Brent Ellman – Lifeboat News: The Blog https://lifeboat.com/blog Safeguarding Humanity Tue, 10 Oct 2023 01:23:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.1 Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/blowback-how-israel-went-from-helping-create-hamas-to-bombing-it https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/blowback-how-israel-went-from-helping-create-hamas-to-bombing-it#respond Tue, 10 Oct 2023 01:23:30 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/blowback-how-israel-went-from-helping-create-hamas-to-bombing-it

“This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a ” counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as ” a creature of Israel.”)

The Israeli government gave me a budget, the retired brigadier general confessed, and the military government gives to the mosques.

Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious… More.


What do you know about Hamas?

That it’s sworn to destroy Israel? That it’s a terrorist group, proscribed both by the United States and the European Union? That it rules Gaza with an iron fist? That it’s killed hundreds of innocent Israelis with rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks?

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Musicgen Streaming by sanchit-gandhi https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/musicgen-streaming-by-sanchit-gandhi https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/musicgen-streaming-by-sanchit-gandhi#respond Mon, 09 Oct 2023 20:29:46 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/musicgen-streaming-by-sanchit-gandhi

“Stream the outputs of the MusicGen text-to-music model by playing the generated audio as soon as the first chunk is ready.”


Discover amazing ML apps made by the community.

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You can now use the DALL-E 3 AI image generator inside Bing Chat https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/you-can-now-use-the-dall-e-3-ai-image-generator-inside-bing-chat https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/you-can-now-use-the-dall-e-3-ai-image-generator-inside-bing-chat#respond Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:23:30 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/you-can-now-use-the-dall-e-3-ai-image-generator-inside-bing-chat

The image generator inside the AI-powered Bing Chat is getting a big upgrade today: Microsoft announced that OpenAI’s latest DALL-E 3 model is now available to all Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator users. It has been rolling out over the last week or so, first to Bing Enterprise users and then to Bing Image Creator, but now it’s open to everyone.

Bing is getting DALL-E 3 access even before OpenAI’s own ChatGPT does — that’s scheduled to happen this month, but only for paying users. Microsoft is likely to be the most popular image generating tool for a while.

“Microsoft is planning to use DALL-E tech in more than just Bing, too. It’s working on an AI image creation tool in the Paint app called Paint Cocreator, for instance, which will bring the DALL-E model right into Windows.”


OpenAI’s latest image creation tool is supposed to be more creative and more realistic — and it’ll finally understand your prompt.

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Scaling GAIA-1: 9-billion parameter generative world model for autonomous driving https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/scaling-gaia-1-9-billion-parameter-generative-world-model-for-autonomous-driving https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/scaling-gaia-1-9-billion-parameter-generative-world-model-for-autonomous-driving#respond Wed, 04 Oct 2023 18:25:11 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/scaling-gaia-1-9-billion-parameter-generative-world-model-for-autonomous-driving

GAIA-1 is a cutting-edge generative world model built for autonomous driving. A world model learns representations of the environment and its future dynamics, providing a structured understanding of the surroundings that can be leveraged for making informed decisions when driving. Predicting future events is a fundamental and critical aspect of autonomous systems. Accurate future prediction enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate and plan their actions, enhancing safety and efficiency on the road. Incorporating world models into driving models yields the potential to enable them to understand human decisions better and ultimately generalise to more real-world situations.

GAIA-1 is a model that leverages video, text and action inputs to generate realistic driving videos and offers fine-grained control over ego-vehicle behaviour and scene features. Due to its multi-modal nature, GAIA-1 can generate videos from many prompt modalities and combinations.


Examples of types of prompts that GAIA-1 can use to generate videos. GAIA-1 can generate videos by performing the future rollout starting from a video prompt. These future rollouts can be further conditioned on actions to influence particular behaviours of the ego-vehicle (e.g. steer left), or by text to drive a change in some aspects of the scene (e.g. change the colour of the traffic light). For speed and curvature, we condition GAIA-1 by passing the sequence of future speed and/or curvature values. GAIA-1 can also generate realistic videos from text prompts, or by simply drawing samples from its prior distribution (fully unconditional generation).

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AI is getting better at hurricane forecasting https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/ai-is-getting-better-at-hurricane-forecasting https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/ai-is-getting-better-at-hurricane-forecasting#respond Wed, 04 Oct 2023 18:24:16 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/ai-is-getting-better-at-hurricane-forecasting

Hurricane Lee wasn’t bothering anyone in early September, churning far out at sea somewhere between Africa and North America. A wall of high pressure stood in its westward path, poised to deflect the storm away from Florida and in a grand arc northeast. Heading where, exactly? It was 10 days out from the earliest possible landfall—eons in weather forecasting—but meteorologists at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, or ECMWF, were watching closely. The tiniest uncertainties could make the difference between a rainy day in Scotland or serious trouble for the US Northeast.

Typically, weather forecasters would rely on models of atmospheric physics to make that call. This time, they had another tool: a new generation of AI-based weather models developed by chipmaker Nvidia, Chinese tech giant Huawei, and Google’s AI unit DeepMind.

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National Security Agency is starting an artificial intelligence security center https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/national-security-agency-is-starting-an-artificial-intelligence-security-center https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/national-security-agency-is-starting-an-artificial-intelligence-security-center#respond Wed, 04 Oct 2023 18:24:06 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/national-security-agency-is-starting-an-artificial-intelligence-security-center

The — a crucial mission as AI capabilities are increasingly acquired, developed and integrated into U.S. defense and intelligence systems, the agency’s outgoing director announced Thursday.

Army Gen. Paul Nakasone said the center would be incorporated into the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, where it works with private industry and international partners to harden the U.S. defense-industrial base against threats from adversaries led by China and Russia.

“We maintain an advantage in AI in the United States today. That AI advantage should not be taken for granted,” Nakasone said at the National Press Club, emphasizing the threat from Beijing in particular.”


The National Security Agency is starting an artificial intelligence security center — a crucial mission as AI capabilities are increasingly acquired, developed and integrated into U.S. defense and intelligence systems.

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Archaeologists unearth oldest known wooden structure in the world https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/archaeologists-unearth-oldest-known-wooden-structure-in-the-world https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/archaeologists-unearth-oldest-known-wooden-structure-in-the-world#respond Tue, 03 Oct 2023 19:23:48 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/archaeologists-unearth-oldest-known-wooden-structure-in-the-world

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure, and it’s almost half a million years old.

The simple structure — found along a riverbank in Zambia — is made up of two interlocking logs, with a notch deliberately crafted into the upper piece to allow them to fit together at right angles, according to a new study of cut marks made by stone tools.

The earliest known wood artifact is a 780,000-year-old fragment of polished plank found at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, while the oldest wooden tools for foraging and hunting on record — unearthed in Europe — date back about 400,000 years. It’s thought that Neanderthals made structures from bones or stalactites around 175,000 years ago.


Researchers have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure in Zambia, and it’s almost half a million years old, according to a new study.

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🧠 The brain — the last fortress of humanity https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/%f0%9f%a7%a0-the-brain-the-last-fortress-of-humanity https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/%f0%9f%a7%a0-the-brain-the-last-fortress-of-humanity#comments Mon, 02 Oct 2023 21:25:16 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/10/%f0%9f%a7%a0-the-brain-the-last-fortress-of-humanity

“New devices can read and manipulate our mental states to help us relax, learn and reduce pain. As they do this, they harvest data. Can businesses be trusted with this private information? How can we make use of this technology while protecting the last fortress of our humanity — our thoughts and emotions?”


As neurotechnology becomes widely accessible, do we need to legally protect our thoughts?

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A Silicon Valley Supergroup Is Coming Together to Create an A.I. Device https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/a-silicon-valley-supergroup-is-coming-together-to-create-an-a-i-device https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/a-silicon-valley-supergroup-is-coming-together-to-create-an-a-i-device#respond Fri, 29 Sep 2023 20:22:39 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/a-silicon-valley-supergroup-is-coming-together-to-create-an-a-i-device

Since founding OpenAI in 2015, Sam Altman has spent many days thinking that the company’s generative artificial-intelligence products need a new kind of device to succeed. Since leaving Apple in 2019, Jony Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, iPod and MacBook Air, has been considering what the next great computing device could be.

Now, the two men and their companies are teaming up to develop a device that would succeed the smartphone and deliver the benefits of A.I. in a new form factor, unconstrained by the rectangular screen that has been the dominant computing tool of the past decade, according to two people familiar with the discussions…

“…Many tech executives believe the technology has the power to introduce a new paradigm in computing that they call “ambient computing.” Rather than typing on smartphones and taking photographs, they imagine a future device in the form of something as simple as a pendant or glasses that can process the world in real time, using a sophisticated virtual assistant capable of fielding questions and processing images.”


OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the former Apple designer Jony Ive and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son are teaming up to develop a device that could replace the smartphone.

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FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-for-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power https://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-for-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power#respond Fri, 29 Sep 2023 20:22:25 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-for-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.

The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance. Amazon’s far-reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars in retail sales every year, touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses big and small and affect over a hundred million shoppers.

“Our complaint lays out how Amazon has used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The complaint sets forth detailed allegations noting how Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them. Today’s lawsuit seeks to hold Amazon to account for these monopolistic practices and restore the lost promise of free and fair competition.”

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