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There is nothing like watching the recorded address of the Japanese prime Minister to the Congress
Help! “No Scientist Left Behind”
“Now, AI is affecting office workers,and even affecting scientists. If you look at protein folding, the problem that I had, people were working on this. They have an established discipline, they have an annual conference, they have a competition every year to see where is the state of the Art. And they have all kinds of sophisticated ways of doing this. Comes AI and completely beats them. Completely. And the initial reaction of scientists is rejection, resentment, we don’t trust it. And you can look at history, some of the quotes that were said, it was really funny. And this happened in more than one discipline where AI took over from that. But eventually, people realize that if you can’t beat them, join them. And now everybody who does research in protein folding does AI. Computer Vision is a branch of AI. And so on. So because of this, Caltech has a program, an instructional program, to be able to teach research workers in different branches of science the practical aspects of AI that can help them in their work. Do you know what the program is jokingly dubbed? No scientist left behind. [Laughter]” Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa, Caltech
ChatGPT has rocked the general public’s perception and expectations of artificial intelligence (AI). In this lecture, Abu-Mostafa will explain the science of AI in plain language and explore how the scientific details illustrate the risks and benefits of AI. Between the extremes of “AI will kill us all” and “AI will solve all our problems,” the science can help us identify what is realistic and what is speculative, and guide us in our planning, legislation, and investment in AI.
Posted in AI, Humor, Technology
Tagged "Protein Folding", AI, Caltech
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The Number One Reason for Choosing Apple for Smartphones
I have a history of buying Android smartphones but several years ago switched to Apple. The reason has to do with Operating System software updates. Apple supports iOS updates for several years, but Google only supports Android updates for a couple of years. That means that you must buy new equipment or risk exposure to malware. Related to this is the notion of hardware fragmentation. Apple has a closed hardware offering each year, whereas Android is currently running on over 24,000 different hardware devices, many of which are obsolete, running on old versions of Android that have known security vulnerabilities. This chart from OpenSignal shows the dispersion of Android devices with larger boxes for larger market share:
There is a more extensive discussion of the problem of fragmentation here at VentureBeat. That article discusses many related issues and provides many other surprisingly useful charts.
Posted in Technology
Tagged Android, Apple, comparisons, OpenSignal, VentureBeat
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Chinese Refugees: People Who Are Fleeing the Chinese Communist Party and Their Journey
The Wall Street Journal has an article tracing the journey of refugees from China. A couple of notable quotes:
The United Nations refugee agency counted 116,868 Chinese seeking asylum around the world at a point measured in mid-2022, up from 15,362 at the end of 2012, the year Mr. Xi took power.
Since the start of the government’s budget year in October through February, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have apprehended 4,271 Chinese nationals along the southwest border, 12 times the number in the same period a year earlier. Total arrests at the border during the period were 891,774.
Norma Pimentel, who oversees the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in McAllen, said the shelter staff used to see a Chinese person once every couple of months. “Now, all of a sudden, we see a surge of people from China,” she said, adding that on a day recently, 50 people, or about 25% of the day’s refugees, were Chinese.
The reporters were Wenxin Fan at wenxin.fan@wsj.com and Shen Lu at shen.lu@wsj.com
Posted in Society
Tagged China, Immigration
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Here’s a New Way to Live Forever
The OpenAI user guide(Opens in a new window) warns users: “We are not able to delete specific prompts from your history. Please don’t share any sensitive information in your conversations.” It says the system uses all questions and text submitted to it as training data.
When we say “Open” we mean OPEN !
New Article in Nature Photonics about Reducing Noise in Quantum Computing
Researchers Ludovico Lami (QuSoft, University of Amsterdam) and Mark M. Wilde (Cornell) have made significant progress in quantum computing by deriving a formula that predicts the effects of environmental noise. This is crucial for designing and building quantum computers capable of working in our imperfect world. Read more here:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/985301
and here:
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/04/formula-predicts-effects-noise-quantum-information
Posted in Technology
Tagged Quantum Computing
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Bard thinks Google will host ChatGPT Plugins
Bard also thought that I might be referring to WordPress Plugins. That’s a little weird because I made no reference to WordPress.
Posted in AI, Technology
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The Worst Schools in the U.S.
Herald Weekly gives us a list of the worst colleges in the US. They get low marks for cost versus median salary, for high crime exposure, and for abridgement of free speech. Warning: there are surprises given the criteria used in selection. It is a long list. How about UC Santa Barbara. Didn’t see that coming.
Comparing Bing and Bard on the Question of Roofing Shingle Underlayments
I asked Bing and Bard various questions about Roofing Shingle Underlayments. You can see that each response has advantages and disadvantages. Bing uses ChatGPT version 4. Google Bard v1 is based on the long running internal “Project Bard.” Note the final question and answer.
Here is how Bard described the situation to me:
- Bard was named after the Bards of Celtic cultures, who were professional storytellers, verse-makers, music composers, oral historians and genealogists.
- Bard and Bing with ChatGPT are both large language models that can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. However, there are some key differences between the two.
- Bard is a Google product, while Bing with ChatGPT is a Microsoft product. This means that Bard is trained on Google’s data, while Bing with ChatGPT is trained on Microsoft’s data. This could potentially lead to differences in the way that the two models generate text and answer questions.
- Bard is still under development, while Bing with ChatGPT is already available to the public. This means that Bard may not be as polished or reliable as Bing with ChatGPT. However, it also means that Bard is constantly being improved, and it may eventually surpass Bing with ChatGPT in terms of accuracy and reliability.
Posted in Construction, Technology
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