What are humanity’s options? Does AI believe in God? In this exclusive Q&A, Nick Bostrom says that the big questions are above his pay grade. But who is in charge, then?
Frankly, I think 100 years is too far to look into the future because we will see dramatic new scientific areas emerge 20 years from now. My grandfather immigrated to Israel in 1946 from Holland to be a Technion student in civil engineering.
At that time, civil engineering and mechanical engineering were the most prestigious fields you could study. Back then, the disciplines of science that I work in, like computer science and electrical engineering, did not even exist as separate fields.
In comparison, today progress happens even more quickly. This rapid progress is especially apparent in disciplines like quantum technologies and AI.
Explore the latest developments in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), understand how AGI could transform our reality.
What happens when we’re faced with something no one has ever seen before – a disruptive force that has no clear historical precedent? Something like artificial general intelligence (AGI).
The team has released the width-pruned version of the model on Hugging Face under the Nvidia Open Model License, which allows for commercial use. This makes it accessible to a wider range of users and developers who can benefit from its efficiency and performance.
“Pruning and classical knowledge distillation is a highly cost-effective method to progressively obtain LLMs [large language models] of smaller size, achieving superior accuracy compared to training from scratch across all domains,” the researchers wrote. “It serves as a more effective and data-efficient approach compared to either synthetic-data-style fine-tuning or pretraining from scratch.”
This work is a reminder of the value and importance of the open-source community to the progress of AI. Pruning and distillation are part of a wider body of research that is enabling companies to optimize and customize LLMs at a fraction of the normal cost. Other notable works in the field include Sakana AI’s evolutionary model-merging algorithm, which makes it possible to assemble parts of different models to combine their strengths without the need for expensive training resources.
AI systems mass-producing cheap research would be bad news for an already struggling scientific ecosystem.
M any prominent people in the tech industry have talked about the increasing convergence between humans and machines in coming decades. For example, Elon Musk has reportedly said he wants humans to merge with AI “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence”
His company Neuralink aims to facilitate this convergence so that humans won’t be “left behind” as technology advances in the future. While people with disabilities would be near-term recipients of these innovations, some believe technologies like this could be used to enhance abilities in everyone.
These aims are inspired by an idea called transhumanism, the belief that we should use science and technology to radically enhance human capabilities and seek to direct our own evolutionary path. Disease, aging and death are all realities transhumanists wish to end, alongside dramatically increasing our cognitive, emotional and physical capacities.
In “The Singularity Is Nearer,” the futurist Ray Kurzweil reckons with a world dominated by artificial intelligence (good) and his own mortality (bad).
Until today, we’ve seen exactly 40 seconds of Boston Dynamics’ new electric Atlas in action. The Hyundai-owned robotics stalwart is very much still in the early stages of commercializing the biped for factory floors. For now, however, it’s doing the thing Boston Dynamics does second best after building robots: showing off in viral video form.
After debuting a short video of the robot doing push-ups during a recent conference presentation, the company has shared the clip with TechCrunch. While this is in no way an indicator of real-world use, it’s a great demonstration of Atlas’ extremely robust and powerful actuators.
