AI Weekly Digest #10: Towards Autonomous AI Agents

Welcome to this new edition of our AI newsletter, where we bring you the latest updates on artificial intelligence!

I had to leverage AI tools to semi-automate this newsletter at some point! And since ChatGPT pluggins are out, I decided to give it a try! Part of the headlines was generated thanks to ChatGPT and ChatWithVideo Plugin (I shared my experience here).

Let me know what you think about it and enjoy your weekly AI digest! Have a great week-end!

• The Main Headlines: OpenAI announcements, Google Colab Coding Assistant, Edit AI images without prompts, New Robots announcements and PrivateGPT.

• Beyond the Hype, the story: EU AI Act, the new GDPR for AI is here, and it’s brutal!

• Bonus: 5 ChatGPT plugins that you should get now!

Beyond the Hype, The Story

“Regulators Gonna Regulate”!
AI is here to stay, so how can we make it safe(r) for everyone?
We all agree that we need to address this open question; yet we don’t agree on how it should be handled.

On 11th May 2023, the a draft of the EU AI Act was adopted! You can find the documents detailing the new regulations heres!

The proposed rules now need to be endorsed by the whole Parliament, with the vote expected during the 12-15 June session. If approved, this pioneering legislation will set a precedent for AI regulation worldwide, promoting a human-centric, trustworthy, and safe approach to AI.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Risks are categorized based on their potential impact on people.

• Certain AI practices will be Prohibited, including real-time biometric identification in public spaces, predictive policing, and emotion recognition systems. The ban extends to any AI system that may exploit people's vulnerabilities or deploy manipulative techniques, thereby posing an unacceptable risk to people's safety.

• High-risk AI areas as those that pose potential harm to people's health, safety, fundamental rights, or the environment. This list includes AI systems used to influence political campaigns and recommender systems on social media platforms with a large user base (over 45 million).

• Obligations for providers of foundation models, such as GPT, to ensure robust protection of fundamental rights, health and safety, the environment, democracy, and the rule of law. These providers are required to comply with additional transparency requirements, like disclosing that the content was AI-generated and designing the model to prevent the generation of illegal content.

• Sandboxes: Special provisions to boost AI innovation, such as exemptions for research activities and open-source AI components. Support the creation of regulatory sandboxes where AI can be tested in a controlled environment before being deployed.

• Empowering citizens by allowing them to file complaints about AI systems and receive explanations for decisions made by high-risk AI systems that significantly impact their rights.

• A company risks administrative fines of up to 6% of its total worldwide annual turnover for the preceding financial year or up to 30,000,000 EUR, whichever is higher, for non-compliance with the prohibition of certain artificial intelligence practices and non-compliance of the AI system with certain requirements laid down in the regulation.

Stay tuned!

Main Headlines

• OpenAI Announcement:

  • Web browsing and plugins are now available to all ChatGPT Plus users. This includes a browsing function that allows ChatGPT to search the web. The plugins feature allows users to add a variety of plugins to enhance the capabilities of ChatGPT, such as the Wolfram plugin for complex calculations and real-time data (you can enable them in your settings: see image below)

  • ChatGPT mobile app on the iPhone is live! The app currently only works in the US and on iPhone, but Android users are next. The app does not yet have the new browsing features and plugins built into it.

• PrivateGPT: As a business you are probably worried about the integrity and privacy of you data when interacting with ChatGPT or any other Large Language Models (LLMs). LLM applications are limitless but we can’t afford them if they compromise the safety of your company and users’ data; right?
  PrivateGPT addresses this issue by building a standalone pipeline that you can run locally, with LangChain and opensource models such as GPT4All. It’s as good as the opensource models (which can’t compte yet with ChatGPT), but we’ll get there ;)

• Senate Hearing on AI Regulation: EU AI Act is on the way, and US is also working on framing its set of regulations when it comes to AI R&d and applications! Thus, a Senate hearing on AI regulation took place this week, featured Sam Altman from OpenAI, Gary Marcus, and Christina Montgomery from IBM. The hearing discussed potential impacts of AI on jobs, the potential for AI to manipulate elections, and the concentration of AI power in a few companies. The creators of AI were essentially asking for government regulation to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models. Here’s a video summarizing the key moments of the hearing.

• Google's AI-Powered Coding: Colab is a key online notebook IDE used worldwide by ML engineers and data scientists. User friendly, easy to share making collaboration seamless, and last but not least, Colab provides you with online GPUs and TPUs on demand even for free plans!
  Google announced that they're adding AI-powered coding for free inside Google Colab. The feature will roll out gradually in the coming months, starting with paid subscribers.

• New Robots Announced: We’re still a few years away from mass production (IMHO), yet it’s always exciting to see the progress made in this area!

  • Sanctuary AI's Humanoid Robot: Sanctuary AI demoed their new humanoid walking AI robot, Phoenix. The robot is designed to be a general-purpose robot capable of performing tasks that humans can do.

  • Tesla's Humanoid Robot: Tesla also showcased their humanoid robot, Tesla Optimus. The robot is trained by humans and is capable of memorizing its environment.

• DragGAN: The DragGAN method enable a smooth manipulation of images by simply “moving pixels”. The model regenerates the image to match the change desired by the user, enabling scenarios near to impossible to achieve via prompting. However, its current limitation is that it can only be applied to images generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), not to any uploaded image. Why? in a nutshell this is possible because we have the exact image representation in a latent space (i.e., a representation of all features of the image as defined by a neural network). By manipulating the image, the model regenerates an image by exploring coherent “nearby” representations in that latent space.

Bonus!

ChatGPT plugins are out and available for all Premium subscribers. Here’s a list of 5 plugins you should install right away!

• AskYourPDF: add a pdf link and chat with it naturally, the way you do it with ChatGPT!

• ChatWithVideo: Put a youtube video link, and ask it questions about the content of the video. You can also get a summary or find timestamps related to a subject or quote!

• Zapier: Probably the most powerful integration of all! Zapier is a nocode connector integrated with over 5000 tools. Let’s assume you often rely on ChatGPT to write an email, you can simply rely on zapier plugin to draft emails for you, connected to gmail, and you’ll find them in your draft folder for reviews and validation.

• Wolfram: wolfram is a scientific engine that you can us to enable any kind of calculations. So if you’re working on a mathematical problem, analyzing data, and so on, it might become your best friend. Combine both ChatGPT and Wolfram abilities to chat naturally about any complex scientific problem.

• EdX: You need to find great resources to learn about a specific topic? Now ChatGPT and EdX are integrated together to enable a seamless search (or recommendation) based on what you are looking for.

That’s it for today! If you made it this far, I’d appreciate a quick feedback 😋! I know there’s room for improvement! So don’t hesitate to share with me the things you liked and those that you didn’t.

Have a great Sunday and may AI always be on your side!