Reddit communities have reopened after a protest blackout that resulted in outages across the platform. However, tensions remain high as many community moderators decided to reopen their subreddits due to threats from Reddit against those promoting the blackout. The reopening was seen as a necessary step to avoid being replaced by the company. While some major subreddits like r/music and r/aww are still restricted or private, the platform has experienced significant instability and a lack of content due to the coordinated protest. Continue reading “Reddit Considers Banning Leaders of Protests”
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Google released Bard, its rival to ChatGPT
Google is launching a new AI-powered conversation service called Bard, which will be able to explain complex topics in simple terms and provide mundane tasks like suggesting lunch ideas or tips for planning a party. It is unclear if Bard will be able to write prose like William Shakespeare 🙂 .
The announcement comes shortly after Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and other AI tools.
Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI of $1 billion has increased the pressure on Google to show that it can compete in an area of technology that could be just as transformative as PCs, the internet, and smartphones have been in the past four decades.
Google is working on artificial intelligence technology to respond to the success of ChatGPT, which has been attracting millions of users and raising concerns in schools. Google’s technology, named “Language Model for Dialogue Applications” or LaMDA, will be used to power its Bard service, which is part of its “code red” effort. CEO Sundar Pichai has been emphasizing the importance of AI for the past six years.
Google is investing in and partnering with Anthropic, an AI startup, and plans to incorporate AI tools like LaMDA into its search engine. The AI tools will be deployed soon and the startup‘s chatbot, Claude, is focused on AI safety.
Google has a program focused on responsible AI and ML technology and was rocked by the departure of AI researcher Timnit Gebru in 2020. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were drawn back into active work due to an emergency caused by the ChatGPT AI system.
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Microsoft researchers adding AI to Excel
Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, Excel, is getting an upgrade! The clever people at Microsoft are adding AI technology to make it even better. This will help people make and keep their formulas in Excel more easily. It’s called FLAME and it’s a small language model created by Microsoft’s own software developers.
Big language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are very popular right now. These models are made by training them on a lot of text so they can predict what to say based on what they’re asked. The issue with these big models is that they take a lot of resources to make and use.
Training them requires a lot of data and money, and using them also takes up a lot of computer power. For example, it took 248 super powerful computer graphics cards and 24 days to train a model called Incoder 6.7B on 159GB of computer code.
Lambda Labs has calculated that making GPT-3, a big language model with 175 billion parameters, costs around 4.6 million dollars using powerful computer chips called Tesla V100. FLAME, on the other hand, is much smaller with only 60 million parameters and was specifically made just for Excel formulas. The researchers didn’t say what FLAME stands for, but it’s probably short for “First LAnguage Model for Excel.”
Even though it’s small, FLAME does a better job than bigger language models made for completing computer code. This includes models like CodeT5, Codex-Cushman, and Codex-Davinci that have 220 million, 12 billion, and 175 billion parameters respectively.
FLAME was created to help people make and fix formulas in Excel, and to help with something called syntax reconstruction which involves taking out extra characters from formulas so the model can understand and put them back together better.
In the future, if FLAME is added to Excel, it could fix formulas like this:
=IF('Jan 17'!B2="", 'Feb 17'!B2="", 'Mar 17'!B2="", 'Apr 17'!B2="", yes)
And turn it into this, using its ability to make corrections:
=IF(AND('Jan 17'!B2="", 'Feb 17'!B2="", 'Mar 17'!B2="", 'Apr 17'!B2=""), "yes", "no")
Because FLAME needs much less training data than other big language models like Codex, Microsoft should find it more affordable to use when it’s ready.
For people who have to work with big spreadsheets that have a lot of formulas, FLAME looks like it could be really helpful.
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