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Most artificial intelligence experts seem to agree that taking the next big leap in the field will depend at least partly on building supercomputers on a once unimaginable scale. At an event hosted by the venture capital firm Sequoia last month, the CEO of a startup called Lightmatter pitched a technology that might well enable this hyperscale computing rethink by letting chips talk directly to one another using light.
Yes, San Francisco is a nexus of artificial intelligence innovation, but it’s also one of the queerest cities in America. The Mission District, where ChatGPT maker OpenAI is headquartered, butts up against the Castro, where sidewalk crossings are coated with rainbows, and older nude men are often seen milling about.
Now in its 16th season, RuPaul’s Drag Race has birthed more than a few iconic lip-sync battles, but precious few have featured Muppets. None, even. AI Drag Race changed that. In the Instagram account’s recent season finale, Miss Piggy, wearing an AI-generated drag look, faced off against lover-turned-rival Kermisha Ihman, who had a thick, 40-inch-long ponytail atop her green felt head.
Voice synthesis has come a long way since 1978’s Speak & Spell toy, which once wowed people with its state-of-the-art ability to read words aloud using an electronic voice. Now, using deep-learning AI models, software can create not only realistic-sounding voices but can also convincingly imitate existing voices using small samples of audio.
Ever since the rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022, many people in science, business, and media have been obsessed with AI. A cursory look at my own published work during that period fingers me as among the guilty. My defense is that I share with those other obsessives a belief that large language models are the leading edge of an epochal transformation. Maybe I’m swimming in generative Kool-Aid, but I believe AI advances within our grasp will change not only the way we work, but the structure of businesses, and ultimately the course of humanity.
This past Monday, about a dozen engineers and executives at data science and AI company Databricks gathered in conference rooms connected via Zoom to learn if they had succeeded in building a top artificial intelligence language model. The team had spent months, and about $10 million, training DBRX, a large language model similar in design to the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But they wouldn’t know how powerful their creation was until results came back from the final tests of its abilities.
Bloom, a non-player character with a face like a potato and a black beanie pulled tight around his ears, wants to know about my strategy and how I fare in combat. “I follow a map and I punch hard,” I reply into the microphone. Text of our conversation flashes across the bottom of my screen. The NPC thinks I’m bragging. He continues to drone on about our place in the resistance and how we need to fight back, his AI-driven voice tinny enough to sound mechanical but not grating.
As AI-powered image generators have become more accessible, so have websites that digitally remove the clothes of people in photos. One of these sites has an unsettling feature that provides a glimpse of how these apps are used: two feeds of what appear to be photos uploaded by users who want to “nudify” the subjects.