We lost Twitter and got X. We tried out Bluesky and Mastodon (well, some of us did). We fretted about AI bots and teen mental health. We cocooned in private chats and scrolled endlessly as we did in years past. For social media users, 2023 was a year of beginnings and endings, with some soul-searching in between.

Heres a look back some of the biggest stories in social media in 2023 and what to watch for next year:

A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter s San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into whats now known as X.

Musk revealed the X logo in July. It quickly replaced Twitters name and its whimsical blue bird icon, online and on the companys San Francisco headquarters.

And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds, Musk posted on the site.

Because of its public nature and because it attracted public figures, journalists and other high-profile users, Twitter always had an outsized influence on popular culture but that influence seems to be waning.

It had a lot of problems even before Musk took it over, but it was beloved brand with a clear role in the social media landscape, said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. There are still moments of Twitter magic on the platform, like when journalists took the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and the smaller communities on the platform remain important to many users. But the Twitter of the past 17 years is largely gone, and Xs reason for existence is murky.

Since Musks takeover, X has been bombarded by allegations of misinformation and racism, endured significant advertising losses and suffered declines in usage. It didnt help when Musk went on an expletive-ridden rant in an on-stage interview about companies that had halted spending on X. Musk asserted that advertisers that pulled out were engaging in blackmail and, using a profanity, essentially told them to get lost.

Continuing the trend of welcoming back users who had been banned by the former Twitter for hate speech or spreading misinformation, in December, Musk restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to an unscientific poll he posted to his followers that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.

LGBTQ and other organizations supporting marginalized groups, meanwhile, have been raising alarms about X becoming less safe. In April, for instance, it quietly removed a policy against the targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals. In June, the advocacy group GLAAD called it the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people.

GLSEN, an LGBTQ education group, announced in December that it was leaving X, joining other groups such as the suicide prevention nonprofit Trevor Project, saying that Musks changes have birthed a new platform that enables its users to harass and target the LGBTQ+ community without restriction or discipline.

Musks ambitions for X include transforming the platform into an everything app like Chinas WeChat, for instance. The problem? Its not clear if U.S. and Western audiences are keen on the idea. And Musk himself has been pretty vague on the specifics.

While X contends with an identity crisis, some users began looking for a replacement. Mastodon was one contender, along with Bluesky, which actually grew out of Twitter a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on its board of directors.

When tens of thousands of people, many of them fed-up Twitter users, began signing up for the (still) invite-only Bluesky in the spring, the app had less than 10 people working on it, said CEO Jay Graber recently.

This meant scrambling to keep everything working, keeping people online, scrambling to add features that we had on the roadmap, she said. For weeks, the work was simply scaling ensuring that the systems could handle the influx.

We had one person on the app for a while, which was very funny, and there were memes about Paul versus all of Twitters engineers, she recalled. I dont think we hired a second app developer until after the crazy growth spurt.

Seeing an opportunity to lure in disgruntled Twitter users, Facebook parent Meta launched its own rival, Threads, in July. It soared to popularity as tens of millions began signing up though keeping people on has been a bit of a challenge. Then, in December, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a surprise move that the company was testing interoperability the idea championed by Mastodon, Bluesky and other decentralized social networks that people should be able to use their accounts on different platforms kind of like your email address or phone number.

Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol, Zuckerberg posted on Threads in December. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. Im pretty optimistic about this.

Social medias impact on childrens mental health hurtled toward a reckoning this year, with the U.S. surgeon general warning in May that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens and calling on tech companies, parents and caregivers to take immediate action to protect kids now.

Were asking parents to manage a technology thats rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage, Dr. Vivek Murthy told The Associated Press. And were putting all of that on the shoulders of parents, which is just simply not fair.

In October, dozens of U.S. states sued Meta for harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

In November, Arturo Bjar, a former engineering director at Meta, testified before a Senate subcommittee about social media and the teen mental health crisis, hoping to shed light on how Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, knew about the harms Instagram was causing but chose not to make meaningful changes to address them.

The testimony came amid a bipartisan push in Congress to adopt regulations aimed at protecting children online. In December, the Federal Trade Commission proposed sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children, including turning off targeted ads to kids under 13 by default and limiting push notifications.

Your AI friends have arrived but chatbots are just the beginning. Standing in a courtyard at his companys Menlo Park, California headquarters, Zuckerberg said this fall that Meta is focused on building the future of human connection and painted a near-future where people interact with hologram versions of their friends or coworkers and with AI bots built to assist them. The company unveiled an army of AI bots with celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton lending their faces to play them that social media users can interact with.

Next year, AI will be integrated into virtually every corner of the platforms, Enberg said.

Social apps will use AI to drive usage, ad performance and revenues, subscription sign ups, and commerce activity. AI will deepen both users and advertisers reliance and relationship with social media, but its implementation wont be entirely smooth sailing as consumer and regulatory scrutiny will intensify, she added.

The analyst also sees subscriptions as an increasingly attractive revenue stream for some platforms. Inspired by Musks X, subscriptions started as a way to diversify or boost revenues as social ad businesses took a hit, but they have persisted and expanded even as the social ad market has steadied itself.

With major elections coming up in the U.S. and India among other countries, AIs and social medias role in misinformation will continue to be front and center for social media watchers.

Were not prepared for this, A.J. Nash, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox, told the AP in May. To me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that on a large scale, and distribute it on social platforms, well, its going to have a major impact.

Excerpt from:

The year of social media soul-searching: Twitter dies, X and Threads are born and AI gets personal - The Associated Press

A masterpiece hanging in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid has long sparked debates over whether it was the work of Raphael. But a group of researchers now claims to have finally solved the mystery through the use of an artificial intelligence algorithm.

The Madonna della Rosa (Madonna of the Rose) depicts Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus, along with an infant version of John the Baptist. Until the 19th century, the painting was attributed to the Italian Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, more often known as Raphael. Then doubts were raised over the Joseph figure looking like an afterthought and whether Raphael had painted the lower section.

The museums website page for the oil painting solely credits it to Raphael.

According to a new research paper published on December 21 in the journal Heritage Science, analysis of the painting using an AI algorithm with an accuracy of 98 percent found that the painting was entirely made by the Italian artist. But it raised questions about whether Raphael indeed painted the face of Joseph in the painting.

The researchers, led by University of Bradford visual computer professor Hussan Ugail, noted that the AI analysis supported earlier work by art historians who had previously questioned the full attribution of this painting to Raphael alone, suggesting that his associate, Giulio Romano, might have had a hand in it.

University of Bradford emeritus professor of molecular spectroscopy Howell Edwards, who co-authored the paper, told the Guardian: The AI program analysis of our work has demonstrated conclusively that whereas the three figures of the Madonna, [Jesus] and St John the Baptist are unequivocally by Raphael, that of St Joseph is not, and has been painted by someone else.

In January, Ugail was part of a team of researchers who used AI-assisted computer-based facial recognition on a painting known as the de Brcy Tondo to also help determine it was a work by Raphael. The research team found that the faces of the Madonna and child in the de Brcy Tondo were identical to ones in the Raphael altarpieceSistine Madonna. Then another study called into question the results of that research, and museum experts raised questions about the methodology.

Ugail told the Guardian that he knows nothing about art, and that the reception to his work from art historians can be frosty. I think there is fear and they also think we are naive, that we dont know what we are doing, he said.

While there is ongoing concern over how the use of AI will eliminate the work of human beings, the research team emphasized in the conclusion of their Heritage Science paper that AI could become a useful resource for art historians and collectors as a supplementary tool for verifying paintings alongside existing methods such as scholarly analysis, spectroscopic imaging, and dating techniques.

As advances continue to be made in machine learning and image processing technologies, this method has the potential to become part of an array of tools for artwork analysis and verification, the paper said. It can operate in conjunction with other methods currently in use, including in-depth scrutiny by art historians and various advanced imaging techniques, thus contributing to a more thorough and dependable framework for artwork authentication and analysis.

Continued here:

AI Says Painting Attributed to Raphael Includes Contributions from Other Artists - ARTnews

Artificial intelligence has been inescapable this year. After OpenAI released ChatGPT some 13 months ago, attention turned to how such tools will disrupt careers and industriesand eager venture capitalists poured billions into AI startups that might do the disrupting.

But VCs themselves could get disrupted, according to billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and the CEO of VC firm Social Capital.

We talk about AI as a big disruptor to the big companies and this and that, but AI may be the biggest disruptor to VC in the end, Palihapitiya said on the All-In Podcast this week.

A world where AI proliferates, he said, is positive for founders, who will be able to own more of their companies rather than give away too much equity to VCs.

In the past, he said, a tech startup with $2 million in seed funding might hire seven people and have enough capital to survive for a year and a half, after which it hopefully gained enough traction so that investors would pony up $10 million or $15 million in Series A funding. The downside, of course, is that in exchange for capital, VCs want equity in the company.

But AI tools give founders more leverage, Palihapitiya said, mentioning GitHub Copilot, which makes creating and fixing code much easier. Startups can now hire programmers, perhaps in other countries with lower pay rates, to use such tools to get more done faster, he noted.

The upshot is that, today, a tech startup with the same amount of seed funding might have a three- or four-person team and survive on that $2 million for four years rather than a year a half. Founders could then end up owning 80% of their company with the potential to exit for $50 million or $100 million, and theyve made more money than in a traditional outcome he said.

Its only a matter of time, Palihapitiya added, until they can put two and two together in an Excel spreadsheet to figure out that owning 50% of a $100 million company is greater than owning 18% of some other company when youre massively diluted, or 8% or whatever.

Jason Calacanis, an angel investor, responded that now, instead of founders of a particular cohort competing on who can raise the most money at the highest valuation, hes seen them shifting to, how do I get to profitability and how do I own as much of my company as possible?

Palihapitiya became the face of the SPAC boom-and-bust a few years back due to his involvement with special purpose acquisition companiesshell corporations listed on a stock exchange that acquire a private company, thereby making it public sans the rigors of the IPO process.

This isnt the first time he has mulled the role of VCs in an AI-altered world.

It seems pretty reasonable and logical, he said last month on the podcast, that AI productivity gains will lead to tens or hundreds of millions of startups made up of only one or two people.

Theres a lot of sort of financial engineering that kind of goes away in that world, he said. I think the job of the venture capitalist changes really profoundly. I think theres a reasonable case to make that it doesnt exist.

Excerpt from:

Chamath Palihapitiya says venture capitalists also face disruption from AIand startup founders stand to benefit - Fortune

Posted by Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind & Google Research, Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind, and James Manyika, SVP, Google Research, Technology & Society

This has been a year of incredible progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and its practical applications.

As ongoing research pushes AI even farther, we look back to our perspective published in January of this year, titled Why we focus on AI (and to what end), where we noted:

We are committed to leading and setting the standard in developing and shipping useful and beneficial applications, applying ethical principles grounded in human values, and evolving our approaches as we learn from research, experience, users, and the wider community.

We also believe that getting AI right which to us involves innovating and delivering widely accessible benefits to people and society, while mitigating its risks must be a collective effort involving us and others, including researchers, developers, users (individuals, businesses, and other organizations), governments, regulators, and citizens.

We are convinced that the AI-enabled innovations we are focused on developing and delivering boldly and responsibly are useful, compelling, and have the potential to assist and improve lives of people everywhere this is what compels us.

In this Year-in-Review post well go over some of Google Research's and Google DeepMinds efforts putting these paragraphs into practice safely throughout 2023.

This was the year generative AI captured the worlds attention, creating imagery, music, stories, and engaging conversation about everything imaginable, at a level of creativity and a speed almost implausible a few years ago.

In February, we first launched Bard, a tool that you can use to explore creative ideas and explain things simply. It can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content and more.

In May, we watched the results of months and years of our foundational and applied work announced on stage at Google I/O. Principally, this included PaLM 2, a large language model (LLM) that brought together compute-optimal scaling, an improved dataset mixture, and model architecture to excel at advanced reasoning tasks.

By fine-tuning and instruction-tuning PaLM 2 for different purposes, we were able to integrate it into numerous Google products and features, including:

In June, following last years release of our text-to-image generation model Imagen, we released Imagen Editor, which provides the ability to use region masks and natural language prompts to interactively edit generative images to provide much more precise control over the model output.

Later in the year, we released Imagen 2, which improved outputs via a specialized image aesthetics model based on human preferences for qualities such as good lighting, framing, exposure, and sharpness.

In October, we launched a feature that helps people practice speaking and improve their language skills. The key technology that enabled this functionality was a novel deep learning model developed in collaboration with the Google Translate team, called Deep Aligner. This single new model has led to dramatic improvements in alignment quality across all tested language pairs, reducing average alignment error rate from 25% to 5% compared to alignment approaches based on Hidden Markov models (HMMs).

In November, in partnership with YouTube, we announced Lyria, our most advanced AI music generation model to date. We released two experiments designed to open a new playground for creativity, DreamTrack and music AI tools, in concert with YouTubes Principles for partnering with the music industry on AI technology.

Then in December, we launched Gemini, our most capable and general AI model. Gemini was built to be multimodal from the ground up across text, audio, image and videos. Our initial family of Gemini models comes in three different sizes, Nano, Pro, and Ultra. Nano models are our smallest and most efficient models for powering on-device experiences in products like Pixel. The Pro model is highly-capable and best for scaling across a wide range of tasks. The Ultra model is our largest and most capable model for highly complex tasks.

In a technical report about Gemini models, we showed that Gemini Ultras performance exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks used in LLM research and development. With a score of 90.04%, Gemini Ultra was the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU, and achieved a state-of-the-art score of 59.4% on the new MMMU benchmark.

Building on AlphaCode, the first AI system to perform at the level of the median competitor in competitive programming, we introduced AlphaCode 2 powered by a specialized version of Gemini. When evaluated on the same platform as the original AlphaCode, we found that AlphaCode 2 solved 1.7x more problems, and performed better than 85% of competition participants

At the same time, Bard got its biggest upgrade with its use of the Gemini Pro model, making it far more capable at things like understanding, summarizing, reasoning, coding, and planning. In six out of eight benchmarks, Gemini Pro outperformed GPT-3.5, including in MMLU, one of the key standards for measuring large AI models, and GSM8K, which measures grade school math reasoning. Gemini Ultra will come to Bard early next year through Bard Advanced, a new cutting-edge AI experience.

Gemini Pro is also available on Vertex AI, Google Clouds end-to-end AI platform that empowers developers to build applications that can process information across text, code, images, and video. Gemini Pro was also made available in AI Studio in December.

To best illustrate some of Geminis capabilities, we produced a series of short videos with explanations of how Gemini could:

In addition to our advances in products and technologies, weve also made a number of important advancements in the broader fields of machine learning and AI research.

At the heart of the most advanced ML models is the Transformer model architecture, developed by Google researchers in 2017. Originally developed for language, it has proven useful in domains as varied as computer vision, audio, genomics, protein folding, and more. This year, our work on scaling vision transformers demonstrated state-of-the-art results across a wide variety of vision tasks, and has also been useful in building more capable robots.

Expanding the versatility of models requires the ability to perform higher-level and multi-step reasoning. This year, we approached this target following several research tracks. For example, algorithmic prompting is a new method that teaches language models reasoning by demonstrating a sequence of algorithmic steps, which the model can then apply in new contexts. This approach improves accuracy on one middle-school mathematics benchmark from 25.9% to 61.1%.

In the domain of visual question answering, in a collaboration with UC Berkeley researchers, we showed how we could better answer complex visual questions (Is the carriage to the right of the horse?) by combining a visual model with a language model trained to answer visual questions by synthesizing a program to perform multi-step reasoning.

We are now using a general model that understands many aspects of the software development life cycle to automatically generate code review comments, respond to code review comments, make performance-improving suggestions for pieces of code (by learning from past such changes in other contexts), fix code in response to compilation errors, and more.

In a multi-year research collaboration with the Google Maps team, we were able to scale inverse reinforcement learning and apply it to the world-scale problem of improving route suggestions for over 1 billion users. Our work culminated in a 1624% relative improvement in global route match rate, helping to ensure that routes are better aligned with user preferences.

We also continue to work on techniques to improve the inference performance of machine learning models. In work on computationally-friendly approaches to pruning connections in neural networks, we were able to devise an approximation algorithm to the computationally intractable best-subset selection problem that is able to prune 70% of the edges from an image classification model and still retain almost all of the accuracy of the original.

In work on accelerating on-device diffusion models, we were also able to apply a variety of optimizations to attention mechanisms, convolutional kernels, and fusion of operations to make it practical to run high quality image generation models on-device; for example, enabling a photorealistic and high-resolution image of a cute puppy with surrounding flowers to be generated in just 12 seconds on a smartphone.

Advances in capable language and multimodal models have also benefited our robotics research efforts. We combined separately trained language, vision, and robotic control models into PaLM-E, an embodied multi-modal model for robotics, and Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), a novel vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns from both web and robotics data, and translates this knowledge into generalized instructions for robotic control.

Furthermore, we showed how language can also be used to control the gait of quadrupedal robots and explored the use of language to help formulate more explicit reward functions to bridge the gap between human language and robotic actions. Then, in Barkour we benchmarked the agility limits of quadrupedal robots.

Designing efficient, robust, and scalable algorithms remains a high priority. This year, our work included: applied and scalable algorithms, market algorithms, system efficiency and optimization, and privacy.

We introduced AlphaDev, an AI system that uses reinforcement learning to discover enhanced computer science algorithms. AlphaDev uncovered a faster algorithm for sorting, a method for ordering data, which led to improvements in the LLVM libc++ sorting library that were up to 70% faster for shorter sequences and about 1.7% faster for sequences exceeding 250,000 elements.

We developed a novel model to predict the properties of large graphs, enabling estimation of performance for large programs. We released a new dataset, TPUGraphs, to accelerate open research in this area, and showed how we can use modern ML to improve ML efficiency.

We developed a new load balancing algorithm for distributing queries to a server, called Prequal, which minimizes a combination of requests-in-flight and estimates the latency. Deployments across several systems have saved CPU, latency, and RAM significantly. We also designed a new analysis framework for the classical caching problem with capacity reservations.

We improved state-of-the-art in clustering and graph algorithms by developing new techniques for computing minimum-cut, approximating correlation clustering, and massively parallel graph clustering. Additionally, we introduced TeraHAC, a novel hierarchical clustering algorithm for trillion-edge graphs, designed a text clustering algorithm for better scalability while maintaining quality, and designed the most efficient algorithm for approximating the Chamfer Distance, the standard similarity function for multi-embedding models, offering >50 speedups over highly-optimized exact algorithms and scaling to billions of points.

We continued optimizing Googles large embedding models (LEMs), which power many of our core products and recommender systems. Some new techniques include Unified Embedding for battle-tested feature representations in web-scale ML systems and Sequential Attention, which uses attention mechanisms to discover high-quality sparse model architectures during training.

Beyond auto-bidding systems, we also studied auction design in other complex settings, such as buy-many mechanisms, auctions for heterogeneous bidders, contract designs, and innovated robust online bidding algorithms. Motivated by the application of generative AI in collaborative creation (e.g., joint ad for advertisers), we proposed a novel token auction model where LLMs bid for influence in the collaborative AI creation. Finally, we show how to mitigate personalization effects in experimental design, which, for example, may cause recommendations to drift over time.

The Chrome Privacy Sandbox, a multi-year collaboration between Google Research and Chrome, has publicly launched several APIs, including for Protected Audience, Topics, and Attribution Reporting. This is a major step in protecting user privacy while supporting the open and free web ecosystem. These efforts have been facilitated by fundamental research on re-identification risk, private streaming computation, optimization of privacy caps and budgets, hierarchical aggregation, and training models with label privacy.

In the not too distant future, there is a very real possibility that AI applied to scientific problems can accelerate the rate of discovery in certain domains by 10 or 100, or more, and lead to major advances in diverse areas including bioengineering, materials science, weather prediction, climate forecasting, neuroscience, genetic medicine, and healthcare.

In Project Green Light, we partnered with 13 cities around the world to help improve traffic flow at intersections and reduce stop-and-go emissions. Early numbers from these partnerships indicate a potential for up to 30% reduction in stops and up to 10% reduction in emissions.

In our contrails work, we analyzed large-scale weather data, historical satellite images, and past flights. We trained an AI model to predict where contrails form and reroute airplanes accordingly. In partnership with American Airlines and Breakthrough Energy, we used this system to demonstrate contrail reduction by 54%.

We are also developing novel technology-driven approaches to help communities with the effects of climate change. For example, we have expanded our flood forecasting coverage to 80 countries, which directly impacts more than 460 million people. We have initiated a number of research efforts to help mitigate the increasing danger of wildfires, including real-time tracking of wildfire boundaries using satellite imagery, and work that improves emergency evacuation plans for communities at risk to rapidly-spreading wildfires. Our partnership with American Forests puts data from our Tree Canopy project to work in their Tree Equity Score platform, helping communities identify and address unequal access to trees.

Finally, we continued to develop better models for weather prediction at longer time horizons. Improving on MetNet and MetNet-2, in this years work on MetNet-3, we now outperform traditional numerical weather simulations up to twenty-four hours. In the area of medium-term, global weather forecasting, our work on GraphCast showed significantly better prediction accuracy for up to 10 days compared to HRES, the most accurate operational deterministic forecast, produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In collaboration with ECMWF, we released WeatherBench-2, a benchmark for evaluating the accuracy of weather forecasts in a common framework.

The potential of AI to dramatically improve processes in healthcare is significant. Our initial Med-PaLM model was the first model capable of achieving a passing score on the U.S. medical licensing exam. Our more recent Med-PaLM 2 model improved by a further 19%, achieving an expert-level accuracy of 86.5%. These Med-PaLM models are language-based, enable clinicians to ask questions and have a dialogue about complex medical conditions, and are available to healthcare organizations as part of MedLM through Google Cloud.

In the same way our general language models are evolving to handle multiple modalities, we have recently shown research on a multimodal version of Med-PaLM capable of interpreting medical images, textual data, and other modalities, describing a path for how we can realize the exciting potential of AI models to help advance real-world clinical care.

We have also been working on how best to harness AI models in clinical workflows. We have shown that coupling deep learning with interpretability methods can yield new insights for clinicians. We have also shown that self-supervised learning, with careful consideration of privacy, safety, fairness and ethics, can reduce the amount of de-identified data needed to train clinically relevant medical imaging models by 3100, reducing the barriers to adoption of models in real clinical settings. We also released an open source mobile data collection platform for people with chronic disease to provide tools to the community to build their own studies.

AI systems can also discover completely new signals and biomarkers in existing forms of medical data. In work on novel biomarkers discovered in retinal images, we demonstrated that a number of systemic biomarkers spanning several organ systems (e.g., kidney, blood, liver) can be predicted from external eye photos. In other work, we showed that combining retinal images and genomic information helps identify some underlying factors of aging.

In the genomics space, we worked with 119 scientists across 60 institutions to create a new map of the human genome, or pangenome. This more equitable pangenome better represents the genomic diversity of global populations. Building on our ground-breaking AlphaFold work, our work on AlphaMissense this year provides a catalog of predictions for 89% of all 71 million possible missense variants as either likely pathogenic or likely benign.

We also shared an update on progress towards the next generation of AlphaFold. Our latest model can now generate predictions for nearly all molecules in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), frequently reaching atomic accuracy. This unlocks new understanding and significantly improves accuracy in multiple key biomolecule classes, including ligands (small molecules), proteins, nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), and those containing post-translational modifications (PTMs).

On the neuroscience front, we announced a new collaboration with Harvard, Princeton, the NIH, and others to map an entire mouse brain at synaptic resolution, beginning with a first phase that will focus on the hippocampal formation the area of the brain responsible for memory formation, spatial navigation, and other important functions.

Quantum computers have the potential to solve big, real-world problems across science and industry. But to realize that potential, they must be significantly larger than they are today, and they must reliably perform tasks that cannot be performed on classical computers.

This year, we took an important step towards the development of a large-scale, useful quantum computer. Our breakthrough is the first demonstration of quantum error correction, showing that its possible to reduce errors while also increasing the number of qubits. To enable real-world applications, these qubit building blocks must perform more reliably, lowering the error rate from ~1 in 103 typically seen today, to ~1 in 108.

Generative AI is having a transformative impact in a wide range of fields including healthcare, education, security, energy, transportation, manufacturing, and entertainment. Given these advances, the importance of designing technologies consistent with our AI Principles remains a top priority. We also recently published case studies of emerging practices in society-centered AI. And in our annual AI Principles Progress Update, we offer details on how our Responsible AI research is integrated into products and risk management processes.

Proactive design for Responsible AI begins with identifying and documenting potential harms. For example, we recently introduced a three-layered context-based framework for comprehensively evaluating the social and ethical risks of AI systems. During model design, harms can be mitigated with the use of responsible datasets.

We are partnering with Howard University to build high quality African-American English (AAE) datasets to improve our products and make them work well for more people. Our research on globally inclusive cultural representation and our publication of the Monk Skin Tone scale furthers our commitments to equitable representation of all people. The insights we gain and techniques we develop not only help us improve our own models, they also power large-scale studies of representation in popular media to inform and inspire more inclusive content creation around the world.

With advances in generative image models, fair and inclusive representation of people remains a top priority. In the development pipeline, we are working to amplify underrepresented voices and to better integrate social context knowledge. We proactively address potential harms and bias using classifiers and filters, careful dataset analysis, and in-model mitigations such as fine-tuning, reasoning, few-shot prompting, data augmentation and controlled decoding, and our research showed that generative AI enables higher quality safety classifiers to be developed with far less data. We also released a powerful way to better tune models with less data giving developers more control of responsibility challenges in generative AI.

We have developed new state-of-the-art explainability methods to identify the role of training data on model behaviors. By combining training data attribution methods with agile classifiers, we found that we can identify mislabelled training examples. This makes it possible to reduce the noise in training data, leading to significant improvements in model accuracy.

We initiated several efforts to improve safety and transparency about online content. For example, we introduced SynthID, a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images. SynthID is imperceptible to the human eye, doesn't compromise image quality, and allows the watermark to remain detectable, even after modifications like adding filters, changing colors, and saving with various lossy compression schemes.

We also launched About This Image to help people assess the credibility of images, showing information like an image's history, how it's used on other pages, and available metadata about an image. And we explored safety methods that have been developed in other fields, learning from established situations where there is low-risk tolerance.

Privacy remains an essential aspect of our commitment to Responsible AI. We continued improving our state-of-the-art privacy preserving learning algorithm DP-FTRL, developed the DP-Alternating Minimization algorithm (DP-AM) to enable personalized recommendations with rigorous privacy protection, and defined a new general paradigm to reduce the privacy costs for many aggregation and learning tasks. We also proposed a scheme for auditing differentially private machine learning systems.

On the applications front we demonstrated that DP-SGD offers a practical solution in the large model fine-tuning regime and showed that images generated by DP diffusion models are useful for a range of downstream tasks. We proposed a new algorithm for DP training of large embedding models that provides efficient training on TPUs without compromising accuracy.

We also teamed up with a broad group of academic and industrial researchers to organize the first Machine Unlearning Challenge to address the scenario in which training images are forgotten to protect the privacy or rights of individuals. We shared a mechanism for extractable memorization, and participatory systems that give users more control over their sensitive data.

We continued to expand the worlds largest corpus of atypical speech recordings to >1M utterances in Project Euphonia, which enabled us to train a Universal Speech Model to better recognize atypical speech by 37% on real-world benchmarks.

We also built an audiobook recommendation system for students with reading disabilities such as dyslexia.

Our work in adversarial testing engaged community voices from historically marginalized communities. We partnered with groups such as the Equitable AI Research Round Table (EARR) to ensure we represent the diverse communities who use our models and engage with external users to identify potential harms in generative model outputs.

We established a dedicated Google AI Red Team focused on testing AI models and products for security, privacy, and abuse risks. We showed that attacks such as poisoning or adversarial examples can be applied to production models and surface additional risks such as memorization in both image and text generative models. We also demonstrated that defending against such attacks can be challenging, as merely applying defenses can cause other security and privacy leakages. We also introduced model evaluation for extreme risks, such as offensive cyber capabilities or strong manipulation skills.

As we advance the state-of-the-art in ML and AI, we also want to ensure people can understand and apply AI to specific problems. We released MakerSuite (now Google AI Studio), a web-based tool that enables AI developers to quickly iterate and build lightweight AI-powered apps. To help AI engineers better understand and debug AI, we released LIT 1.0, a state-of-the-art, open-source debugger for machine learning models.

Colab, our tool that helps developers and students access powerful computing resources right in their web browser, reached over 10 million users. Weve just added AI-powered code assistance to all users at no cost making Colab an even more helpful and integrated experience in data and ML workflows.

To ensure AI produces accurate knowledge when put to use, we also recently introduced FunSearch, a new approach that generates verifiably true knowledge in mathematical sciences using evolutionary methods and large language models.

For AI engineers and product designers, were updating the People + AI Guidebook with generative AI best practices, and we continue to design AI Explorables, which includes how and why models sometimes make incorrect predictions confidently.

We continue to advance the fields of AI and computer science by publishing much of our work and participating in and organizing conferences. We have published more than 500 papers so far this year, and have strong presences at conferences like ICML (see the Google Research and Google DeepMind posts), ICLR (Google Research, Google DeepMind), NeurIPS (Google Research, Google DeepMind), ICCV, CVPR, ACL, CHI, and Interspeech. We are also working to support researchers around the world, participating in events like the Deep Learning Indaba, Khipu, supporting PhD Fellowships in Latin America, and more. We also worked with partners from 33 academic labs to pool data from 22 different robot types and create the Open X-Embodiment dataset and RT-X model to better advance responsible AI development.

Google has spearheaded an industry-wide effort to develop AI safety benchmarks under the MLCommons standards organization with participation from several major players in the generative AI space including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face, and more. Along with others in the industry we also co-founded the Frontier Model Forum (FMF), which is focused on ensuring safe and responsible development of frontier AI models. With our FMF partners and other philanthropic organizations, we launched a $10 million AI Safety Fund to advance research into the ongoing development of the tools for society to effectively test and evaluate the most capable AI models.

In close partnership with Google.org, we worked with the United Nations to build the UN Data Commons for the Sustainable Development Goals, a tool that tracks metrics across the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and supported projects from NGOs, academic institutions, and social enterprises on using AI to accelerate progress on the SDGs.

The items highlighted in this post are a small fraction of the research work we have done throughout the last year. Find out more at the Google Research and Google DeepMind blogs, and our list of publications.

As multimodal models become even more capable, they will empower people to make incredible progress in areas from science to education to entirely new areas of knowledge.

Progress continues apace, and as the year advances, and our products and research advance as well, people will find more and interesting creative uses for AI.

Ending this Year-in-Review where we began, as we say in Why We Focus on AI (and to what end):

If pursued boldly and responsibly, we believe that AI can be a foundational technology that transforms the lives of people everywhere this is what excites us!

This Year-in-Review is cross-posted on both the Google Research Blog and the Google DeepMind Blog.

Originally posted here:

2023: A year of groundbreaking advances in AI and computing - Google Research

Robotics company using AI that does engineering work by climbing walls

by Brock Owens

WJAC - GECKO ROBOTICS

Gecko Robotics, based out of Pittsburgh, said it is using AI to find problems before they happen at nuclear reactors, boilers, pipelines, tanks, and ships.

With robots that can climb walls, Gecko Robotics said its mission is to protect some of the world's most important assets.

Company founder and CEO Jake Loosararian said this dream started as a student at Grove City College, and now he's beginning to partner power plants that are using the software he is calling Cantilever.

What those robots are doing is they're gathering information and data as it relates to the health of the structures, Loosararian said. The software was targeted at specifically using our unique data sets that we've been collecting for the last 11 years since I started Gecko out of my college dorm room.

He said making the AI able to climb walls is inspired by a trip to a powerplant in Oil City when he was in college.

The guy who was gathering information to see if the power plant was going to have a forced outage, Loosararian said, Fell and died doing that inspection.

The robot is remote control operated and according to Loosararian takes about half the time doing the engineering jobs. He said it does require some human help.

Loosararian said he understands the fear some people show toward artificial intelligence progress.

I think it's right to be skeptical of technology, but it's more important to prioritize health, safety, and actually doing the job right, Loosararian said.

At least for now, Cantilever should not fully push out the human jobs according to Loosararian.

Loosararian said, Ones that don't adopt these useful pieces of tech are very much at risk of not just providing solutions to the community that they need to be relied on, but also folks jobs are going to be at risk if you can't figure out better ways to actually operate these facilities.

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Robotics company using AI that does engineering work by climbing walls - WJAC Johnstown