Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
-Opening sentence of the textbook States of Matter by David Goodstein.
The FTC is worried that the big tech firms will further entrench their monopolies. They are doing a lot of good stuff lately; an underappreciated boon of the Biden Presidency. Lina Khan looks to be really set on fixing decades of mistakes.
I guess they just want to know if these deals lock out potential competitors.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
You can use graphics cards for more than just graphics, eg for AI. Nvidia is a leader in facilitating that.
They offer a software toolkit for developing programs (an SDK) that use their GPUs to best effect. People have begun making "translation layers" that allow such CUDA programs to run on non-nvidia hardware. (I have no idea how any of this works.) The license of that SDK now forbids reverse engineering its output to create these compatibility tools.
Unless I am very mistaken, Nvidia can't ban the use of "translation layers" or stop people making them, as such. This clause creates a barrier to creating them, though.
Some programs will probably remain CUDA specific, because of that clause. That means that Nvidia is a gatekeeper for these programs and can charge extra for access.
Despite the fact that Nvidia is now almost the main beneficiary of the growing interest in AI, the head of the company, Jensen Huang, does not believe that additional trillions of dollars need to be invested in the industry.
*Because of
You heard it, guys. There's no need to create competition to Nvidia's chips. It's perfectly fine if all the profits go to Nvidia, says Nvidia's CEO.
That was an annoying read. It doesn't say what this actually is.
It's not a new LLM. Chat with RTX is specifically software to do inference (=use LLMs) at home, while using the hardware acceleration of RTX cards. There are several projects that do this, though they might not be quite as optimized for NVIDIA's hardware.
Go directly to NVIDIA to avoid the clickbait.
Chat with RTX uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM software and NVIDIA RTX acceleration to bring generative AI capabilities to local, GeForce-powered Windows PCs. Users can quickly, easily connect local files on a PC as a dataset to an open-source large language model like Mistral or Llama 2, enabling queries for quick, contextually relevant answers.
Source: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/chat-with-rtx-available-now/
Download page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ai-on-rtx/chat-with-rtx-generative-ai/
Currently, AI means Artificial Neural Network (ANN). That's only one specific approach. What ANN boils down to is one huge system of equations.
The file stores the parameters of these equations. It's what's called a matrix in math. A parameter is simply a number by which something is multiplied. Colloquially, such a file of parameters is called an AI model.
2 GB is probably an AI model with 1 billion parameters with 16 bit precision. Precision is how many digits you have. The more digits you have, the more precise you can give a value.
When people talk about training an AI, they mean finding the right parameters, so that the equations compute the right thing. The bigger the model, the smarter it can be.
Does that answer the question? It's probably missing a lot.
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) continues to march through the halls of Congress as though it’s the best thing since sliced bread, even though one of the co-creators of this bill clearly stated that her intention is to protect children from “the transgender” and to prevent “indoctrination” from the LGBT community.
Historically, "protecting children" was always about oppressing LGBT people and even women. Protecting kids from turning gay or becoming cross-dressers. I'm sure it seems foolish to anyone here, but if you believe that being gay is a choice, it makes sense.
Comstock Laws, anyone?
Explanation of how this works.
These "AI models" (meaning the free and open Stable Diffusion in particular) consist of different parts. The important parts here are the VAE and the actual "image maker" (U-Net).
A VAE (Variational AutoEncoder) is a kind of AI that can be used to compress data. In image generators, a VAE is used to compress the images. The actual image AI only works on the smaller, compressed image (the latent representation), which means it takes a less powerful computer (and uses less energy). It’s that which makes it possible to run Stable Diffusion at home.
This attack targets the VAE. The image is altered so that the latent representation is that of a very different image, but still roughly the same to humans. Say, you take images of a cat and of a dog. You put both of them through the VAE to get the latent representation. Now you alter the image of the cat until its latent representation is similar to that of the dog. You alter it only in small ways and use methods to check that it still looks similar for humans. So, what the actual image maker AI "sees" is very different from the image the human sees.
Obviously, this only works if you have access to the VAE used by the image generator. So, it only works against open source AI; basically only Stable Diffusion at this point. Companies that use a closed source VAE cannot be attacked in this way.
I guess it makes sense if your ideology is that information must be owned and everything should make money for someone. I guess some people see cyberpunk dystopia as a desirable future. I wonder if it bothers them that all the tools they used are free (EG the method to check if images are similar to humans).
It doesn’t seem to be a very effective attack but it may have some long-term PR effect. Training an AI costs a fair amount of money. People who give that away for free probably still have some ulterior motive, such as being liked. If instead you get the full hate of a few anarcho-capitalists that threaten digital vandalism, you may be deterred. Well, my two cents.
I remember reading about this; in particular, some fake electors showing up to vote for Trump and being turned away. I was super confused, as a european, because it seemed obvious that this meant that they were impersonating officials.
I asked americans why they hadn't been arrested. I don't quite recall the answers, but it was something about them just making a gesture, or just larping. It's still just weird to me.
There's a bunch of sci-fi stories that have a fast-talking hero conning a gullible, maybe alien, AI. I always thought that was just for comedy, until ChatGPT. I am really mildly infuriated that this is how it actually works.
Oh! Look how happy those little girls are! Probably because they just learned that Stay-At-Home-Mom isn't the only acceptable career for a woman.