A selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about AI.
News, Articles, and Analyses
OpenAI Slashes the Cost of Using Its AI With a ‘Mini’ Model | WIRED
(Thursday, July 18, 2024) “With competing models—including many free ones—flooding the market, OpenAI is announcing a cheaper way to use its AI.”
AI in Context: Cloudera Accelerates AI ROI with Verta Acquisition – The Futurum Group
Author: Dr. Bob Sutor
“Learn why Cloudera’™s acquisition of Verta was a smart move to extend its AI capabilities and accelerate customer AI implementation ROI.”
Technical Papers and Preprints
[2407.15160] When Can Transformers Count to n?
Authors: Yehudai, Gilad; Kaplan, Haim; Ghandeharioun, Asma; Geva, Mor; Globerson, Amir
(Sunday, July 21, 2024) “Large language models based on the transformer architectures can solve highly complex tasks. But are there simple tasks that such models cannot solve? Here we focus on very simple counting tasks, that involve counting how many times a token in the vocabulary have appeared in a string. We show that if the dimension of the transformer state is linear in the context length, this task can be solved. However, the solution we propose does not scale beyond this limit, and we provide theoretical arguments for why it is likely impossible for a size limited transformer to implement this task. Our empirical results demonstrate the same phase-transition in performance, as anticipated by the theoretical argument. Our results demonstrate the importance of understanding how transformers can solve simple tasks.”
[2407.15671] Problems in AI, their roots in philosophy, and implications for science and society
Authors: Velthoven, Max; Marcus, Eric
(Monday, July 22, 2024) “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of today’s most relevant emergent technologies. In view thereof, this paper proposes that more attention should be paid to the philosophical aspects of AI technology and its use. It is argued that this deficit is generally combined with philosophical misconceptions about the growth of knowledge. To identify these misconceptions, reference is made to the ideas of the philosopher of science Karl Popper and the physicist David Deutsch. The works of both thinkers aim against mistaken theories of knowledge, such as inductivism, empiricism, and instrumentalism. This paper shows that these theories bear similarities to how current AI technology operates. It also shows that these theories are very much alive in the (public) discourse on AI, often called Bayesianism. In line with Popper and Deutsch, it is proposed that all these theories are based on mistaken philosophies of knowledge. This includes an analysis of the implications of these mistaken philosophies for the use of AI in science and society, including some of the likely problem situations that will arise. This paper finally provides a realistic outlook on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and three propositions on A(G)I and philosophy (i.e., epistemology).”
[2407.15847] LLMmap: Fingerprinting For Large Language Models
Authors: Pasquini, Dario; Kornaropoulos, Evgenios M.; Ateniese, Giuseppe
(Monday, July 22, 2024) “We introduce LLMmap, a first-generation fingerprinting attack targeted at LLM-integrated applications. LLMmap employs an active fingerprinting approach, sending carefully crafted queries to the application and analyzing the responses to identify the specific LLM model in use. With as few as 8 interactions, LLMmap can accurately identify LLMs with over 95% accuracy. More importantly, LLMmap is designed to be robust across different application layers, allowing it to identify LLMs operating under various system prompts, stochastic sampling hyperparameters, and even complex generation frameworks such as RAG or Chain-of-Thought.”
Share this:
Notable and Interesting Recent AI News, Articles, and Papers for Thursday, July 18, 2024
A selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about AI.
News, Articles, and Analyses
IBM text-to-SQL generator tops leaderboard – IBM Research
(Tuesday, July 02, 2024) “IBM’s generative AI solution takes a top spot on the BIRD benchmark for handling complex database queries”
Reaffirming IBM’s commitment to the Rome Call for AI ethics – IBM Research
(Monday, July 15, 2024) “IBM joined representatives from many of the world’s major religions in Japan to discuss ethical AI development.”
AMD takes a deep dive into architecture for the AI PC chips | VentureBeat
Author: Dean Takahashi
(Monday, July 15, 2024) “Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Advanced Micro Devices executives revealed the details of the chipmaker’s latest AI PC architecture, which includes a new neural processing unit (NPU) in the company’s latest AMD Ryzen AI chips. The company announced the latest AMD Ryzen […]”
MathΣtral | Mistral AI | Frontier AI in your hands
(Tuesday, July 16, 2024) “As a tribute to Archimedes, whose 2311th anniversary we’re celebrating this year, we are proud to release our first Mathstral model, a specific 7B model designed for math reasoning and scientific discovery. The model has a 32k context window published under the Apache 2.0 license.”
AI in gaming: Developers worried by generative tech
“In a struggling games industry AI has been hailed as a possible saviour. But not everyone’s convinced.”
Technical Papers and Preprints
[2407.12690] The Dual Imperative: Innovation and Regulation in the AI Era
Author: Carvão, Paulo
(Thursday, May 23, 2024) “This article addresses the societal costs associated with the lack of regulation in Artificial Intelligence and proposes a framework combining innovation and regulation. Over fifty years of AI research, catalyzed by declining computing costs and the proliferation of data, have propelled AI into the mainstream, promising significant economic benefits. Yet, this rapid adoption underscores risks, from bias amplification and labor disruptions to existential threats posed by autonomous systems. The discourse is polarized between accelerationists, advocating for unfettered technological advancement, and doomers, calling for a slowdown to prevent dystopian outcomes. This piece advocates for a middle path that leverages technical innovation and smart regulation to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing its risks, offering a pragmatic approach to the responsible progress of AI technology. Technical invention beyond the most capable foundation models is needed to contain catastrophic risks. Regulation is required to create incentives for this research while addressing current issues.”
[2407.12043] The Art of Saying No: Contextual Noncompliance in Language Models
Authors: Brahman, Faeze; Kumar, Sachin; Balachandran, Vidhisha; Dasigi, Pradeep; Pyatkin, Valentina; Ravichander, Abhilasha; Wiegreffe, Sarah; Dziri, Nouha; Chandu, Khyathi; Hessel, Jack; Tsvetkov, Yulia; Smith, Noah A.; Choi, Yejin; Hajishirzi, Hannaneh
(Tuesday, July 02, 2024) “Chat-based language models are designed to be helpful, yet they should not comply with every user request. While most existing work primarily focuses on refusal of “unsafe” queries, we posit that the scope of noncompliance should be broadened. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of contextual noncompliance describing when and how models should not comply with user requests. Our taxonomy spans a wide range of categories including incomplete, unsupported, indeterminate, and humanizing requests (in addition to unsafe requests). To test noncompliance capabilities of language models, we use this taxonomy to develop a new evaluation suite of 1000 noncompliance prompts. We find that most existing models show significantly high compliance rates in certain previously understudied categories with models like GPT-4 incorrectly complying with as many as 30% of requests. To address these gaps, we explore different training strategies using a synthetically-generated training set of requests and expected noncompliant responses. Our experiments demonstrate that while direct finetuning of instruction-tuned models can lead to both over-refusal and a decline in general capabilities, using parameter efficient methods like low rank adapters helps to strike a good balance between appropriate noncompliance and other capabilities.”
Share this:
Notable and Interesting Recent AI News, Articles, and Papers for Monday, July 15, 2024
A selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about AI.
News, Articles, and Analyses
Developers get by with a little help from AI: Stack Overflow Knows code assistant pulse survey results – Stack Overflow
Gen AI and beyond: Where else to focus now | McKinsey
(Friday, July 12, 2024) “Yes, gen AI can be dazzling. But to deliver value, leaders will have to look beyond center stage.”
Designing for Education with Artificial Intelligence: An Essential Guide for Developers – Office of Educational Technology
“Informing product leads and their teams of innovators, designers, and developers as they work toward safety, security, and trust while creating AI products and services for use in education.”
IBM’s AI, Open-Source Granite Models & Sports Technology – The Futurum Group
Author: Steven Dickens
“Chief Technology Advisor Steven Dickens shares insights on how IBM uses AI to enhance sports, democratizing innovation through open-source.”
Technical Papers and Preprints
[2407.08488] Lynx: An Open Source Hallucination Evaluation Model
Authors: Ravi, Selvan Sunitha; Mielczarek, Bartosz; Kannappan, Anand; Kiela, Douwe; Qian, Rebecca
(Thursday, July 11, 2024) “Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques aim to mitigate hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, LLMs can still produce information that is unsupported or contradictory to the retrieved contexts. We introduce LYNX, a SOTA hallucination detection LLM that is capable of advanced reasoning on challenging real-world hallucination scenarios. To evaluate LYNX, we present HaluBench, a comprehensive hallucination evaluation benchmark, consisting of 15k samples sourced from various real-world domains. Our experiment results show that LYNX outperforms GPT-4o, Claude-3-Sonnet, and closed and open-source LLM-as-a-judge models on HaluBench. We release LYNX, HaluBench and our evaluation code for public access.”
[2407.08105] Federated Learning and AI Regulation in the European Union: Who is Responsible? — An Interdisciplinary Analysis
Authors: Woisetschläger, Herbert; Mertel, Simon; Krönke, Christoph; Mayer, Ruben; Jacobsen, Hans-Arno
(Thursday, July 11, 2024) “The European Union Artificial Intelligence Act mandates clear stakeholder responsibilities in developing and deploying machine learning applications to avoid substantial fines, prioritizing private and secure data processing with data remaining at its origin. Federated Learning (FL) enables the training of generative AI Models across data siloes, sharing only model parameters while improving data security. Since FL is a cooperative learning paradigm, clients and servers naturally share legal responsibility in the FL pipeline. Our work contributes to clarifying the roles of both parties, explains strategies for shifting responsibilities to the server operator, and points out open technical challenges that we must solve to improve FL’s practical applicability under the EU AI Act.”
Share this:
Notable and Interesting Recent AI News, Articles, and Papers for Thursday, July 11, 2024
A selection of the most important recent news and articles about AI.
