Good afternoon and welcome back.

In Today’s Email:

• World leaders call for AI pause ⏸️

• Google Brain and DeepMind team up 👏

• Pope Francis goes viral ✝️

World leaders call for AI pause ⏸️

Do you think AI is moving too fast?

Some of the world’s biggest leaders do, and they’re making it known. Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Evan Sharp, Emad Mostaque, and others recently signed an open letter by the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit that is “steering transformative technology towards benefitting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.”

The letter cites concerns about the labor market and misinformation. In particular, the letter touches on AI models becoming “human-competitive at general tasks” such as OpenAI’s GPT-4. The letter also suggests companies are developing advanced AI systems that the creators can’t “understand, predict, or reliably control” them.

It also suggested nonhuman minds will eventually “outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us.” The letter asked important questions about the state of AI.

• “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”

• “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?”

• “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?”

• “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

🤔

The letter ended with a message for the future.

“Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an "AI summer" in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt. Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do so here. Let's enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.”

Google Brain and DeepMind team up 👏

The AI teams within Alphabet are putting their rivalry aside to work together.

Here are the two teams.

• Google’s Brain: was founded in 2011 by Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Andrew Ng. Has produced many breakthroughs including AI infrastructure (developing TensorFlow), sequence-to-sequence learning (leading to Transformers and BERT), and AutoML which pioneered automated ML for production use.

• DeepMind: was founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman. Joined forces with Google in 2014. Has produced many scientific breakthroughs including diagnosing eye diseases as effectively as the world’s top doctors and predicting the complex 3D shapes of proteins.

The teams have come together to compete with OpenAI, especially after the troublesome launch of Google’s Bard chatbot.

Do you think OpenAI should be concerned?

Pope Francis goes viral ✝️

You’ve probably seen these photos going viral recently.

What’s the catch? These photos are AI-generated.

Still gotta admit, he looks dripped out.

These photos were made using Midjourney’s AI image generator. This isn’t the first time people have been misled by the ultrarealistic photos being generated.

🤯

Even Elon chimed in on the Pope’s new look.

😂😂

That’s it for today, we’ll see you back here tomorrow!