Author: The Conversation

Last week, artificial intelligence pioneers and experts urged major AI labs to immediately pause the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. An open letter penned by the Future of Life Institute cautioned that AI systems with “human-competitive intelligence” could become a major threat to humanity. Among the risks, the possibility of AI outsmarting humans, rendering us obsolete, and taking control of civilisation. The letter emphasises the need to develop a comprehensive set of protocols to govern the development and deployment of AI. It states: These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable…

A recent open letter by computer scientists and tech industry leaders calling for a six-month ban on artificial intelligence development has received widespread attention online. Even Canada’s Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne has responded to the letter on Twitter. The letter, published by the non-profit Future of Life Institute, has asked for all AI labs to stop training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, the model behind ChatGPT. The letter argues that AI has been “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.” The letter…

In architecture, new materials rarely emerge. For centuries, wood, masonry and concrete formed the basis for most structures on Earth. In the 1880s, the adoption of the steel frame changed architecture forever. Steel allowed architects to design taller buildings with larger windows, giving rise to the skyscrapers that define city skylines today. Since the industrial revolution, construction materials have been largely confined to a range of mass-produced elements. From steel beams to plywood panels, this standardized kit of parts has informed the design and construction of buildings for over 150 years. That may soon change with advances in what’s called “large-scale…

With the launch of ChatGPT to the public, post-secondary institutions are aware of the seismic impact this could have on both the business and art of education. Educators’ emotions have ranged from intrigue and excitement to panic about massive disruption. Public access to this large language model (LLM) raises important questions about teaching and learning, including the design of meaningful assessments, the appropriate use of technology, maintaining academic integrity and quality control over education. There are also broader existential, ethical and equity concerns, such as those raised by AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru, computational linguist Emily M. Bender and others. In response to these legitimate concerns, there…

As a victim or suspect of a crime, or witness to an offence, you may find your actions, behaviour and character scrutinised by the police or a barrister using CCTV footage. You may assume all the relevant footage has been gathered and viewed. You may sit on a jury and be expected to evaluate CCTV footage to help determine whether you find a defendant guilty or innocent. You may believe you will see all the key images. You may trust the camera never lies. However, the evidence we gathered during our study of British murder investigations and trials reveals how, like other…

In March 2020, weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, its director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus delivered a speech in which he emphasised the importance of testing: … the most effective way to prevent infections and save lives is breaking the chains of transmission. And to do that, you must test and isolate. You cannot fight a fire blindfolded. And we cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected. We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test. The pandemic exposed critical shortcomings of existing diagnostic techniques. It revealed an urgent need for tests…

The AI chatbot known as ChatGPT, developed by the company OpenAI, has caught the public’s attention and imagination. Some applications of the technology are truly impressive, such as its ability to summarise complex topics or to engage in long conversations. It’s no surprise that other AI companies have been rushing to release their own large language models (LLMs) – the name for the technology underlying chatbots like ChatGPT. Some of these LLMs will be incorporated into other products, such as search engines. With its impressive capabilities in mind, I decided to test the chatbot on Wordle – the word game from the New York Times – which I have been…

Recent public interest in tools like ChatGPT has raised an old question in the artificial intelligence community: is artificial general intelligence (in this case, AI that performs at human level) achievable? An online preprint this week has added to the hype, suggesting the latest advanced large language model, GPT-4, is at the early stages of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as it’s exhibiting “sparks of intelligence”. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has unabashedly declared its pursuit of AGI. Meanwhile, a large number of researchers and public intellectuals have called for an immediate halt to the development of these models, citing “profound risks to society and humanity”. These…

On May 11, 2020 a deadly threat flew from Los Angeles to New York City in under nine minutes. It was a 20-tonne Chinese Long March 5B rocket body passing around 60 miles overhead. Just 15 minutes later, the rocket body re-entered the atmosphere and broke into pieces, including a 12-metre-long pipe that crashed into a village in the Ivory Coast. Reports of a 12-m-long object crashing into the village of Mahounou in Cote d’Ivoire. It’s directly on the CZ-5B reentry track, 2100 km downrange from the Space-Track reentry location. Possible that part of the stage could have sliced through the atmo…

We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs. Two colliding neutron stars – each the super-dense core of an exploded star – produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a “supramassive” neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole. Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory – an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of…