Google employee suspended for believing AI model is sentient
Google placed an engineer within its Responsible AI division on paid administration leave after he broke a confidentiality agreement by speaking to a House Judiciary (That’s an American political thing) committee member. That conversation included details about his work and Google’s alleged unethical activities around AI. He revealed to The Washington Post that he believes one of Google’s AI projects, LaMDA or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, has achieved sentience. He also revealed that he came to his conclusions from his experience as a priest instead of a scientist.
A read-through of his conversation with what is essentially a chatbot doesn’t provide any conclusive evidence that we might be facing an I, Robot situation. There is considerable evidence that Google has made a fairly sophisticated chatbot. That should be no surprise given that the company has access to so much data about how people speak and construct sentences. Maybe when Google starts trying to attach cells to a robot skeleton, we could start to worry. Until then, AI isn’t sentient. Yet.
Source: Engadget
DeFi's largest lender, Celcius, all but freezes accounts
The Celsius Network, the largest DeFi lender in the world of cryptocurrencies, on Sunday announced that it was “pausing all withdrawals, Swap, and transfers between accounts.” If you’ve been following any cryptocurrency news over the last six months, this should come as no surprise. After all, Celsius works in a very similar way to a ‘normal’ bank. It obtains deposits of currency and then loans out the currency while providing an interest rate to depositors. Only in this case, that currency is crypto.
Well, that’s the idea, but because pretty much all cryptocurrencies have been doing a nosedrive, this flopped rather spectacularly. According to CoinMarketCap, the company’s token CEL has dropped, from trading at $7.1 a year ago to $0.2 at time of writing. That’s nearly a 190% difference (because it went up, and then way down). In yesterday’s blog post, the company said, “We are taking this necessary action for the benefit of our entire community in order to stabilize liquidity and operations while we take steps to preserve and protect assets.” But it also said that will take time and there will be delays. We’re beginning to see the comparisons to ponzi schemes now.
Source: The Verge
We could see a new HTC metaverse-focused phone this month
At Mobile World Congress this year, Taiwanese tech company HTC teased a new high-end mobile phone that will tie-in to the metaverse… somehow. We still don’t know what that tie-in will look like or how it will work but now at least we have a date for when we will learn more. Last week, HTC tweeted the save-the-date for 28 June 2022. The accompanying image also featured the Viverse logo, the company’s open-source answer to the metaverse.
Our best bet for the new device would be some sort of VR/AR feature that will presumably also work with the company’s Vive Flow VR headset. Little else is known about the upcoming device but, from the sounds of things, this is going to be as industry gripping as the crypto-focused Exodus 1 phone that featured a hardware crypto wallet. If you are really into VR, this might be worth a gander, but we wouldn’t hold our breath.
Source: Engadget
Netflix will release a Dragon Age series in December
Although the next Dragon Age game from Bioware is still a while away, fans of the games will get a different taste of the franchise in December in the form of a six-episode animated series, Dragon Age: Absolution. The reveal trailer didn’t have much in the way of synopsis but you can see some good looking shots of a few different races and classes, like Elves, Dwarves, mages and warriors so expect some of that in a new story within Tevinter. Oh, there’s a special ring as well, we think. It’s probably not Elden, or The One, but it’s better than nothing.
Red Dog Culture House is producing the series for Netflix. You might be familiar with their other work which includes the animated The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf and the ‘Good Hunting’ episode from Volume One of Love, Death & Robots. While fans eagerly await the next game, this will (hopefully) tide them over until it eventually releases.
Source: Engadget