The Daily Index — Friday, June 2, 2023 · TLDR Index

HEADLINES & LAUNCHES

TLDR AI

TLDR AI

BAIDU ROLLS OUT AI VENTURE FUND

Chinese tech giant Baidu is rolling out a 1 billion yuan ($145 million) AI venture fund to back startups focused on content generated by artificial intelligence applications. The fund will also launch a competition for developers who build applications off Baidu's ERNIE large language model (LLM) or integrate the model into their existing products.

techcrunch.com · 1 min

TLDR AI

USING GOOGLE’S CODE HISTORY TO WRITE MORE CODE

Google has recorded every change to its code base for decades, including rich descriptions, changes, and fixes. They treat this as a sequence modeling problem and create a set of robust internal tools that can help software engineers be more productive. They find it to be surprisingly effective, even at novel tasks like “history informed generation”.

ai.googleblog.com · 12 min

TLDR AI

INTRIGUING PROPERTIES OF QUANTIZATION AT SCALE

We’ve talked about precision before, that’s how much space it takes to store a number. And how many unique values that number can represent. When you reduce the precision, AI models take less space on the computer, but weird things start to happen because you represent fewer numbers for the parameters. This paper studies what happens when you quantize before training at scale. They start to poke at the magical 6B parameter performance barrier.

arxiv.org · 28 min

TLDR AI

FACE GENERATION

Creating realistic talking digital people that sync with any speech audio is an important challenge in the digital world. GeneFace++ is a new method that improves lip-syncing, video quality, and system efficiency, making it the first of its kind to achieve real-time talking face generation.

arxiv.org · 13 min

TLDR AI

COST-EFFICIENT FINE-TUNING OF COMPACT MODELS

Large AI models can be expensive and bad for the environment, so researchers have found a more efficient way to create smaller models using a method called knowledge distillation. This approach is often better than spending money on extra data and helps create compact models that still perform well in various language tasks.

arxiv.org · 17 min

TLDR AI

SPEEDING UP THE MPT 65K CONTEXT MODEL

The recent MosaicML MPT models are still gaining popularity. One of the big contributions was the “Storywriter” model which could use up to 65k tokens in context. Inference with this model was painfully slow. By adding a Key/Value cache we can speed up generation by almost 10x.

huggingface.co · 3 min

TLDR AI

AUTOMATE THE CEOS

Hamilton Nolan argues that CEOs are becoming increasingly unnecessary as AI becomes more sophisticated. He proposes that we should automate the CEO position and distribute the power and wealth that CEOs currently control to other stakeholders, such as workers and shareholders.

hamiltonnolan.com · 5 min

TLDR AI

INSIDE THE HORRIFYING WORLD OF TRUE CRIME DEEPFAKES

TikTok accounts are posting horrifying artificial intelligence-generated clips of murder victims — mostly children — describing their own ghastly demise.

archive.ph · 4 min

TLDR AI

AMAZON TURNS TO AI TO WEED OUT DAMAGED GOODS

Amazon is rolling out artificial intelligence across a dozen of its largest warehouses to screen items for damage before orders are shipped to customers.

archive.ph · 3 min