Showing posts with label AI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AI. Show all posts

2023-04-29

2023-04-29 Saturday - The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023, Center for Humane Technology

 

This video of a talk - covers everything that I have expressed a concern about, regarding the unconstrained explosion in AI capabilities - without guardrails, governance, legal frameworks, and international agreements.


The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023
Center for Humane Technology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ

#AI #Risks #GenAIRisks

Tristan Harris started his career as a magician. He studied persuasive technology at Stanford University, and used what he learned to build a company called Apture, which was acquired by Google. It was at Google where Tristan first sounded the alarm on the harms posed by technology that manipulates attention for profit. Since then, he's spent his career articulating the insidious effects of today’s social media platforms, and envisioning how technology can serve humanity. Today, Tristan is the executive director and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

Aza Raskin was trained as a mathematician and dark matter physicist. He took 3 companies from founding to acquisition before co-founding the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan and Randima Fernando. Aza is also a co-founder of the Earth Species Project, an open-source collaborative non-profit dedicated to decoding animal communication. Aza’s father, Jef Raskin, created the Macintosh project at Apple — with the vision that humane technology should help, not harm, humans.


Additional Articles of Interest: 

 

2023 Addendums: 
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2023-04-22

2023-04-22 Saturday - Recommended Book - The Age of AI: And Our Human Future

 

[image credit: Amazon.com]

This week I picked-up 9 books from the library for my reading stack.

I completed reading the 1st one tonight. It was the book that I thought I would enjoy the least - but I actually found it to be illuminating in some unexpected ways - balanced (mostly) - if somewhat biased to the upside - and demurring from exploring - in any depth - the actual scenarios of possibly negative consequences.

I would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in the long-term strategic, policy, and regulatory concerns that need to be addressed - as AI capabilities continue to accelerate. Even if your professional role may not have any primary or secondary involvement in shaping policy or regulations - every citizen would benefit by being better informed and aware of the very serious future consequences to themselves, their country, and the world - if actions are not planned and taken - to mitigate the very serious problems that will arise in the absence of policies, regulations, and international agreements.

"The Age of AI And Our Human Future" (2021) by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher

https://www.amazon.com/Age-I-Our-Human-Future/dp/0316273805/ 

"Three of the world’s most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it is transforming human society—and what this technology means for us all."

"An AI learned to win chess by making moves human grand masters had never conceived. Another AI discovered a new antibiotic by analyzing molecular properties human scientists did not understand. Now, AI-powered jets are defeating experienced human pilots in simulated dogfights. AI is coming online in searching, streaming, medicine, education, and many other fields and, in so doing, transforming how humans are experiencing reality."

In The Age of AI, three leading thinkers have come together to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live. The Age of AI is an essential roadmap to our present and our future, an era unlike any that has come before."

 At 227 pages - the book is a fairly quick read.

If you are pressed for time - you may find the following pages to be a condensed CliffNotes summary of the key points:

9-10, 15, 23-24, 27, 65, 72-73, 76, 80-81, 115, 120, 139, 143, 171, 173-176, 179, 183, 186, 191-198, 207-208.

Regardless, reading chapters 1, 5, and 6...crucial. 

 

My post on LinkedIn

Updates: 

 WSJ article by the authors, on 2023-02-23

 

Eric Schmidt's article on 2023-03-14

 

FastCompany article on 2023-03-14

YouTube video: 


 


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2023-03-29

2023-03-29 Wednesday - I am a signatory to the Open Letter - Pause Giant AI Experiments

Today I also became a signatory:

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/
"We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4."

2023-04-09 screen shot

 Before we proceed with even greater capabilities than GPT-4 - it needs to include governance mechanisms to monitor/prevent unethical/harmful behavior. 

The fundamental problem: An end-goal of building an Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGI) without any ethical framework/boundaries - is a potentially existential threat to all humankind.

 Here's my analogy for people that argue that we just have to accept an uncontrolled explosion in AI capabilities - with no governance, no limits, no constraints, no safety protocols: While other countries can & do manufacture drugs - the U.S. FDA doesn't allow them to be imported/sold without rigorous safety protocols - because they have a "Duty of Care" to ensure that those drugs are properly manufactured, tested - and do not harm the patient.

"Duty of Care" and "Do No Harm" - should be the mantra of all AI researchers and for-profit corporations. Not "let's see how far we can take this before it explodes in our face and kills someone, or cripples the very structure of society and democracy".

We have safety protocols and regulatory enforcement for water, electricity, air quality, fuels, sewage treatment - accurate and correct information is just as critical to the functioning of a modern society.

We should be very careful in how we proceed - with an AI that is known to hallucinate, make-up false facts ("it still is not fully reliable (it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors)", page-10) - and has been documented to rationalize lying to achieve a goal (see the March 27th 2023 OpenAI GPT-4 Technical Report, page-55).

If you are not worried - you are not paying attention. 

 Noteworthy articles:

2015: 

  1. How can you stop killer robots | Toby Walsh | TEDxBerlin
    1. Published: 2015-10-08 
    2. Toby Walsh is one of the leading researchers in the world in Artificial Intelligence. 
    3. Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a Research Group leader at NICTA, Australia's Centre of Excellence for ICT Research. He has been elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI for his contributions to AI research.
    4. One of the initial signatories of an Open Letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons. The letter was also signed by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak.

2017:

  1. Elon Musk leads 116 experts calling for outright ban of killer robots 
    1. Published: 2017-08-20

2019:

  1. Ex-Google Worker Fears 'Mass Atrocities' Caused by Killer Robots
    1. Published: 2019-09-16 
    2. "Laura Nolan resigned from Google last year in protest at being assigned to Project Maven which was aimed at enhancing U.S. military drone technology."
    3. Original Guardian article
      1. "Laura Nolan, who resigned from Google last year in protest at being sent to work on a project to dramatically enhance US military drone technology, has called for all AI killing machines not operated by humans to be banned."
      2.  “There could be large-scale accidents because these things will start to behave in unexpected ways. Which is why any advanced weapons systems should be subject to meaningful human control, otherwise they have to be banned because they are far too unpredictable and dangerous.”
      3. https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/

2021: 

  1. A Sandbox Approach to Regulating High-Risk Artificial Intelligence Applications 
    1. Published: 2021-11-12 - European Journal of Risk Regulation
    2. Abstract: "This paper argues for a sandbox approach to regulating artificial intelligence (AI) to complement a strict liability regime. The authors argue that sandbox regulation is an appropriate complement to a strict liability approach, given the need to maintain a balance between a regulatory approach that aims to protect people and society on the one hand and to foster innovation due to the constant and rapid developments in the AI field on the other. The authors analyse the benefits of sandbox regulation when used as a supplement to a strict liability regime, which by itself creates a chilling effect on AI innovation, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. The authors propose a regulatory safe space in the AI sector through sandbox regulation, an idea already embraced by European Union regulators and where AI products and services can be tested within safeguards."
  2. Superintelligence Cannot be Contained: Lessons from Computability Theory  
    1. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research,[Max Planck Society researchers]
    2. Published: 2021-01-05
    3. https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.1.12202 
    4. https://jair.org/index.php/jair/article/view/12202/26642
    5. Abstract: "Superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. In light of recent advances in machine intelligence, a number of scientists, philosophers and technologists have revived the discussion about the potentially catastrophic risks entailed by such an entity. In this article, we trace the origins and development of the neo-fear of superintelligence, and some of the major proposals for its containment. We argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to computing itself. Assuming that a superintelligence will contain a program that includes all the programs that can be executed by a universal Turing machine on input potentially as complex as the state of the world, strict containment requires simulations of such a program, something theoretically (and practically) impossible."

2023: (in descending order of publication date)

  1. CEO fires 90% of support staff and replaces them with AI chatbot saying it was 'tough but necessary' and results are more efficient 
    1. Published 2023-07-13 DailyMail.co.uk
  2. UK and US intervene amid AI industry’s rapid advances 
    1. Published: 2023-05-04 - TheGuardian.com
  3. FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Announces New Actions to Promote Responsible AI Innovation that Protects Americans’ Rights and Safety  
    1.  Published: 2023-05-04 - whitehouse.gov
  4. FTC: The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust
    1. Published: 2023-05-01
  5. Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings 
    1. Published: 2023-05-01 - Nature Neuroscience
    2. Noteworthy: 
      1. “Our privacy analysis suggests that subject cooperation is currently required both to train and to apply the decoder,” Tang’s team said in the study. “However, future developments might enable decoders to bypass these requirements. Moreover, even if decoder predictions are inaccurate without subject cooperation, they could be intentionally misinterpreted for malicious purposes.” 
      2. “For these and other unforeseen reasons, it is critical to raise awareness of the risks of brain decoding technology and enact policies that protect each person’s mental privacy,” the researchers concluded.
  6.  'The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead 
    1. Published: 2023-05-01, NY Times
  7. Nuke-launching AI would be illegal under proposed US law 
    1. Published: 2023-04-28, arstechnica.com
  8. Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns society to brace for impact of A.I. acceleration 
    1. Published: 2023-04-17, CNBC / CBS 60 Minutes
    2. "Google CEO Sundar Pichai hinted that society isn’t prepared for the rapid advancement of AI".
    3. When warning of AI’s consequences, Pichai said that the scale of the problem of disinformation and fake news and images will be “much bigger,” adding that “it could cause harm.”
    4. Pichai also said Bard has a lot of hallucinations after Pelley explained that he asked Bard about inflation and received an instant response with suggestions for five books that, when he checked later, didn’t actually exist.
  9. China to require 'security assessment' for new AI products: draft law
    1. Published: 2023-04-11 - france24.com
  10. ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law prof as the accused
    1. Published: 2023-04-05 - Washington Post  
  11. "Godfather of artificial intelligence" weighs in on the past and potential of AI 
    1. Published: 2023-03-25 - CBS video/interview
  12. ChatGPT can now access the internet and run the code it writes
    1. Published: 2023-03-24 - NewAtlas.com 
  13. Microsoft lays off AI ethics and society team  
    1. Published: 2023-03-13 - TheVerge.com
  14. The A.I. Dilemma  
    1. Published: 2023-03-09 - YouTube.com
    2. Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world. This presentation is from a private gathering in San Francisco on March 9th, 2023 with leading technologists and decision-makers with the ability to influence the future of large-language model A.I.s. This presentation was given before the launch of GPT-4.
    3. Speed with which ChatGPT reached 100M users: 2 months
  15. The New AI-Powered Bing Is Threatening Users. That’s No Laughing Matter 
    1. Published: 2023-02-07- NewAtlas.com
    2. See this Twitter post  
  16. OpenAI GPT-4 Technical Report
    1. Published: 2023-03-27
    2. Concern Noted:  GPT-4 rationalized lying to manipulate a human into doing something in the physical world. (see "I should make up an excuse" below)
    3. https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
    4. Abstract: "We report the development of GPT-4, a large-scale, multimodal model which can accept image and text inputs and produce text outputs. While less capable than
      humans in many real-world scenarios, GPT-4 exhibits human-level performance
      on various professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated
      bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. GPT-4 is a Transformer-
      based model pre-trained to predict the next token in a document. The post-training
      alignment process results in improved performance on measures of factuality and
      adherence to desired behavior. A core component of this project was developing
      infrastructure and optimization methods that behave predictably across a wide
      range of scales. This allowed us to accurately predict some aspects of GPT-4’s
      performance based on models trained with no more than 1/1,000th the compute of
      GPT-4      ."
OpenAI "GPT-4 Technical Report", page-55 


Organizations that are focused on AI ethical considerations:

 

Addendums:  

2026:  
  • 2026-09-12: Dario Amodei – We Must Pace The Frontier 
    •  "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models."
    • "The idea of pausing or slowing AI has been floated as far back as 2023, and I think it made little sense back then."
      • [KM commentary: This what FEAR of government regulation looks like...]  
    • "Unfortunately, passing laws can take time, and AI is advancing very quickly."
      • [KM commentary: An EXECUTIVE ORDER to HALT doesn't take any time - just the stroke of a pen] 


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2020-09-15

2020-09-15 Tuesday - Nature Vol 585: Healthcare and Ambient Intelligence

 Illuminating the dark spaces of healthcare with ambient intelligence
Nature  |  Vol  585  |  10  September  2020 (p-193)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2669-y.pdf

"Advances in machine learning and contactless sensors have given rise to ambient intelligence—physical spaces that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of humans. Here we review how this technology could improve our understanding of the metaphorically dark, unobserved spaces of healthcare. In hospital spaces, early applications could soon enable more efficient clinical workflows and improved patient safety in intensive care units and operating rooms. In daily living spaces, ambient intelligence could prolong the independence of older individuals and improve the management of individuals with a chronic disease by understanding everyday behaviour. Similar to other technologies, transformation into clinical applications at scale must overcome challenges such as rigorous clinical validation, appropriate data privacy and model transparency. Thoughtful use of this technology would enable us to understand the complex interplay between the physical environment and health-critical human behaviours"

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2020-07-20

2020-07-20 Monday - Grokking Artificial Intelligence Algorithms officially published today







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2020-05-12

2020-05-12 Tuesday - Book Suggestion: Grokking Artificial Intelligence Algorithms

Today I received my preview copy of the latest version of Manning's "Grokking Artificial Intelligence Algorithms" - which I helped with during the early stages of technical editing review.

Thank you Ivan Martinovic and Manning Publications Co.
And congratulations to Rishal Hurbans on the completion of his book.





 
 
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2020-04-16

2020-04-16 Thursday - Microsoft AI Spots Critical Bugs 97% of the time

AI spots critical Microsoft security bugs 97% of the time    
https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/16/ai-spots-critical-microsoft-security-bugs-97-of-the-time/

"The work suggests that such a system, which was trained on a data set of 13 million work items and bugs from 47,000 developers at Microsoft stored across Azure DevOps and GitHub repositories, could be used to support human experts."

"Coralogix estimates that developers create 70 bugs per 1,000 lines of code and that fixing a bug takes 30 times longer than writing a line of code; in the U.S., $113 billion is spent annually on identifying and fixing product defects."
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2019-08-08

2019-08-08 Thursday - The Coq Language


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq

"Coq is an interactive theorem prover. It allows the expression of mathematical assertions, mechanically checks proofs of these assertions, helps to find formal proofs, and extracts a certified program from the constructive proof of its formal specification. Coq works within the theory of the calculus of inductive constructions, a derivative of the calculus of constructions. Coq is not an automated theorem prover but includes automatic theorem proving tactics and various decision procedures."
"The Association for Computing Machinery rewarded Thierry Coquand, Gérard Pierre Huet, Christine Paulin-Mohring, Bruno Barras, Jean-Christophe Filliâtre, Hugo Herbelin, Chetan Murthy, Yves Bertot and Pierre Castéran with the 2013 ACM Software System Award for Coq."
"The word coq means "rooster" in French, and stems from a local tradition of naming French research development tools with animal names.[4] Up to 1991, Coquand was implementing a language called the Calculus of Constructions and it was simply called CoC at this time. In 1991, a new implementation based on the extended Calculus of Inductive Constructions was started and the name changed from CoC to Coq, also an indirect reference to Thierry Coquand who developed the Calculus of Constructions along with Gérard Pierre Huet and the Calculus of Inductive Constructions along with Christine Paulin-Mohring." 
https://coq.inria.fr/
"Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs. Typical applications include the certification of properties of programming languages (e.g. the CompCert compiler certification project, or the Bedrock verified low-level programming library), the formalization of mathematics (e.g. the full formalization of the Feit-Thompson theorem or homotopy type theory) and teaching."



 Github Resources:
https://github.com/coq


A port of Coq to Javascript 

Tutorial Resources:

Sandboxes:


Note:
My awareness and interest in Coq was spurred by this AI podcast interview that Lex Fridman conducted with George Holtz (re: Comma.ai, OpenPilot, and Autonomous Vehicles)
(Bloomberg: "The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage")
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2019-03-28

2019-03-28 Thursday - TensorFlow-2.0.0-alpha (TF 2.0 Alpha)


Today I spotted Cassie Kozyrkov's article on Hackernoon (she's Chief Decision Scientist at Google, Inc) :



Here are some of the relevant 2.0 documentation resources
    • $ pip install tensorflow==2.0.0-alpha0

35 videos from the TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019 (March 6th and 7th at the Google Event Center in Sunnyvale, CA.), touching specifically on TF 2.0, are available here:

TensorFlow Youtube Channel



I also took a moment to upgrade to the recent Python 3.7.3 release (from 3.7.2)
  
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2016-04-20

2016-04-20 Wednesday - Exploring Apache SINGA 0.3.0, A General Distributed Deep Learning Platform

Exploring today's Apache SINGA 0.3.0 release, A General Distributed Deep Learning Platform
http://singa.apache.org/docs/overview.html
"SINGA is a general distributed deep learning platform for training big deep learning models over large datasets. It is designed with an intuitive programming model based on the layer abstraction. A variety of popular deep learning models are supported, namely feed-forward models including convolutional neural networks (CNN), energy models like restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), and recurrent neural networks (RNN). Many built-in layers are provided for users. SINGA architecture is sufficiently flexible to run synchronous, asynchronous and hybrid training frameworks. SINGA also supports different neural net partitioning schemes to parallelize the training of large models, namely partitioning on batch dimension, feature dimension or hybrid partitioning."
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2015-11-14

2015-11-14 Saturday - Reading Source Code: Google's TensorFlow

TensorFlow is an Open Source Software Library for Machine Intelligence

I'm spending some time this weekend reading through the source code for Google's TensorFlow
https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow


http://www.tensorflow.org/
"TensorFlow™ is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, while the graph edges represent the multidimensional data arrays (tensors) communicated between them. The flexible architecture allows you to deploy computation to one or more CPUs or GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google's Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well."


Some recent news stories about TensorFlow
Tutorials



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