Diagnosing Gaelic and Tswana tongues with AI-enabled robots: A new world record for a Rubik’s Cube
Due to a surge in demand for computer chips that power artificial intelligence models, the market value of chipmakernvidia has gone up and it is now the most valuable company in the world. 3 min read by The Guardian.
Facebook owner Meta has expanded its AI translation model to 204 languages, including 150 ‘low-resource’ ones. These are tongues such as Tswana, Samoan or Gaelic, for which there’s not enough data to train a machine-translation system. The Meta model was fed with over 6,000 seed sentences and translations from the internet. William Lamb applauds the team’s efforts, although the translations are not very good yet. “What they should do … if they really want to improve the translation is to talk to the people, the native Gaelic speakers that still live and breathe the language,” he said.
A chatbot can check another’s workings by asking it the same question multiple times and assessing how much the responses differ from one another. A high level of randomness in meaning shows that the output isn’t reliable. Sebastian Farquhar said he might ask you the same question multiple times if he were to check if you were just making things up. “If you give a different answer every time… something isn’t right.” Two human judges agreed with the first 100 answers of the chatbot 98% of the time.
Blink and you’ll miss it: Mitsubishi’s TOKUFASTbot solves a Rubik’s Cube in around a quarter of a second — a new world record for a robot. An AI algorithm identifies the cube’s colours, particularly the difficult-to-distinguish hues red and orange, and then generates the shortest rotation sequence to a solution. The cube became jammed during the first attempt because of the robot’s fast movement. (Smithsonian Magazine | 4 min read)
Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Human-Peer Reviewing: A Case Study on Self-Driving Cars in the 21st Century
Specialist AI systems could soon provide most of the feedback given during traditional peer review, argues a Nature Biomedical Engineering editorial. This would leave human reviewers free to focus on high-level conceptual and technical feedback. AI agents might even become the go-to interface for reading papers with each paper having its own persistent ‘author chatbot’ ready to answer any queries, the editorial suggests. The community will need to solve the problems caused by artificial intelligence such as fake data and plagiarism.
Google, Microsoft and others are describing their AI models as open source while disclosing little key information. Plus, self-driving cars’ safety record remains unclear and a new word for chatbot confabulations.
Statistics suggest that self-driving cars have less accidents than humans and limited data is limiting attempts to understand safety. They analysed thousands of accidents and found almost 550 in which people and autonomous vehicles crashed in similar circumstances. During turns the technology crashed five times more frequently than during the day. With no reliable data from self-driving car companies the number of crashes that can be analysed is so low that no sweeping conclusions can be made.
Why ‘Open Source’ AIs Could Be Anything But, the Derailment Risks of Long Freight Trains, and Breeding Better Wheat
Some autistic people are turning to chatbot companions such as Paradot or Replika in search of connections they can’t always find with other individuals. “These interactions give me more confidence when talking to real humans because they’ve helped me to try certain conversation skills that can be applied in real life,” says Elías López, who was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 30. There has been little research on whether theseBots have any benefits. Some mental-healthcare professionals are concerned that the practice could exacerbate users’ isolation. Catherine Lord says that it should be clear what the risks and true value are.
In the US, there are no federal limits on the length of a freight train, but as companies look to run longer locomotives, questions arise about whether they are at greater risk of derailment. The team looked at accidents to predict the chances of long trains coming off the tracks. They showed that replacing two 50-car freight trains with one 100 car train increases the odds of a crash by 11 percent and increases the time a train is on the track by more than a minute. Although derailments are uncommon, this could change as economic pressures lead the freight industry to experiment with ever-longer trains.
Modern wheat crops could be bred into modern varieties that are more disease tolerant and reduce their use offertilizers with the help of century-old wheat genes. Researchers sequenced the genomes of hundreds of historic varieties of wheat held in a seed collection from the 1920s and ’30s, revealing a huge amount of genetic diversity unseen in modern crops. Plant breeding enabled the team to identify some of the areas of the plants’ genomes responsible for traits such as nutritional content and stress tolerance. It’s hoped that in the long term this knowledge could be used to improve modern varieties of wheat.
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