Google I/O is all about AI
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Google presented numerous AI innovations at its I/O developer conference. CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted the company’s long-standing investment in this area. The term “Gemini”, the name of Google’s own AI platform, was mentioned particularly frequently. Gemini 1.5 Pro with a context window of up to two million tokens will now be available to developers and cloud customers. The efficient Gemini 1.5 Flash variant is intended to reduce costs.
The video AI Veo competes with OpenAI’s Sora and generates videos over a minute long. The image generator Imagen was introduced in version 3. With AI Overview, the search receives AI-generated summaries above the results. Project Astra bundles the development of AI agents that should be accessible via smartphones.
Visual search is also being expanded to process videos as input and answer related questions. According to Liz Reid, Head of Search, Google will in the future take on a variety of tasks such as searching, simplifying, researching and planning.
Desktop app for ChatGPT first for Mac only
OpenAI announced as part of the Spring Update that it will release a native ChatGPT application for the Mac desktop, with the Windows version to follow later. The app will be distributed to the first users with a ChatGPT Plus subscription over the next few weeks and will be available via the chatbot’s web interface. It allows access to the AI chatbot using a key combination and accepts text input as well as screenshots, files, photos and voice input.
During the presentation, OpenAI demonstrated how the app can assist with programming by explaining and further processing code. At the same time, the company is revamping its web interface with a new home screen and an improved message display. The iOS version of ChatGPT already supports GPT-4o, but does not yet conform to the new design. Currently, OpenAI is slowly distributing access to the Mac app to selected users.
Sutskever leaves OpenAI
OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT and GPT-4, is facing personnel changes at the highest level. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist, announced his departure to pursue a personally meaningful project. Jan Leike, a researcher for AI security, also announced his resignation without giving any further reasons.
Sutskever and Leike worked on security concepts for controlling a potentially dangerous superintelligence. Sutskever’s successor is Jakub Pachocki, who previously led important projects such as GPT-4.
CEO Sam Altman, who was unexpectedly fired at the end of 2022 and later reinstated, expressed his regret about Sutskever’s departure in a statement. However, he is confident that OpenAI, under the new scientific leadership, will continue to advance the development of safe and useful general artificial intelligence (AGI).
Apple releases updates to Logic Pro with lots of AI
Apple has presented the new versions Logic Pro for iPad 2 and Logic Pro for Mac 11 with several AI functions. The session players are virtually generated drummers, keyboardists and bassists who analyze a vocal track and create appropriate accompaniment. The game can be customized by the user with various settings.
The Stem Splitter makes it possible to remix recordings of live concerts and remove individual elements. The AI separates vocals, drums, bass and other instruments. This allows the volume of guitars to be reduced while the rest of the music remains unchanged. Extracting vocal tracks and combining them with AI-generated accompaniment is also possible.
Other new features include improvements to studio assistance, a global chord track and ChromaGlow for adding analog sound effects. The updates require at least the A12 Bionic chip and iPadOS 17.4 or macOS 13.5. Logic Pro for iPad costs 4.99 euros per month or 49 euros annually, the Mac version costs 229.99 euros.
Recursion accelerates drug development with BioHive-2
The biopharmaceutical company Recursion wants to significantly advance drug discovery. It also has the most powerful supercomputer in the pharmaceutical industry, BioHive-2, put into operation. The system ranks 35th on the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
BioHive-2 is equipped with 504 Nvidia H100 GPUs and achieves an AI performance of 2 exaflops. This means it outperforms its predecessor BioHive-1 five times. AI is expected to drastically shorten the years of development of new active ingredients, which normally requires millions of laboratory experiments.
“With AI in use today, we can achieve 80 percent of the value with 40 percent of the lab work, and this ratio will only improve in the future,” said Ben Mabey, CTO of Recursion. However, biology is incredibly complex, so it will take years until this approach develops its full potential.
“But looking back, people will realize that this was a real turning point in healthcare,” Mabey said.
Better understand the function of the hippocampus through an AI model
Researchers at Columbia University and Google DeepMind have developed a deep learning model that not only solves tasks, but also predicts changes it causes in the environment. This predictive learning accelerated the learning process and helped the model adapt to new goals more flexibly.
According to the team, they showed up Similarities between the activity patterns in the AI model’s prediction module and the hippocampus of animals. Functional alternatives to so-called location cells were formed in the AI network, which become active at certain positions in space – only in this case in virtual space. The results suggest that predictive learning may be a key mechanism by which the hippocampus provides useful representations to other brain areas without directly generating action sequences or supporting planning processes.
The study shows how deep learning systems can serve as a model for the interaction of different brain regions. The findings could also inspire new approaches to more efficient machine learning and more flexible AI.
How intelligent is artificial intelligence actually? What consequences does generative AI have for our work, our leisure time and society? In Heise’s “AI Update” we, together with The Decoder, bring you updates on the most important AI developments every weekday. On Fridays we examine the different aspects of the AI revolution with experts.
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