Welcome to this week's AIAW News on the Artificial Intelligence After Work Podcast. We're highlighting key AI developments reshaping our world. Prophetic AI introduces Morpheus-1, a device for inducing lucid dreams, while Neuralink's brain chip marks a breakthrough in neurological AI applications. Tesla's Full Self-Driving Beta update pushes autonomous driving forward. In Europe, the Weimar Triangle initiative signifies a collaborative effort in AI advancement. Google's innovations include the enhanced Bard chatbot and new music creation tools, expanding AI's creative capabilities. However, challenges surface with OpenAI's ChatGPT facing GDPR issues in Italy, underscoring the need for legal compliance in AI. Moreover, the spread of deepfake images of Taylor Swift on social media platforms raises urgent concerns about the ethical use of AI. These developments reflect AI's diverse impact, from technological innovation to ethical and legal considerations. Stay tuned for more AI insights and connect with us at www.aiawpodcast.com, or follow @aiawpodcast on Twitter.
Follow us on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiawpodcast
Welcome to this week's AIAW News on the Artificial Intelligence After Work Podcast. We're highlighting key AI developments reshaping our world. Prophetic AI introduces Morpheus-1, a device for inducing lucid dreams, while Neuralink's brain chip marks a breakthrough in neurological AI applications. Tesla's Full Self-Driving Beta update pushes autonomous driving forward. In Europe, the Weimar Triangle initiative signifies a collaborative effort in AI advancement. Google's innovations include the enhanced Bard chatbot and new music creation tools, expanding AI's creative capabilities. However, challenges surface with OpenAI's ChatGPT facing GDPR issues in Italy, underscoring the need for legal compliance in AI. Moreover, the spread of deepfake images of Taylor Swift on social media platforms raises urgent concerns about the ethical use of AI. These developments reflect AI's diverse impact, from technological innovation to ethical and legal considerations. Stay tuned for more AI insights and connect with us at www.aiawpodcast.com, or follow @aiawpodcast on Twitter.
Follow us on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiawpodcast
So time for a small middle break before we continue the discussion with Jesper Fredyksson about going from RAG to autonomous agents in some way. But before that, let's pick up some of the favorite news that we heard over the last week, and each one of us can choose a couple of topics. Who wants to go first, jesper, do you have a favorite news article that you want to?
Speaker 2:talk about. So I think I hinted towards in the beginning that I maybe stopped the brain imaging work prematurely. I've been following eagerly for many years now the mind reading AI story. Already in 2011, the first paper was released from a research group where they tried to reconstruct an image, or rather film, of what participants were seeing when they recorded fMRI scans. So they showed something to the participants and then they observed the activities in the voxels of the brain scan.
Speaker 1:Can you do that fMRI in real time? How did they do that?
Speaker 2:No, I think they did it. They probably recorded it and then they used it afterwards. You can do fMRI in real time, but the question is what you do with it. I don't think you can get the results and work with it. It takes some time.
Speaker 2:Anyway, this is a long ago, this paper, but what caught my attention this week was something that looks very weird. It's called Morpheus, which is a transformer model for a specific purpose that has to do with brain imaging. It's made by a startup company called Prophetic and I have a very overloaded video where they describe this. It's, in a way, very American and very over the top. They talk about lucid dreaming. It's a device that is made for getting you in a state where you have lucid dreaming.
Speaker 2:I have my doubts that it's going to work, but the underpinning of this is like a trend that's been going for a long time this mind-reading thing. What they're adding in this product is something that would be super fun to have worked on if I was still in the brain imaging game Something that can while you go to sleep, you're supposed to wear this headband. It can register what your activities in the brain are. It uses EEG, and already that is questionable how well it performs fMRI definitely, but EEG a little bit shaky. Then it reads off this activity and tries to steer it towards activities that look like lucid dreaming.
Speaker 1:How do they steer it? They put electrical impulses somehow.
Speaker 2:They use a new technology that I haven't heard about before. That's called ultrasound. It's something I'm forgetting. It's called, let's say I think it's called transcranial ultrasound, something. I don't think that they will succeed with this, but I still think it's going to be an interesting story to follow Is it ultrasonic sound that they actually use to modify the brain waves somehow yes, Supposedly they modify.
Speaker 2:There are other experiments with this where they are trying to do things like cure. I'm not sure if they really work, but there's something about curing addictions using this technology. For me it's a new thing. I've heard about transcranial magnetic stimulation before, where you induce currents. This is a new thing. I hadn't heard about it before. It's going to be interesting to follow. I don't believe in it, but I believe in a lot of it.
Speaker 1:You think it's fake, don't you?
Speaker 2:No, I don't think it's fake. I think they're really trying to do this. It seems like it follows some kind of trajectory. I buy into what they're saying, but I don't think it's solid enough to work to really put you in a lucid dreaming state.
Speaker 1:I mean, I've been to meditations, you know, and I think you know, all this kind of interesting technology and trying to understand your own brain. It's really interesting, and perhaps we should describe what lucid dreaming really is. That's true, yeah, you have a good definition or so.
Speaker 2:lucid dreaming is when you're, when you're sleeping and you're aware that you're dreaming, you have some conscience in your dream that this is a dream. If you, if you, if you get to the, to the stage where you realize that you're dreaming, then you can sometimes also control the dream. Have you had a lucid dream? Yeah, me too. It's very cool when you, when you get into that stage. But it would and it would be cool if, if you could use a device to to control it.
Speaker 4:And is there a thing here where you know sometimes it feels like the human brain. We need to process stuff in when we sleep or you need to sleep on that.
Speaker 2:Are you talking about the meaning of sleep?
Speaker 4:No, I'm actually. I was going down the path how we lose a dream and potentially can be useful as a way to process complex topics yeah, maybe.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think it's a way to try to understand yourself a bit and get a closer understanding of your mind.
Speaker 4:Perhaps some thoughts or is it gimmicky or is it useful?
Speaker 2:Are we talking about lucid dreaming? Yeah, I think it's. I say it as a fun pastime. I don't think it's particularly revelatory revelatory to me. I don't think it brings any new insights about me. Maybe that's just me. I think it's. It's. It's like a good VR show in a way.
Speaker 4:I'm not sure. I'm thinking that I'm processing stuff sometimes, that maybe you can unlock processing power in your brain.
Speaker 1:I think we can all agree that if you don't sleep, you're going to go crazy, very, very and die very quickly.
Speaker 2:Sleep is one thing, but the dreaming is totally different.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to get the point Then. So then the question is really can we in some way start to sleep in a more efficient way, if you think about sleeping as some kind of defragmentation of the brain or some kind of way to reset the brain to make sure it's operating properly, but then have some kind of more conscious part of it? Because this is really moving between the land of being unconscious and being conscious and finding the intersection of the tween Exactly, and that is kind of an interesting land where I think you're trying to make sleep more useful, exactly.
Speaker 2:So how can I?
Speaker 4:get to 23 hours work. All right, let's go for the next one. This is awesome.
Speaker 1:That's very cool, that AI can actually potentially get you more access to lucid dreaming, perhaps even control it Awesome. Should I go or should you want? I have two very small stories actually.
Speaker 4:I have one small story and one which we could discuss. I can start with a small story and then you can do yours, and then we'll see. Did you all see Elon Musk? Do you all see that there was some announcement around Neuralink?
Speaker 1:I thought about that when I did this more first time.
Speaker 4:I think that sort of couldn't. You know, we're still in brain land now. But so Neuralink, they started human trials and they have some kind of first results or whatever. That's what I know.
Speaker 1:I think it's a fairly big topic the first human implant and the person is now recovering from that surgery.
Speaker 2:Do we know who it was? Was it somebody who had disabilities?
Speaker 4:or why the storytelling has been to cure Parkinson's or different things. That's the storytelling of course You're focusing on.
Speaker 2:How can we make people who are I think what they said about this was that the purpose of this implant was to control a cursor.
Speaker 4:Yes, on on the experiment. Yeah, that was the experiment, but but the bigger picture storytelling, that's what I was referring to, you know to. To someone who is cannot walk, can we make them walk again? Someone that this kind of spinal cord injury they cannot really move their limbs in some way and for them to start but of course this is, this is a big picture topic where, if you figure this out, the uses you know goes in many directions. This particular one was steer cursor, I think it was.
Speaker 1:I mean it's a really big milestone. I mean they we've seen the videos of the pigs that had the implants and the apes and not that. Now it's actually the first human that have a ship in the brain that they can read and control the brain with. It's a super big milestone, I think. Yeah, we'll see what happens with it.
Speaker 4:But we'll see when we look back at this mind capsule. Yes, kevin, so that was that, was it Okay?
Speaker 1:okay, let's see one. Should I take a quick one just to continue on in a mask with Tesla, and they actually released the big release now, the version 12 of their full set driving. Yeah, so now it's released, not to everyone, of course, but to selected set of better drivers. And the big news with the version 12, which is this is is.
Speaker 1:It is the first end to end neural network version. So before they just had neural networks for the perception part of the full set driving, not for the control or planning part. That was hard coded with rules saying if there is a traffic sign that is green, then accelerate, otherwise do not. So they had humans adding these kind of rules, hand coded rules. Now they removed them. Now they have networks that control both the perception, the planning and the control and that opened up so many new possibilities because now you don't need to annotate anymore saying this is a lane in the streets, this is a traffic sign, this is a human or pedestrian on the street, this is a car. You don't need the whole object detection kind of annotation that otherwise is necessary. It just can learn end to end, from braking, accelerating, steering to the sensory input.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and of course, one of the key unique things has, of course, been the smartness of Tesla, you know, recording and building up the training data sets, that is more training data than anyone. The normal is even close by orders of magnitude by orders of magnitude, put them in a position where this is liable.
Speaker 2:Do they do the annotation automatically, or is that out of the picture?
Speaker 1:I think it's out of the picture but I think they start with still having the old models that have the annotations in them and that's like an initialization of the other models. So they don't have to train from scratch, because I think that would take too long, but at least they have a starting point. Then they just let it train end to end without having the annotations.
Speaker 4:And yeah, we talked about this before and it is a fairly big deal.
Speaker 1:It is a really big deal.
Speaker 4:Interesting.
Speaker 1:And I guess it will take some time before it catch up, because the problem with this is, if you want to control it, it's really hard now Before you could go in and say that now you know if you see a dog, then run it over. If you see humans, then stop. Now you can't do that anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I was thinking when I was asking about the annotations.
Speaker 4:I don't know the details on this level. You know how it really works.
Speaker 1:I mean hard coded, then you can simply add the rules. But in your network you can't go in and change the parameters one by one. I mean it's too hard. So the only way to change the parameters then for the control part if you should break or not is really to add data to it. Yeah, and they still don't know if it will work or not. So it's much harder to control a system that you can't add hard coded rules to.
Speaker 2:Do you know if they use synthetic data or if it's only real data that they're working with?
Speaker 4:I don't know the details.
Speaker 1:I'm sure they use some synthetic data as well and simulate the shit of this all the time I would be surprised, but I don't know.
Speaker 2:I was talking to a company, Swedish company, who does synthetic data and I think they did specifically for the car industry. They had some I don't remember the name of the company, but I remember seeing a video that they generated. They rendered photo realistic scenes where somebody in a car stretches over to fetch a mobile phone and then jiggles a little bit with the steering wheel just to see what happens in a car when you do things that you're not supposed to do. I think it was cool.
Speaker 1:Did you have one more? I have one more. I think it's interesting given all the super election year that we will have in 2024. And, of course, we had the big election in Argentina in October and it was so much generative AI and fake images and fake videos People putting the opposing candidate in I guess zombie picture and themselves with a teddy bear.
Speaker 1:It was like a weird thing and of course this will be a very interesting year with all the elections, and not the least in US and now it was a fake Joe Biden robocall. Basically, they had an AI that called home to citizens in US sounding like Joe Biden. I can't really make the Biden's voice.
Speaker 3:You know how he sounds.
Speaker 1:I guess you should be sluddering a bit with the voices. Oh sorry, I shouldn't. Anyway, it sounded like real Biden and it was telling voters not to go and vote in New Hampshire primary election.
Speaker 2:Because the real election was later, so you're not supposed to vote. It would just help.
Speaker 1:Donald Trump if they went to vote. So don't do it. And it is like crazy. I listened to actually the phone call. They had a clip of it. You can listen to it. It was actually kind of poorly done. It was very distorted, very noisy kind of sound, but it sounded like Joe Biden and it's telling people not to go to vote.
Speaker 2:Did you hear what happened after that? So they figured out that it was the company behind this. Robocole was 11 Labs, I mean creating it created like that. And then they talked to 11 Labs and they told Suspected yes, suspected.
Speaker 1:11 Labs does so much better than this, but okay.
Speaker 2:At least what I heard. So they found out that it was through 11 Labs, and then they reached out to them and they found out who it was.
Speaker 1:Really. Who was it then?
Speaker 2:I don't know, that was not in the story, but I think it's interesting if we're at that stage where people do this fake news. They use AI to produce fake things but we're actually catching up with it.
Speaker 1:I saw this story that I read that they will certainly investigate this and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law or something, because it's clearly illegal to try to influence the democracy and voting in this way. So yeah, interesting.
Speaker 4:I have one more On a different note To end this.
Speaker 1:I mean it's the first one of the bigger one. I'm sure you will see so much more of this coming year and they used all the different variations on this.
Speaker 4:Here you have a call not to vote. Okay, what else can you do to create mayhem.
Speaker 2:There's so many variations.
Speaker 4:On a different note, there was an announcement on the 23rd of January that Germany, france and Poland announced the Weimar Triangle for artificial intelligence. The Weimar Triangle was first coined and used between these three states in 1991. And literally that was Poland joining EU and France and Germany stepping up to really help them accelerate to come into the western standards and all this. And now they are joining forces, literally going back, and now Poland is not sort of the state they're helping, so now they're more in equal terms. But they said the core idea is, like three leading members that has formed a political alliance to push for better coordination between national plans and investment in artificial intelligence with EU policies relating to the sector. So of course we are doing so much things in EU level in one way, sort of the bureaucratic way, with horizon, whatever it is called.
Speaker 4:But I think this is an interesting topic. If we want to stand up and be competitive in Europe, there needs to be some real hard work and money and focus. If you contrast how China is doing things or how the US is doing things, so will we see more of this. I think this is an interesting angle that the states are sort of starting to. Really Can it be done through states? I'm not sure. I really not sure. That's what I thought was interesting, right.
Speaker 2:I mean, mistral is super interesting in this respect. There's finally a European company that does generative AI, and they really have to forefront. I mean, there's so many of these government initiatives that seems to not do so much, or what do you think? Maybe this is more your game.
Speaker 1:Okay, I had one last story, but I was yesterday at this conference in Sweden called AI for the good of nations.
Speaker 3:Good of the nation, which is basically Sweden, not nations.
Speaker 1:Yes, good of the Swedish nation, but the core story and it was a story first in the Swedish Dagens Nyheterna also collected to this, saying lagom is not enough for Swedish AI, or lagom is a Swedish word which I it's hard to translate to English, but it's basically saying you know, being halfway through or doing it semi good enough is just good enough.
Speaker 4:Yeah, good enough is not enough good enough is not good enough.
Speaker 1:I guess that's a great surprise. And then we have the, the minister of digitalization there, erik Slotner. We had the CIO of Estonia, lukas, and so many other. The AI commission and I spoke a bit as well and we were trying to see, you know, for one, to recognize that Sweden actually has fallen behind a bit. We previously, like 10 years ago, was really leading or was in at least the top in some aspects when it comes to digitalization, but now, when it comes to AI, we are trailing a bit behind, and that is if you compare to other you know countries in the Nordics and Europe. So even in in the Europe, we can say we are average. Basically, we are not, certainly not in need, but we are average or a bit above average. If you then think that Europe on its side is behind US and China, then we're, compared to the rest of the world, even further behind a bit, and I think it was really good to hear that also.
Speaker 1:The minister recognized that and said this is not okay, we should fix this and for me and for all the other people that are that are interested in these fields and believe AI will do society so much good. It was really pleasant to hear that they all recognized this more AI engineers yes, more AI engineers for the world.
Speaker 4:But the interesting topic is, I think, back to to the core question is this a state matter or is it? What is the state matter?
Speaker 2:in this, and I think that's the core crux here, what can and what should the state you know should the state become a startup?
Speaker 4:should the state become a hyperscaler? I do not think it's about that at all.
Speaker 1:It's about creating the environments isn't that the state's purpose, though?
Speaker 4:not to create the startup but to create the environment. Yeah, but that's versa.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so it is a state matter, so I so I question, or what they should do exactly so that that was that would be my.
Speaker 4:I'm on the other side here. That's it's definitely a state matter, but not the not.
Speaker 1:But it's about what is the state matter is the interesting question really, and I shouldn't linger on this topic, but still because I got this question so so often and some people ask you know, are the small country of Sweden, what can you ever do? But then I, you know if you compare to China or US or whatnot, but I think you know. I would like to quote. I think it was Eric Schmidt when he was leading Google.
Speaker 1:That said we don't fear the enterprises. We don't fear the apples or the Microsoft of the world. The one we do fear is the innovative startup, small startup that have the really innovative idea that we haven't thought about. That can really revolutionize how we're going to use the world and in that sense, a small country like Sweden can, if we are really innovative, make a big change so I don't think we should, you know, count size necessarily as the the most important thing no, but.
Speaker 4:And then back to my the news tour on the Weimar triangle. Are we better off used to being nimble and just focusing on Sweden as a nation state, or do we want to collaborate with Norway and Denmark? There is a logic behind that argument. That could be that language is so profound in this world that there is an argument here that the way we are using English language is, by the whole, large language models towards certain cultures. So if you really want to have something that is AI for good, that sort of works for us it's super important, most likely to have the strength of your languages as part of this. There are many angles here. Are we better off doing it alone, or are we better off doing it with our Scandinavian friends, or should we tag along with Germany? Is EU the right place?
Speaker 1:Questions.
Speaker 4:Should I ask Shatibiti? Should I ask Yesche? Good, I think it's enough.
Speaker 1:OK, should we move back to no?
Speaker 4:Go on.
Speaker 3:First a little bit of comment. It's super exciting to hear that that event happened yesterday. Maybe they should listen to episode 01 of the podcast three years ago. We have been discussing this for three years. We brought so many people here politicians and etc. To discuss just that and how we can find solutions. Maybe they should listen to this. They should have, but that is another story for another day. Yeah, coming back Very few small news. This is the freshest one. It's only six hours old, and that is that Google basically announced today that Bar Chat is not powered by the Gemini Pro model globally to support with over 40 languages.
Speaker 3:They also announced quite a number of new inventions, including I don't see Swedish there, though, of course, because Sweden, as you mentioned, is a small country. They just started talking about how they should take this seriously. Being a bit sarcastic here, but I think this is only part of the languages, and it's 14 total, so I'm sure Swedish is here as well, I don't understand.
Speaker 2:Wasn't Gemini Pro powered all along?
Speaker 1:And Bar was powered by Paul too before. Now it's switched to Gemini. Yes, gemini was announced in December.
Speaker 3:No, no, gemini was announced in December with the story when they were marketing wise.
Speaker 3:So now it's that in Gemini Pro, they also announced the update on the music effects. So now, basically, you can release videos up to 70 seconds in length and music loops, and this is actually making quite a lot of noise in the music industry, because now you can actually do quite a lot of new loops and etc. So those ones that are working as a freelancer making jingles Goodbye. The interesting another story was actually regarding OpenAI. You remember that Italy forbid OpenAI chat GPT at the beginning, and since then they opened it, but they have been investigating actually how to catch them in court. So finally now they have sent like a cease to disease almost type of a letter where they are saying that the OpenAI is working against the GDPR in Europe. Yes, but they don't.
Speaker 3:Actually they haven't, if I understood correctly, they haven't defined on which basically grounds they are convicting OpenAI for that, but they demanded answer and of course, openai said like, oh, we are always working towards that, but as you can see in this text, actually it's like most likely it's about the data that they have been gathering, which is crap from internet. It includes also personal data of individuals, and then there is also a violation in the output, which is basically hallucination. There is a concern about like what is called, like I think it was child violation or something like that. I'm not sure about that. So, yes, also, flag child safety is a problem or whatever. So they have some explanation to do and I think eventually they will get fined as well, because we in Europe we are so good in collecting money. It's like the kings in the past.
Speaker 1:That's how we survive. We sue all the big tech giants. Yeah, I mean, why should you innovate?
Speaker 4:Like the European business owner right.
Speaker 2:Why you should innovate where you can just block it.
Speaker 3:You know somebody needs to be a policeman. You know if everybody parking on the wrong street you can actually punish and get money from that as well.
Speaker 1:I mean, imagine you know, one part of GDPR is the right to be forgotten, so if someone comes you know remember Spotify days you know some person came remove everything about me. And of course it's super hard to do that, even for Spotify, even though it didn't have an AI model to remove it from? Well, the part of it. But anyway, how should Shet or Open AI, remove people, personal information or a specific person Inside the parameter space of?
Speaker 3:almost impossible. It is yeah, they also if you're dead. We didn't cover on the last episode, but actually there was a discussion about the New York Times, you know like.
Speaker 2:Lawson and etc.
Speaker 3:And Sam Altman went out so like and just frankly said like how do you think is going to be possible to build a large language model of this side without actually using any, yeah, intellectual property data? It's impossible. Then you will have like completely different and if in it basically it's a questions like If we are going towards artificial general intelligence and large language models of this size, you cannot build that without basically having all the human knowledge gathered into one. It's impossible, right?
Speaker 1:I wish I'm a word to sue me because they force me in my human brain to move all information.
Speaker 3:But yes, perfect, yeah, and if I don't?
Speaker 1:do that, I get sued 4% of my revenue.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean.
Speaker 3:When you have neurolinked Working on that and the last, basically to finish with the what the what is called under, started. There are different ways, how to do defects. So somebody this Wednesday, this was the biggest, actually news. So, as you know, taylor Swift Ended up in the news for a wrong reason this time. So somebody has produced like a number of explicit pictures of her and this route this over social media channel, especially especially X and, I Think, reddit and etc.
Speaker 3:So now, all of this social media this was the interesting part all the social media basically removed or cancelled, or basically, yeah, canceled all the, the searches for such pictures, and now they don't know exactly where this is coming from, the pictures, because probably it's the other stable diffusion, or Dali, or mid-journey, one of them for sure, and they will probably find it if they want to. But it rises a concern. So how far we need to go in order for us to start Thinking about like, okay, maybe there is a Miss use of this, and I don't know if you know, if you have worked with the mid-journey version six. Actually, nudity is back, yeah, so it's very, very, very interesting, because, even if you don't want it, at some point of time it just pops out. It's very interesting, interesting. I think it's scary because at some point of time it was basically at the beginning it was like that. Then it was cancelled, now the way a six, it came back as well, so interesting. So this is basically for me very short and sweet, so let's continue.