Elon Musk thinks the world is woefully unprepared for the impact of artificial intelligence. On Sunday, he agreed that the technology will hit people like an asteroid, and he revealed that he used his only one-on-one meeting with then President Barack Obama to push for A.I. regulation.

The Twitter and Tesla CEO made the comments in response to a tweet from A.I. software developer Mckay Wrigley, who wrote on Saturday: It blows my mind that people cant apply exponential growth to the capabilities of AI. You wouldve been called a *lunatic* a year ago if you said wed have GPT-4 level AI right now. Now think another year. 5yrs? 10yrs? Its going to hit them like an asteroid.

Musk responded: I saw it happening from well before GPT-1, which is why I tried to warn the public for years. The only one on one meeting I ever had with Obama as President I used not to promote Tesla or SpaceX, but to encourage AI regulation. Obama had dinner with Musk in February 2015 in San Francisco.

This week, Musk responded to news about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer laying the groundwork for Congress to regulate artificial intelligence.

Good news! AI regulation will be far more important than it may seem today, Musk tweeted.

According to the Financial Times, Musk is developing plans to launch an A.I. startup, dubbed X.AI, to compete against Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which makes generative A.I. tools, including the A.I. chatbots ChatGPT and GPT-4 and the image generator DALL-E 2.

Musk is also reportedly working on an A.I. project at Twitter.

A few weeks ago, Musk called for a six-month pause on developing A.I. tools more advanced than GPT-4, the successor to ChatGPT. He was joined in signing an open letter by hundreds of technology experts, among them Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. The letter warned of mass-scale misinformation and the mass automation of jobs.

The power of A.I. systems to automate some white-collar jobs is in little doubt. A Wharton professor recently ran an experiment to see what A.I. tools could accomplish on a business project in 30 minutes and called the results superhuman. Meanwhile some remote workers are apparently taking advantage of productivity-enhancing A.I. tools to hold multiple full-time jobs, with their employers none the wiser. But fears that in the long run A.I. will replace many jobs are mounting.

Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit, but he parted ways with it after a power struggle with CEO Sam Altman over its control and direction, according to the Wall Street Journal.

He tweeted on Feb. 17 that OpenAI was created as an open-source nonprofit to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.

Altman himself has warned frequently about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Last month in an ABC interview, he said that other A.I. developers working on ChatGPT-like tools wont apply the kind of safety limits his firm hasand the clock is ticking.

Musk has long believed that oversight for artificial intelligence is necessary, having described the technology as potentially more dangerous than nukes.

We need some kind of, like, regulatory authority or something overseeing A.I. development, he told Tesla investors last month. Make sure its operating in the public interest.

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Elon Musk agrees A.I. will hit people like an asteroid, says he used Obama meeting to urge regulation - Fortune

The St. Louis County Police Department has tapped artificial intelligence technology to reduce 911 wait times for county residents.

We are trying to provide prompt, efficient and accurate service to first responders in the community, said Brian Battles, the administrative specialist for the departments Bureau of Communications. But over the last three years, we noticed a decrease in the amount of applications that we've taken for the public safety dispatcher position, while the workload has increased. We were not able to keep up with that under the direction we were going.

Dispatchers handle about 2,000 calls a day, split roughly 50/50 between 911 and nonemergency issues like how to get a copy of a police report. Priority always goes to 911 calls, Battles said, but once dispatchers get on a nonemergency call, they cannot switch if an emergency call comes in.

And youre locked into a 5minute conversation with somebody on a nonemergency call in which you're not going to be able to provide them any assistance anyway, he said. That can leave someone who needs 911 waiting for the next available operator.

In order to free up dispatchers for 911 calls, the bureau needed to find a way to divert nonemergency calls. After consulting with other agencies and looking at national trends, Battles said, the department signed a contract with AT&T, which uses an intelligent voice assistant from Five9.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public Radio

Since the system went live in March, Battles said, the volume of nonemergency calls answered by dispatchers has decreased by 60%.

All 911 calls are still handled by dispatchers, Battles said. But those who dial the nonemergency line (636-529-8210) will have their call answered by a voice asking them to please state the nature of your call. The system is programmed to recognize key words and phrases, and then route the caller to the correct department, though they will get to a live person if the system incorrectly routes them twice.

Matt Crecelius, business manager for the St. Louis County Police Officers Association, called the system a great benefit to the community and our emergency dispatchers by making workloads more manageable.

Donald Wunsch, director of the Kummer Institutes Center for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, said residents should give the system a chance.

The chances are that more often than not, this system is likely to forward you to as good a direction as the random person operating that system would be, he said. Even when you get to a human, it's kind of annoying if you have to get forwarded five times before you get to the right human.

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St. Louis County hopes artificial intelligence will reduce wait times ... - St. Louis Public Radio

When OpenAI, an artificial intelligence startup, released its ChatGPT tool in November, it seemed like little more than a toyan automated chat engine that could spit out intelligent-sounding responses on a wide range of topics for the amusement of you and your friends. In many ways, it didnt seem much more sophisticated than previous experiments with AI-powered chat software, such as the infamous Microsoft bot Taywhich was launched in 2016, and quickly morphed from a novelty act into a racism scandal before being shut downor even Eliza, the first automated chat program, which was introduced way back in 1966. Since November, however, ChatGPT and an assortment of nascent counterparts have sparked a debate not only over the extent to which we should trust this kind of emerging technology, but how close we are to what experts call Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which, they warn, could transform society in ways that we dont understand yet. Bill Gates, the billionaire cofounder of Microsoft, wrote recently that artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet.

The new wave of AI chatbots has already been blamed for a host of errors and hoaxes that have spread around the internet, as well as at least one death: La Libre, a Belgian newspaper, reported that a man died by suicide after talking with a chat program called Chai; based on statements from the mans widow and chat logs, the software appears to have encouraged the user to kill himself. (Motherboard wrote that when a reporter tried the app, which uses an AI engine powered by an open-source version of ChatGPT, it offered different methods of suicide with very little prompting.) When Pranav Dixit, a reporter at BuzzFeed, used FreedomGPTanother program based on an open source version of ChatGPT, which, according to its creator, has no guardrails around sensitive topicsthat chatbot praised Hitler, wrote an opinion piece advocating for unhoused people in San Francisco to be shot to solve the citys homeless crisis, [and] used the n-word.

The Washington Post has reported, meanwhile, that the original ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal involving Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, after a lawyer in California asked the program to generate a list of academics with outstanding sexual harassment allegations against them. The software cited a Post article from 2018, but no such article exists, and Turley said that hes never been accused of harassing a student. When the Post tried asking the same question of Microsofts Bing, which is powered by GPT-4 (the engine behind ChatGPT), it repeated the false claim about Turley, and cited an op-ed piece that Turley published in USA Today, in which he wrote about the false accusation by ChatGPT. In a similar vein, ChatGPT recently claimed that a politician in Australia had served prison time for bribery, which was also untrue. The mayor has threatened to sue OpenAI for defamation, in what would reportedly be the first such case against an AI bot anywhere.

According to a report in Motherboard, a different AI chat programReplika, which is also based on an open-source version of ChatGPTrecently came under fire for sending sexual messages to its users, even after they said they werent interested. Replika placed limits on the bots referencing of erotic roleplaybut some users who had come to depend on their relationship with the software subsequently experienced mental-health crises, according to Motherboard, and so the erotic roleplay feature was reinstated for some users. Ars Technica recently pointed out that ChatGPT, for its part, has invented books that dont exist, academic papers that professors didnt write, false legal citations, and a host of other fictitious content. Kate Crawford, a professor at the University of Southern California, told the Post that because AI programs respond so confidently, its very seductive to assume they can do everything, and its very difficult to tell the difference between facts and falsehoods.

Joan Donovan, the research director at the Harvard Kennedy Schools Shorenstein Center, told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that disinformation is a particular concern with chatbots because AI programs lack any way to tell the difference between true and false information. Donovan added that when her team of researchers experimented with an early version of ChatGPT, they discovered that, in addition to sources such as Reddit and Wikipedia, the software was also incorporating data from 4chan, an online forum rife with conspiracy theories and offensive content. Last month, Emily Bell, the director of Columbias Tow Center for Digital Journalism, wrote in The Guardian that AI-based chat engines could create a new fake news frenzy.

As I wrote for CJR in February, experts say that the biggest flaw in a large language model like the one that powers ChatGPT is that, while the engines can generate convincing text, they have no real understanding of what they are writing about, and so often insert what are known as hallucinations, or outright fabrications. And its not just text: along with ChatGPT and other programs have come a similar series of AI image generators, including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, which are capable of producing believable images, such as the recent photos of Donald Trump being arrestedwhich were actually created by Eliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative reporting outfit Bellingcatand a viral image of the Pope wearing a stylish puffy coat. (Fred Ritchin, a former photo editor at the New York Times, spoke to CJRs Amanda Darrach about the perils of AI-created images earlier this year.)

Three weeks ago, in the midst of all these scares, a body called the Future of Life Institutea nonprofit organization that says its mission is to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologiespublished an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on further AI development. The letter suggested that we might soon see the development of AI systems powerful enough to endanger society in a number of ways, and stated that these kinds of systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. More than twenty thousand people signed the letter, including a number of AI researchers and Elon Musk. (Musks foundation is the single largest donor to the institute, having provided more than eighty percent of its operating budget. Musk himself was also an early funder of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, but he later distanced himself after an attempt to take over the company failed, according to a report from Semafor. More recently, there have been reports that Musk is amassing servers with which to create a large language model at Twitter, where he is the CEO.)

Some experts found the letter over the top. Emily Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and a co-author of a seminal research paper on AI that was cited in the Future of Life open letter, said on Twitter that the letter misrepresented her research and was dripping with #Aihype. In contrast to the letters vague references to some kind of superhuman AI that might pose profound risks to society and humanity, Bender said that her research focuses on how large language models, like the one that powers ChatGPT, can be misused by existing oppressive systems and governments. The paper that Bender co-published in 2021 was called On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? It asked whether enough thought had been put into the potential risks of such models. After the paper came out, two of Benders co-authors were fired from Googles AI team. Some believe that Google made that decision because AI is a major focus for the companys future.

As Chloe Xiang noted for Motherboard, Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton and the author of a newsletter called AI Snake Oil, also criticized the open letter for making it harder to tackle real AI harms, and characterized many of the questions that the letter asked as ridiculous. In an essay for Wired, Sasha Luccioni, a researcher at the AI company Hugging Face, argued that a pause on AI research is impossible because it is already happening around the world, meaning there is no magic button that would halt dangerous AI research while allowing only the safe kind. Meanwhile, Brian Merchant, at the LA Times, argued that the all doom-and-gloom about the risks of AI may spring from an ulterior motive: apocalyptic doomsaying about the terrifying power of AI makes OpenAIs technology seem important, and therefore valuable.

Are we really in danger from the kind of artificial intelligence behind services like ChatGPT, or are we just talking ourselves into it? (I would ask ChatGPT, but Im not convinced I would get a straight answer.) Even if its the latter, those talking themselves into it now include regulators both in the US and around the world. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration has started examining whether some kind of regulation needs to be applied to tools such as ChatGPT, due to the concerns that the technology could be used to discriminate or spread harmful information. Officials in Italy already banned ChatGPT for alleged privacy violations. (They later stated that the chatbot could return if it meets certain requirements.) And the software is facing possible regulation in a number of other European countries.

As governments are working to understand this new technology and its risks, so, too, are media companies. Often, they are doing so behind the scenes. But Wired recently published a policy statement on how and when it plans to use AI tools. Gideon Lichfield, Wireds global editorial director, told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the guidelines are designed both to give our own writers and editors clarity on what was an allowable use of AI, as well as for transparency so our readers would know what they were getting from us. The guidelines state that the magazine will not publish articles written or edited by AI tools, except when the fact that its AI-generated is the whole point of the story.

On the other side of the ledger, a number of news organizations seem more concerned that chatbots are stealing from them. The Journal reported recently that publishers are examining the extent to which their content has been used to train AI tools such as ChatGPT, how they should be compensated and what their legal options are.

Other notable stories:

ICYMI: Free Evan, prosecute the hostage takers

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ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, and the news - Columbia Journalism Review

Aliens have long been a fascinating subject for humans. Innumerable movies, TV series and books are proof of this allure. Our search for extra-terrestrial has eventaken us to other planets, albeit remotely. This search has progressed leaps and bounds in the last few years, but it is still in its natal stages. Global space agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and China National Space Administration (CNSA) have in recent years sent rovers to Mars to aid this search remotely. However, the accuracy of these random searches remains low.

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To remedy this, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has been exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for finding extraterrestrial life on Mars and other icy worlds.

According to a report on Space, a recent study from SETIstates that AI could be used to detect microbial life in the depths of the icy oceans on other planets.

In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, the team details how they trained a machine-learning model to scan data for signs of microbial life or other unusual features that could be indicative of alien life.

Also read |Here's how Artificial Intelligence can help modern-day Goldilocks get a good night's sleep

Using a machine learning algorithm called convolutional neural networks (CNNs) a multidisciplinary team of scientists led by SETI's Kim Warren-Rhodes has mapped sparse lifeforms on Earth.Warren-Rhodes worked alongside experts from other prestigious institutions: Michael Phillips of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laband Freddie Kalaitzis of the Universityof Oxford.

The system developed by them used statistical ecology and AI-detected biosignatures with up to 87.5 per cent accuracy, compared to only 10 per cent for random searches. As per the researchers, itcanpotentially reduce the search area by up to 97 per cent, making it easier for scientists to locate potential chemical traces of life.

Also read |Up, Up, and Away!: Elon Musks SpaceX to try and launch Starship, its most powerful rocket ever on Monday

For testing their system,they initiallyfocused on the sparse lifeforms that dwell in salt domes, rocks, and crystals at Salar de Pajonales at the boundary of the Chilean Atacama Desert and Altiplano.

Warren-Rhodes and his team collected over 8,000 images and 1,000 samples from Salar de Pajonales to search for photosynthetic microbes that may represent a biosignature on NASA's "ladder of life detection" for finding life beyond Earth.

The team also used drone imagery to simulate Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High-Resolution Imaging Experiment camera's Martian terrain images to examine the region.

They found that microbial life in the region is concentrated in biological hotspots that strongly relate to the availability of water.

Researchers suggest that the machine learning tools developed can be used in robotic planetary missions like NASA's Perseverance Rover. The tools can guide rovers towards areas with a higher probability of having traces of alien life, even if they are rare or hidden.

"With these models, we can design tailor-made roadmaps and algorithms to guide rovers to places with the highest probability of harbouring past or present life no matter how hidden or rare," explained Warren-Rhodes.

(With inputs from agencies)

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This article describes the next big step in Artificial Intelligence which may be instant videos

The Runway is one of several businesses developing artificial intelligence technology that may soon allow anyone to create videos by merely putting a few words into a box on a computer screen. Runway expects to launch its service to a select group of testers this week. The next big step in Artificial Intelligence seems to be Instant Videos.

They represent the next step in an industry competition to develop new varieties of artificial intelligence systems that some think might be the next great thing in technology, on par with web browsers or the iPhone. This competition includes industry heavyweights like Microsoft and Google as well as many smaller firms. The development of new video-generation technologies might speed up the work of filmmakers and other digital artists while also providing a rapid and innovative method for spreading false material online, making it even more difficult to determine what is true. The systems are illustrations of generative AI, which can produce text, images, and sounds quickly.

The first video-generation systems were introduced by Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, last year, but they were kept from the general public out of concern that they might one day be used to quickly and effectively disseminate false material.

Despite the hazards, Runways CEO, Cristobal Valenzuela, stated that he thought the technology was too vital to retain in a research lab. He declared that it was among the most astounding technology created in the last 100 years. People must use it, she said. Of course, the ability to edit and manipulate video and film is nothing new. It has been a practice among filmmakers for more than a century. Researchers and digital artists have been utilizing diverse methods.

The videos are only four seconds long, and if you pay close attention, you can see that they are choppy and indistinct. Images can occasionally be strange, twisted, and unsettling. The device is capable of fusing inanimate objects like telephones and balls with living creatures like dogs and cats. But if the correct cue is supplied, it creates videos that demonstrate the direction that technology is headed.

Runways system learns by examining digital material, in this example, pictures, videos, and captions that describe what those pictures show, similar to previous generative AI systems. Researchers are optimistic they can quickly advance and broaden the capabilities of this type of technology by training it on ever-larger volumes of data. Soon, according to experts, they will produce polished short films with dialogue and music.

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What is the Next Big Step in Artificial Intelligence? - Analytics Insight