bots online, while doling out a cryptocurrency bonus as a incentive to participate.

The so-called Worldcoin project is a biometric verification tool led by Sam Altman, the chief executive of Open AI, and the crypto company he co-founded, Tools for Humanity.

Not directly AI related but the Sam Altman tie-in is interesting. This doesn't sound creepy at all... thoughts?

Aug 8 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google and Universal Music (UMG.AS) are in talks to license artists' voices and melodies for artificial intelligence-generated songs, Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing four people familiar with the matter.

The music industry is grappling with "deepfake" songs, made using generative AI, that mimic artists' voices, often without their consent.

The goal behind the talks is to develop a tool for fans to create tracks legitimately and pay the owners of the copyrights for them, the report said, adding the artists would have a choice to opt in the process.

Discussions between Google and Universal Music are at an early stage and no product launch is imminent, while Warner Music (WMG.O) is also in talks with Google about a product, the report added.

The companies did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

Since 2018, a dedicated team within Microsoft has attacked machine learning systems to make them safer. But with the public release of new generative AI tools, the field is already evolving.

The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise says it won’t allow artists to use artificial intelligence technology to draw its cast of sorcerers, druids and other characters and scenery.

Zoom Video Communications, Inc. recently updated its Terms of Service to encompass what some critics are calling a significant invasion of user privacy.

• CoreWeave, a company that provides cloud services, has secured a $2.3 billion loan using Nvidia chips as security.
• This large loan reflects a growing trend of securing loans with physical assets, especially when banks aren't lending as much.
• CoreWeave has grown quickly thanks to a boom in AI. It has special access to advanced Nvidia chips, which gives it an advantage over big cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
• CoreWeave will use the loan to buy more chips, build data centers, and hire more staff. It's aiming to have 14 data centers in the U.S. by the end of the year.
• Earlier this year, CoreWeave also raised $421 million in equity, pushing its value to over $2 billion.

Coverage:

• A New Attack Impacts Major AI Chatbots—and No One Knows How to Stop It - Wired
• Researchers discover new vulnerability in large language models - TechXplore
• Keeping the Baby While Losing the Bathwater: AI’s Efficiencies and Concerns Collide - Pymnts

He has worked closely with a group of researchers building Google’s long-awaited AI model Gemini. They have discussed technical matters such as “loss curves,” a way of measuring an AI program’s performance over time, and Brin has convened weekly discussions of new AI research with Google employees. He also has intervened in personnel matters, such as the hiring of sought-after researchers, the people said.

Brin’s increased presence at Google reflects the pivotal moment in AI and his longstanding interest in the technology, which Google pioneered but was slower than rivals to turn into new products, said current and former employees.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/161078

WSJ News Exclusive | Sergey Brin Is Back in the Trenches at Google Miles Kruppa and Deepa Seetharaman 8–10 minutes

Co-founder is working alongside AI researchers at tech giant’s headquarters, aiding efforts to build powerful Gemini system

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is back at work.

The multibillionaire has been visiting the tech giant’s Mountain View, Calif., offices in recent months generally three to four days a week, working alongside researchers as they push to develop the company’s next large artificial-intelligence system.

Brin participated in meetings about AI at Google’s offices late last year, but the frequency and intensity of his involvement has picked up, said people familiar with the matter. His new stance is a notable change from the relatively hands-off approach he adopted after stepping down from an executive role at parent company Alphabet GOOG 0.65%increase; green up pointing triangle in 2019.

He has worked closely with a group of researchers building Google’s long-awaited AI model Gemini. They have discussed technical matters such as “loss curves,” a way of measuring an AI program’s performance over time, and Brin has convened weekly discussions of new AI research with Google employees. He also has intervened in personnel matters, such as the hiring of sought-after researchers, the people said.

Brin’s increased presence at Google reflects the pivotal moment in AI and his longstanding interest in the technology, which Google pioneered but was slower than rivals to turn into new products, said current and former employees.

Competition is intensifying in AI research, with recent new offerings from companies including Meta Platforms. Google sped up product development in response to last year’s release of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can respond fluently to a range of written queries, by the Microsoft-backed research company OpenAI.

Gemini is Google’s attempt to build a general-purpose AI program that can rival OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which powers a paid version of ChatGPT. Demis Hassabis, the Google executive overseeing the project, told employees during a recent companywide meeting that the program would become available later this year, according to people who heard the remarks.

Brin, 49 years old, started Google with Larry Page in 1998 based on web search research they worked on together as Stanford University doctoral students.

While Brin has been an occasional presence at Google headquarters in recent years, his attention had been largely directed toward outside interests such as airships and new forms of disaster aid, along with efforts to give away portions of his considerable wealth. He is Alphabet’s second-largest individual shareholder behind Page, with a stake valued at close to $90 billion, according to S&P Capital IQ data.

Shares in Alphabet have risen more than 10% since Google announced an array of AI-infused products at its annual developer conference in May, including a new version of the core search engine that provides lengthy summaries and invites follow-up questions. That increase is roughly in line with rival Microsoft’s share price and the broader Nasdaq Composite Index.

Brin has spent much of his time sitting alongside Mountain View-based AI researchers at the newly constructed Charleston East building, a short walk from the original heart of Google’s corporate campus, said people familiar with the matter. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of both Google and Alphabet, also has an office in the building.

When the founders stepped back from their daily roles four years ago and elevated Pichai to Alphabet CEO, they said they would speak with him regularly and offer “advice and love, but not daily nagging.” They still control a majority of Alphabet voting power and sit on an executive board committee with Pichai.

Pichai is excited about Brin’s involvement and has encouraged his contributions, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

Google had a head start on artificial intelligence, forming a research unit in 2011 called Brain to investigate how a computing technique called deep learning could be used to build widely useful AI programs.

Pichai merged the Brain team this year with DeepMind, an AI research company that previously operated independently under the Alphabet umbrella. The shake-up elevated Hassabis, a co-founder of DeepMind, to CEO of the combined group Google DeepMind.

Some researchers have embraced Brin’s involvement, viewing it as an endorsement of their work and a helpful intervention during a transitional period for the AI teams, said current and former employees. Hassabis and many Google DeepMind executives work from London, making that office a de facto power center in the new setup.

Brin’s involvement has ramped up since the release of ChatGPT in November. Google’s co-founders sat in on meetings to review AI products Google was preparing for its developer conference in May, said people familiar with the matter, a development earlier reported by the New York Times.

Brin has since maintained a strong presence at Google’s headquarters, making appearances at research gatherings and company celebrations. Google said Brin doesn’t have a formal new role at the company beyond being a co-founder and board member. A spokeswoman for Brin didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Whereas Page was sometimes a reclusive figure during his time running Google, Brin cultivated a more accessible persona, traversing the headquarters on roller skates and moving between the company’s far-flung projects.

Since the AI boom last year, Brin has attended a launch party for the company that popularized the image-generation program Stable Diffusion and occasionally attends events at a $68 million mansion in Hillsborough, Calif., known as the AGI House, said people who have interacted with him there. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, the idea that computer programs could one day match human reasoning.

In March, Brin was photographed at Google headquarters with Pichai and Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker during a visit from the prime minister of Luxembourg, dressed in gray sweatpants and a black long-sleeve shirt. The other attendees wore suits.

Brin’s work with Gemini is another layer in Google’s long-running efforts to build AI systems that can exhibit humanlike capabilities and more seamlessly meet the needs of the company’s billions of users.

At first Brin ignored the work of the Brain team and expressed skepticism that they could crack artificial intelligence, even though that group began in the Google X division he led, he said during an interview at the World Economic Forum in 2017.

“I didn’t pay attention to it at all, to be perfectly honest,” Brin said. A few years later, Brain’s research was used in many of Google’s largest products, he said, upending his previous assumptions.

Brin has focused in part on personnel issues, an area of difficulty for Google and other large tech companies as the talent wars for AI researchers intensifies. Multiple authors of a landmark 2017 Google paper credited with sparking the latest wave of AI development have left the company to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for competing startups.

Though he is one of the world’s most respected computer scientists, Brin has needed to catch up with the most recent developments in AI and hasn’t contributed significantly to coding projects, said current and former employees.

Brin promoted the possibilities of AI in his last shareholder letter, issued in 2018, writing that the “power and potential and potential of computation to tackle important problems has never been greater.”

“The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime,” he wrote.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6752986

A website called zleague.gg has been scraping Reddit threads, feeding them into an AI and publishing auto-generated summaries without proper oversight. World of Warcraft players on Reddit noticed this and created a fake thread about a made-up feature called Glorbo to trick the AI. The AI then published an article summarizing the fake Glorbo thread, showing that it was easily fooled. This highlights issues with AI-generated content crowding out human writers and the need for Google to better regulate such sites to ensure quality. The Glorbo prank provides an amusing example of how gaming communities can push back against AI overreach.

The main goal of minigpt4.cpp is to run minigpt4 using 4-bit quantization with using the ggml library.

https://github.com/Maknee/minigpt4.cpp

Crossposted from u/ElrasX.

The first comprehensive ML law, is expected to come into force by early 2024

The AI model startup is reviewing competing term sheets for a Series D round that could raise at least $200 million at a valuation of $4 billion, per sources.

Hugging Face is raising a new funding round that is expected to value the high-flying AI startup at $4 billion, multiple sources with knowledge of the matter tell Forbes.

The Series D funding round is expected to raise at least $200 million, two sources said, with Ashton Kutcher’s venture capital firm, Sound Ventures, currently leading an investor scrum. But cofounder and CEO Clément Delangue is shopping around as the company has received multiple offers this week, four sources added.

Delangue was expected to pick a preferred offer as soon as Friday, according to another source, who noted that the situation was still fluid, meaning no agreement has been reached, and the numbers involved could change. Several other sources, who asked to remain anonymous as they weren’t authorized to talk about the deal, said that Hugging Face could seek to raise more, as much as $300 million, while existing investors could still attempt to take the round in a last-minute bid. GV, the venture firm backed by Alphabet, and DFJ were said to be looking at the round, one source added.

Hugging Face didn’t respond to requests for comment. GV declined to comment. Coatue, DFJ, Kutcher, and Lux also didn’t respond.

The anticipated funding is the latest exclamation point in a cash frenzy for promising AI companies, particularly those providing large-language models, or LLMs, that power them. Just over a year ago, Hugging Face raised $100 million in a Series C round led by Lux Capital; Coatue and Sequoia were new investors in that round, joining A.Capital Ventures and Addition. The company had attained a $2 billion valuation in that round despite taking in less than $10 million in revenue in 2021. Its revenue run rate has spiked this year and now sits at around $30 million to $50 million, three sources said — with one noting that it had more that tripled compared to the start of the year.

Named after the emoji of a smiling face with jazz hands, Brooklyn-based Hugging Face has grown quickly by offering what Delangue has described as a “GitHub for machine learning.” It is a central company in a growing movement of AI models that are open sourced, meaning that anyone can access and modify them for free. Hugging Face makes money by charging for security and corporate tools on top of a hub of hundreds of thousands of models trained by its community of developers, including the popular Stable Diffusion model that forms the basis for another controversial AI unicorn, Stability AI. (On Thursday, a Stability AI cofounder sued CEO Emad Mostaque, alleging he was tricked into selling his stake for next to nothing.) Per a Forbes profile in 2022, Bloomberg, Pfizer and Roche were early Hugging Face customers.

Earlier this year, Delangue warned that model providers reliant on paying huge sums to Big Tech’s cloud providers would function as “cloud money laundering.” But training and maintaining models — and building enterprise-grade businesses around them — remains costly. In June, Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion, in part to manage its Microsoft compute and Nvidia hardware costs; the same month, foundation model rival Cohere raised $270 million. Anthropic, maker of the recently-released ChatGPT rival Claude 2, raised $450 million in May. OpenAI closed its own $300 million share sale in April, then raised $175 million for a fund to back other startups a month later, per a filing. Adept became a unicorn after announcing a $350 million fundraise in March. Stability AI, meanwhile, met with a number of venture firms in the spring seeking its own new up-round, industry sources said.

At a $4 billion valuation, Hugging Face would vault to one of the category’s highest-valued companies, matching Inflection AI and just behind Anthropic, reported to have reached closer to $5 billion. OpenAI remains the giant in the fast-growing category, Google, Meta and infrastructure companies like Databricks excluded; while its ownership and valuation structure is complex, the company’s previous financings implied a price tag in the $27 billion to $29 billion range.

Speaking for another Forbes story on the breakout moment for generative AI tools, Delangue predicted, “I think there’s potential for multiple $100 billion companies.”

Crossposted from /u/InevitableSky2801:

Want to start playing with Meta’s Llama 2?

It takes just 7 lines of shell script using llama.cpp to get you started!

Copy Code Snippet: https://lastmileai.dev/workbooks/clkbifegg001jpheon6d2s4m8

Redmond-Puffin-13B / Llama 2 Fine-tune

Download Links:

• https://huggingface.co/FPHam/Free_Sydney_13b_HF
• https://huggingface.co/FPHam/Free_Sydney_13b_GPTQ (slow on AutoGPTQ, fast on ExLLama)