AI with AI

Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news and research, starting with the European Parliament adopting the final recommendations of the Special Committee on AI in a Digital Age (AIDA), finding that the EU should not always regulate AI as a technology, but use intervention proportionate to the type of risk, among other recommendations [1:31]. Synchron enrolled the first patient in the U.S. clinical trial of its brain-computer interface, Stentrode, which does not require drilling into the skull or open brain surgery; it is, at present, the only company to receive FDA approval to conduct clinical trials of a permanently implanted BCI [4:14]. MetaAI releases its 175B parameter transformer for open use, Open Pre-trained Transformers (OPT), to include the codebase used to train and deploy the model, and their logbook of issues and challenges [6:25].  In research, DeepMind introduces Gato, a “single generalist agent,” which with a single set of weights, is able to complete over 600 tasks, including chatting, playing Atari games, captioning images, and stacking blocks with a robotic arm; one DeepMind scientist used the results to claim that “the game is over” and it’s all about scale now, to which others that using massive amounts of data as a substitute for intelligence is perhaps “alt intelligence [8:48].” In the opinion essay of the week, Steve Johnson pens “AI is mastering language, should we trust what it says [18:07]?” Daedalus’s Spring 2022 issue focuses on AI and Society, with nearly 400 pages and over 25 essays on a variety of AI-related topics [19:06]. And finally, Professor Ido Kanter from Bar-Ilan University joins to discuss his latest neuroscience research, which suggests a new model for how neurons learn, using dendritic branches [20:48].