Welcome to our regular column on the important things to see and do for the ANZ startup community, brought to you by the director of the Spark Festival, Maxine Sherrin. If you’d like to know more, sign up to the Weekly Sparks, Maxine’s roundup of all that’s on in Australian tech and startups, which comes out… Read more »
Debates about AI often characterise it as a technology that has come to compete with human intelligence. Indeed, one of the most widely pronounced fears is that AI may achieve human-like intelligence and render humans obsolete in the process. However, one of the world’s top AI scientists is now describing AI as a new form… Read more »
Turing Award winner and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has resigned from his position with Google in order to speak more openly about the dangers of artificial intelligence, raising questions about whether tech giants have silenced the people most qualified to inform the public about the emerging technology’s effects. In 2012, Hinton and two of his students, Ilya Sutskever… Read more »
Throughout history, war has been irrevocably changed by the advent of new technologies. Historians of war have identified several technological revolutions. The first was the invention of gunpowder by people in ancient China. It gave us muskets, rifles, machine guns and, eventually, all manner of explosive ordnance. It’s uncontroversial to claim gunpowder completely transformed how… Read more »
On November 30 2022, OpenAI launched the AI chatbot ChatGTP, making the latest generation of AI technologies widely available. In the few months since then, we have seen Italy ban ChatGTP over privacy concerns, leading technology luminaries calling for a pause on AI systems development, and even prominent researchers saying we should be prepared to… Read more »
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ever more prevalent in our lives. It’s no longer confined to certain industries or research institutions; AI is now for everyone. It’s hard to dodge the deluge of AI content being produced, and harder yet to make sense of the many terms being thrown around. But we can’t have conversations… Read more »
Welcome to our regular column on the important things to see and do for the ANZ startup community, brought to you by the director of the Spark Festival, Maxine Sherrin. She picks out 3 things worth putting in the diary for the week ahead. If you’d like to know more, sign up to the Weekly Sparks,… Read more »
Each day, messages from Nigerian princes, peddlers of wonder drugs and promoters of can’t-miss investments choke email inboxes. Improvements to spam filters only seem to inspire new techniques to break through the protections. Now, the arms race between spam blockers and spam senders is about to escalate with the emergence of a new weapon: generative… Read more »
Rampant misuse of AI voice generation is stirring fear and speculation across multiple industries, as the rapidly developing technology spurs increasing cases of imitation, political deepfakes and security disruption. Five years on from the now-infamous PSA clip showing a deepfake of US president Barack Obama forewarning the dangers of misinformation due to burgeoning artificial intelligence… Read more »
An Australian council mayor may become the first person in the world to sue AI platform ChatGPT for defamation over false claims he was imprisoned over a bribery scandal. The mayor of Hepburn Shire in Victoria, Brian Hood, discovered late last year that artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT was incorrectly claiming that he had pleaded guilty… Read more »
Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA) are shaking up the waste management game by deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in rubbish bins to keep tabs on public bin collections. The tech will be used to predict which spots generate more garbage so authorities can plan how frequently public bins should be emptied. UniSA PhD… Read more »
Venture Science is a practice for founding and building new companies with designed advantage at the start. We’ve done this a lot at Main Sequence to create companies like v2food, Samsara Eco, Eden Brew, Endua and Quasar Sat. I’ve been using Chat GPT-4 to help me imagine new companies. Here’s how you can too. #1… Read more »
Last week, artificial intelligence pioneers and experts urged major AI labs to immediately pause the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. An open letter penned by the Future of Life Institute cautioned that AI systems with “human-competitive intelligence” could become a major threat to humanity. Among the risks,… Read more »
Is it time to put the brakes on the development of artificial intelligence (AI)? If you’ve quietly asked yourself that question, you’re not alone. In the past week, a host of AI luminaries signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of more powerful models than GPT-4; European researchers called for… Read more »
Recent public interest in tools like ChatGPT has raised an old question in the artificial intelligence community: is artificial general intelligence (in this case, AI that performs at human level) achievable? An online preprint this week has added to the hype, suggesting the latest advanced large language model, GPT-4, is at the early stages of… Read more »
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