This week in AI
UK to invest in AI by creating a taskforce. The UK is trying to get on the AI bandwagon and not be left behind. It has pledged £100 million to establish a Foundation Model Taskforce. The team will develop AI that ideally makes the country “globally competitive”. Call me a cynic (soapbox alert), but the UK needs to change a few things to become competitive again – one being to repeal IR35, which hamstrings hiring the best talent.
Apple is to introduce an AI-based Health Coaching Service in 2024. Codenamed Quartz, the AI-based service, will help encourage users to exercise, improve their eating habits, and take steps to improve their sleep.
Hugging Face releases it’sown version of ChatGPT. Hugging Face, the AI startup backed by tens of millions in venture capital, has released an open source alternative to OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot.
Interesting Projects
Zap Weeds with AI-Power Lasers. Yes, a fricking laser! I love the premise of this project, in order to avoid spraying nasty chemicals on your crops to destroy weeds, tow along an AI-powered weed spotter and terminator. Of course, that just leaves trying to eliminate the use of pesticides – I wonder how that will be solved (hopefully more lasers, mwah-hah-ha with a little finger in the side of the mouth).
Chatbot in a Speaker. Hoani Bryson decided to make a standalone voice-operated ChatGPT client in a Speaker complete with a ring of cool mood LED’s.
Australia aiming to use drones to detect Koalas. Australia is expanding its project to survey koalas. The idea is to use citizen scientists to fit thermal cameras to drones and collect data which is then fed to the project’s AI to process and count the koalas.
Baby cry detection using ChatGPT.ChatGPT, TinyML and Text-to-Audio technologies were used to create artificial data for detecting baby crying. The project uses ChatGPT to generate a load of text to describe scenarios of a baby crying, ie. “Tearful baby during bath”. These are fed to another AI that takes test descriptions and tries to generate audio of that. These audios are used as the dataset to train an AI model using Edge Impulse and then deployed on an Arduino Nicla Voice.
Cool Stuff
MatrixSpace announces AI-enabled Radar Modules. MatrixSpace announces the first in a series of small Radar modules that combines sensing, real-time AI edge processing, and RF communication in a package the size of a cellphone to equip large-scale use cases, such as semi-autonomous mobile platforms, general aviation, and portable or fixed systems. Digitizing the outdoors is the ability to measure objects’ size, location, and movement in time, shifting reliance from human sensing to a far more detailed recognition of objects and their movements.
“Liquid” Neural networks adapt on the go. Recent research has shown that small AI networks called Liquid Neural Networks have enabled drones to navigate new environments, outperforming more advanced systems. These are a class of networks that learn on the job, continually adapting to new information just like our brains.