The buzz out of the Code Conference this week is, naturally, all about the disastrous performance of X / Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who closed out the two-day affair in spectacular fashion. Vox’s Peter Kafka, who has been going to the conference since it started in 2008, called it “the weirdest session I’ve ever seen.” If I had to sum up the vibe as everyone trickled off to dinner afterward, it would be stunned disbelief. As for Yaccarino, she immediately fled the premises with her six-person security detail.

It’s not surprising that ChatGPT has been accused of breaching the EU’s main privacy law – PIA blog noted that ChatGPT was a privacy disaster waiting to happen back in February. As the first complaint to be taken up by an EU data protection agency, this case will be watched closely by other EU Member States, and around the world. The Polish inquiry is likely to investigate many of the key GDPR issues that arise for AI programs and be used as a benchmark in future legal cases.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5965315

🤖 Happy FOSAI Friday! 🚀

Friday, September 29, 2023

HyperTech News Report #0002

Hello Everyone!

Welcome back to the HyperTech News Report! This week we're seeing some really exciting developments in futuristic technologies. With more tools and methods releasing by the day, I feel we're in for a renaissance in software. I hope hardware is soon to follow.. but I am here for it! So are you. Brace yourselves. Change is coming! This next year will be very interesting to watch unfold.

Table of Contents

• New Foundation Model!
• Metaverse Developments
• NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails
• Tutorial Highlights

Community Changelog

• Cleaned up some old content (let me know if you notice something that should be archived or updated)

Image of the Week

This image of the week comes from a DALL-E 3 demonstration by Will Depue. This depicts a popular image for diffusion models benchmarks - the astronaut riding a horse in space. Apparently this was hard to get right, and others have had trouble replicating it - but it seems to have been generated by DALL-E 3 nevertheless. Curious to see how it stacks up against other diffusers when its more widely available.

New Foundation Model!

There have been many new models hitting HuggingFace on the daily. The recent influx has made it hard to benchmark and keep up with these models - so I will be highlighting a hand select curated week-by-week, exploring these with more focus (a few at a time).

If you have any model favorites (or showcase suggestions) let me know what they are in the comments below and I'll add them to the growing catalog!

This week we're taking a look at Mistral - a new foundation model with a sliding attention mechanism that gives it advantages over other models. Better yet - the mistral.ai team released this new model under the Apache 2.0 license. Massive shoutout to this team, this is huge for anyone who wants more options (commercially) outside of Llama 2 and Falcon families.

From Mistralai:

The best 7B, Apache 2.0.. Mistral-7B-v0.1 is a small, yet powerful model adaptable to many use-cases. Mistral 7B is better than Llama 2 13B on all benchmarks, has natural coding abilities, and 8k sequence length. It’s released under Apache 2.0 licence, and we made it easy to deploy on any cloud.

Learn More

Mistralai

• https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1
• https://mistral.ai/news/announcing-mistral-7b/
• https://docs.mistral.ai/quickstart/

TheBloke (Quantized)

• https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-v0.1-GGUF https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-v0.1-GPT

More About GPTQ

• https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/1827

More About GGUF

• https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/2398#issuecomment-1682837610

Metaverse Developments

Mark Zuckerberg had his third round interview on the Lex Fridman podcast - but this time, in the updated Metaverse. This is pretty wild. We seem to have officially left uncanny valley territory. There are still clearly bugs and improvements to be made - but imagine the possibilities of this mixed reality technology (paired with VR LLM applications).

The type of experiences we can begin to explore in these digital realms are going to evolve into things of true sci-fi in our near future. This is all very exciting stuff to look forward to as AI proliferates markets and drives innovation.

What do you think? Zuck looks more human in the metaverse than in real life.. mission.. success?

Click here for the podcast episode.

NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails

If you haven't heard about NeMo Guardrails, you should check it out. It is a new library and approach for aligning models and completing functions for LLMs. It is similar to LangChain and LlamaIndex, but uses an in-house developed language from NVIDIA called 'colang' for configuration, with NeMo Guardrail libraries in python friendly syntax.

This is still a new and unexplored tool, but could provide some interesting results with some creative applications. It is also particularly powerful if you need to align enterprise LLMs for clients or stakeholders.

Learn More

Tutorial Highlights

Mistral 7B - Small But Mighty 🚀 🚀

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4wPiallZcI&ab_channel=PromptEngineering

Chatbots with RAG: LangChain Full Walkthrough

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhnCsygAvzY&ab_channel=JamesBriggs

NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails: Full Walkthrough for Chatbots / AI

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwqusllMCnE&t=1s&ab_channel=JamesBriggs

Author's Note

This post was authored by the moderator of [email protected] - Blaed. I make games, produce music, write about tech, and develop free open-source artificial intelligence (FOSAI) for fun. I do most of this through a company called HyperionTechnologies a.k.a. HyperTech or HYPERION - a sci-fi company.

Thanks for Reading!

If you found anything about this post interesting, consider subscribing to [email protected] where I do my best to keep you informed about free open-source artificial intelligence as it emerges in real-time.

Our community is quickly becoming a living time capsule thanks to the rapid innovation of this field. If you've gotten this far, I cordially invite you to join us and dance along the path to AGI and the great unknown.

Come on in, the water is fine, the gates are wide open! You're still early to the party, so there is still plenty of wonder and discussion yet to be had in our little corner of the digiverse.

This post was written by a human. For other humans. About machines. Who work for humans for other machines. At least for now...

Until next time!

Blaed

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5698702

Firefox has added a new built-in full page translation feature that allows you to seamlessly browse the web in your preferred language. As you navigate the site, Firefox continuously translates new content in real time. This feature will be rolled out gradually and should be available for all users starting in Firefox version 118.

Note: Unlike other browsers that rely on cloud services, Firefox keeps your data safe on your device. There's no privacy risk of sending text to third parties for analysis because translation happens on your device, not externally.

These are the things i care the most: I want a smartphone i can repair on my own (battery and screen are the essential parts), with a bootloader easily unlockable, even better with verified boot / supporting a custom OS with re-lockable bootloader.

I don't care if it's supported by an official foundation or by custom ROMs foundations, i want something that will most likely get the longest term updates and security patches.

Does a device like this even exists?

I know that probably one of the few alternatives here is the fairphone, however it's really expensive and i've read many negative reviews of it (pieces staying out of stock for months or stuff like that), and i can't see the meaning of having a repairable smartphone if i have to spend the same money that i would spend buying 3 smartphones with the same specs that would last me the same time. That said, i know the market isn't favouring these kind of businesses and these devices NEED to be expensive in order to keep existing, but i would like to know some other possible alternatives that satisfy these requirements, if they even exist.

Honestly i've come to a point i would probably prefer spend my money on a guitar instead that on a smartphone and just give up, the industry is terrible 😅

The vast majority of computer vision research leads to technology that surveils human beings, a new preprint study that analyzed more than 20,000 computer vision papers and 11,000 patents spanning three decades has found. Crucially, the study found that computer vision papers often refer to human beings as “objects,” a convention that both obfuscates how common surveillance of humans is in the field, and objectifies humans by definition.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Opening statements are set to begin on Thursday in the first U.S. trial over allegations that Tesla's (TSLA.O) Autopilot driver assistant feature led to a death, and its results could help shape similar cases across the country.

The trial, in a California state court, stems from a civil lawsuit alleging the Autopilot system caused owner Micah Lee’s Model 3 to suddenly veer off a highway east of Los Angeles at 65 miles per hour (105 kph), strike a palm tree and burst into flames, all in the span of seconds.

The 2019 crash killed Lee and seriously injured his two passengers, including a then-8-year-old boy who was disemboweled, according to court documents. The lawsuit, filed against Tesla by the passengers and Lee's estate, accuses Tesla of knowing that Autopilot and other safety systems were defective when it sold the car.

Tesla has denied liability, saying Lee consumed alcohol before getting behind the wheel. The electric-vehicle maker also claims it was not clear whether Autopilot was engaged at the time of crash.

Tesla has been testing and rolling out its Autopilot and more advanced Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, which Chief Executive Elon Musk has touted as crucial to his company's future but which has drawn regulatory and legal scrutiny.

Tesla won a bellwether trial in Los Angeles in April with a strategy of saying that it tells drivers that its technology requires human monitoring, despite the "Autopilot" name. A Model S swerved into a curb in 2019 and injured its driver, and jurors told Reuters after the verdict that they believed Tesla warned drivers about its system and that driver distraction was to blame.

The stakes are higher in the trial this week, and in other cases, because people died. Tesla and plaintiff attorneys jousted in the runup about what evidence and arguments each side could make.

Tesla, for instance, won a bid to exclude some of Musk’s public statements about Autopilot. However, attorneys for the crash victims can argue that Lee’s blood alcohol content was below the legal limit, according to court filings.

The trial, in Riverside County Superior Court, is expected to last a few weeks.

cross-posted from [email protected]

• Tech startup, Branch Metrics, claims Google hindered its search app development through exclusive revenue-sharing agreements with Samsung, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.
• The US government accuses Google of illegally maintaining its online search monopoly by having its search engine as the default on PCs and mobile phones, which Google denies.
• Branch Metrics aimed to create a search engine for mobile apps, with significant funding raised and intended integration in Samsung devices starting 2019.
• Due to Google's contract, Samsung limited the functionality of Branch's product, restricting it to search only 25 apps and conceal results from apps not installed on the device.
• Google's revenue-share agreements initially required it to be the sole "web search engine" on devices, later extending to "only connected search and internet search" on devices in 2020.
• AT&T and a Google executive raised concerns about the Branch product violating revenue-share agreements, impacting potential partnerships and Branch's product functionality.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5592397

Forty years ago, Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop the GNU operating system, which would be entirely composed of free software. The existence of a free operating system would enable people to operate their computers in freedom, throwing off the power of the developers of nonfree software. The GNU Project has also built the global free software movement.

This is something I am seeing more and more of. As companies start to either offer or require 2FA for accounts, they don't follow the common standards or even offer any sort of options. One thing that drives me nuts is when they don't offer TOTP as an option. It seems like many companies either use text messages to send a code or use some built in method of authorizing a sign in from a mobile device app.

What are your thoughts on why they want to take the time to maintain this extra feature in an app when you could have just implemented a TOTP method that probably can be imported as an existing library with much less effort?

Are they assuming that people are too dumb to understand TOTP? Are they wanting phone numbers from people? Is it to force people to install their apps?

*edit: I also really want to know what not at least give people the option to choose something like TOTP. They can still offer mobile app verification, SMS, email, carrier pigeon, etc for other options but at least give the user a choice of something besides an insecure method like SMS.

https://archive.is/TmbC1

After three years, a Washington, DC, judge will hear the Department of Justice’s potentially landmark antitrust case against Google. The department alleges Google struck anticompetitive deals with Apple and other companies for prime placement of its search engine, while Google contends its dominant market share is the result of a superior product. It’s the biggest tech antitrust trial since the US took on Microsoft in the 1990s: 10 weeks that could tip the balance of power online.

And the pendulum swings.