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AI

Google's AI Photo Editing Tools Are Expanding To a Lot More Phones (theverge.com) 7

Starting May 15th, almost all Google Photos users will be able to access the AI photo editing features previously limited to Pixel owners and Google One subscribers. All you'll need is a device with at least a 64-bit chip, 4GB of RAM, and either iOS 15 or Android 8.0. The Verge reports: Magic Editor is Google's generative AI photo editing tool, and it debuted as one of the headline AI features on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Those kinds of features typically remain exclusive to new Pixels for six months after launch, and right on time, Google's bringing it to previous Pixel phones. But it's not stopping there; any Google Photos user with an Android or iOS device that meets the minimum requirements will be able to use it without a Google One subscription -- you'll just be limited to 10 saved edits per month. Pixel owners and paid subscribers, however, will get unlimited use.

Older features like Photo Unblur and Magic Eraser -- which used to be available only to Pixel owners and certain Google One subscribers -- will be free for all Photos users. Google has a full list of these features on its Photos community site, and it includes things like editing portrait mode blur and lighting effects (useful, but not the cutting-edge stuff, for better or worse). Other generative AI features that launched with the Pixel 8 series, like Best Take and Audio Magic Eraser, are remaining exclusive to those newest Pixels, at least for now.

United States

New Bill Would Force AI Companies To Reveal Use of Copyrighted Art (theguardian.com) 56

A bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force AI companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. From a report: The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software-and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content.

The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users' prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies.

"AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives. We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections," Schiff said in a statement. Whether major AI companies worth billions have made illegal use of copyrighted works is increasingly the source of litigation and government investigation. Schiff's bill would not ban AI from training on copyrighted material, but would put a sizable onus on companies to list the massive swath of works that they use to build tools like ChatGPT -- data that is usually kept private.

United States

The US is Right To Target TikTok, Says Vinod Khosla (ft.com) 90

Vinod Khosla, the founder of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, opines on the bill that seeks to ban TikTok or force its parent firm to divest the U.S. business: Even if one could argue that this bill strikes at the First Amendment, there is legal precedent for doing so. In 1981, Haig vs Agee established that there are circumstances under which the government can lawfully impinge upon an individual's First Amendment rights if it is necessary to protect national security and prevent substantial harm. TikTok and the AI that can be channelled through it are national and homeland security issues that meet these standards.

Should this bill turn into law, the president would have the power to force any foreign-owned social media to be sold if US intelligence agencies deem them a national security threat. This broader scope should protect against challenges that this is a bill of attainder. Similar language helped protect effective bans on Huawei and Kaspersky Lab. As for TikTok's value as a boon to consumers and businesses, there are many companies that could quickly replace it. In 2020, after India banned TikTok amid geopolitical tensions between Beijing and New Delhi, services including Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, MX TakaTak, Chingari and others filled the void.Â

Few appreciate that TikTok is not available in China. Instead, Chinese consumers use Douyin, the sister app that features educational and patriotic videos, and is limited to 40 minutes per day of total usage. Spinach for Chinese kids, fentanyl -- another chief export of China's -- for ours. Worse still, TikTok is a programmable fentanyl whose effects are under the control of the CCP.

AI

AI Hardware Company From Jone Ive, Sam Altman Seeks $1 Billion In Funding 51

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Former Apple design lead Jony Ive and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are seeking funding for a new company that will produce an "artificial intelligence-powered personal device," according to The Information's sources, who are said to be familiar with the plans. The exact nature of the device is unknown, but it will not look anything like a smartphone, according to the sources. We first heard tell of this venture in the fall of 2023, but The Information's story reveals that talks are moving forward to get the company off the ground.

Ive and Altman hope to raise at least $1 billion for the new company. The complete list of potential funding sources they've spoken with is unknown, but The Information's sources say they are in talks with frequent OpenAI investor Thrive Capital as well as Emerson Collective, a venture capital firm founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. SoftBank CEO and super-investor Masayoshi Son is also said to have spoken with Altman and Ive about the venture. Financial Times previously reported that Son wanted Arm (another company he has backed) to be involved in the project. [...] Altman already has his hands in several other AI ventures besides OpenAI. The Information reports that there is no indication yet that OpenAI would be directly involved in the new hardware company.
AI

Texas Will Use Computers To Grade Written Answers On This Year's STAAR Tests 41

Keaton Peters reports via the Texas Tribune: Students sitting for their STAAR exams this week will be part of a new method of evaluating Texas schools: Their written answers on the state's standardized tests will be graded automatically by computers. The Texas Education Agency is rolling out an "automated scoring engine" for open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness for reading, writing, science and social studies. The technology, which uses natural language processing technology like artificial intelligence chatbots such as GPT-4, will save the state agency about $15-20 million per year that it would otherwise have spent on hiring human scorers through a third-party contractor.

The change comes after the STAAR test, which measures students' understanding of state-mandated core curriculum, was redesigned in 2023. The test now includes fewer multiple choice questions and more open-ended questions -- known as constructed response items. After the redesign, there are six to seven times more constructed response items. "We wanted to keep as many constructed open ended responses as we can, but they take an incredible amount of time to score," said Jose Rios, director of student assessment at the Texas Education Agency. In 2023, Rios said TEA hired about 6,000 temporary scorers, but this year, it will need under 2,000.

To develop the scoring system, the TEA gathered 3,000 responses that went through two rounds of human scoring. From this field sample, the automated scoring engine learns the characteristics of responses, and it is programmed to assign the same scores a human would have given. This spring, as students complete their tests, the computer will first grade all the constructed responses. Then, a quarter of the responses will be rescored by humans. When the computer has "low confidence" in the score it assigned, those responses will be automatically reassigned to a human. The same thing will happen when the computer encounters a type of response that its programming does not recognize, such as one using lots of slang or words in a language other than English.
"In addition to 'low confidence' scores and responses that do not fit in the computer's programming, a random sample of responses will also be automatically handed off to humans to check the computer's work," notes Peters. While similar to ChatGPT, TEA officials have resisted the suggestion that the scoring engine is artificial intelligence. They note that the process doesn't "learn" from the responses and always defers to its original programming set up by the state.
AI

Intel Says New Gaudi 3 AI Chips Top Nvidia H100s in Speed and Cost 32

Intel on Tuesday unveiled its new "Gaudi 3" AI chip that the company claims is over twice as power-efficient and can run AI models one-and-a-half times faster than Nvidia's H100 GPU. "It also comes in different configurations like a bundle of eight Gaudi 3 chips on one motherboard or a card that can slot into existing systems," adds CNBC. From the report: Intel tested the chip on models like Meta's open-source Llama and the Abu Dhabi-backed Falcon. It said Gaudi 3 can help train or deploy models, including Stable Diffusion or OpenAI's Whisper model for speech recognition. Intel says its chips use less power than Nvidia's. Intel said that the new Gaudi 3 chips would be available to customers in the third quarter, and companies including Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Supermicro will build systems with the chips. Intel didn't provide a price range for Gaudi 3.

Gaudi 3 is built on a five nanometer process, a relatively recent manufacturing technique, suggesting that the company is using an outside foundry to manufacture the chips. In addition to designing Gaudi 3, Intel also plans to manufacture AI chips, potentially for outside companies, at a new Ohio factory expected to open in 2027 or 2028, CEO Patrick Gelsinger told reporters last month. "We do expect it to be highly competitive" with Nvidia's latest chips, said Das Kamhout, vice president of Xeon software at Intel, on a call with reporters. "From our competitive pricing, our distinctive open integrated network on chip, we're using industry-standard Ethernet. We believe it's a strong offering."
Facebook

Meta Platforms To Launch Small Versions of Llama 3 Next Week (theinformation.com) 7

Meta Platforms is planning to launch two small versions of its forthcoming Llama 3 large-language model next week, The Information has reported [non-paywalled link]. From the report: The models will serve as a precursor to the launch of the biggest version of Llama 3, expected this summer. Release of the two small models will likely help spark excitement for the forthcoming Llama 3, which will be coming out roughly a year after Llama 2 launched last July.

It comes as several companies, including Google, Elon Musk's xAI and Mistral, have released open-source LLMs. Meta hopes Llama 3 will catch up with OpenAI's GPT-4, which can answer questions based on images users upload to the chatbot. The biggest version will be multimodal, which means it will be capable of understanding and generating both texts and images. In contrast, the two small models to be released next week won't be multimodal, the employee said.

AI

Google's Gemini Pro 1.5 Enters Public Preview on Vertex AI (techcrunch.com) 1

Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google's most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google's enterprise-focused AI development platform. From a report: The company announced the news during its annual Cloud Next conference, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google's Gemini family of generative AI models. Undoubtedly its headlining feature is the amount of context that it can process: between 128,000 tokens to up to 1 million tokens, where "tokens" refers to subdivided bits of raw data (like the syllables "fan," "tas" and "tic" in the word "fantastic").

One million tokens is equivalent to around 700,000 words or around 30,000 lines of code. It's about four times the amount of data that Anthropic's flagship model, Claude 3, can take as input and about eight times as high as OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo max context. A model's context, or context window, refers to the initial set of data (e.g. text) the model considers before generating output (e.g. additional text). A simple question -- "Who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election?" -- can serve as context, as can a movie script, email, essay or e-book.

Google

Google Announces Axion, Its First Custom Arm-based Data Center Processor (techcrunch.com) 22

Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. From a report: Based on Arm's Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances. [...] "Technical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year," Google spokesperson Amanda Lam said. Maybe the chips aren't even ready yet? After all, it took Google a while to announce Arm-chips in the cloud, especially considering that Google has long built its in-house TPU AI chips and, more recently, custom Arm-based mobile chips for its Pixel phones. AWS launched its Graviton chips back in 2018.
Google

With Vids, Google Thinks It Has the Next Big Productivity Tool For Work (theverge.com) 56

For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. From a report: Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies... or even not-that-beautiful movies. It's meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a pitch, update the team, explain a complicated concept. The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google's VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps. "The ethos that we have is, if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids," she says. "No video production is required."

Based on what I've seen of Vids so far, it appears to be roughly what you'd get if you transformed Google Slides into a video app. You collect assets from Drive and elsewhere and assemble them in order -- but unlike the column of slides in the Slides sidebar, you're putting together a left-to-right timeline for a video. Then, you can add voiceover or film yourself and edit it all into a finished video. A lot of those finished videos, I suspect, will look like recorded PowerPoint presentations or Meet calls or those now-ubiquitous training videos where a person talks to you from a small circle in the bottom corner while graphics play on the screen. There will be lots of clip art-heavy product promos, I'm sure. But in theory, you can make almost anything in Vids. ou can either do all this by yourself or prompt Google's Gemini AI to make a first draft of the video for you. Gemini can build a storyboard; it can write a script; it can read your script aloud with text-to-speech; it can create images for you to use in the video. The app has a library of stock video and audio that users can add to their own Vids, too.

Japan

'Social Order Could Collapse' in AI Era, Two Top Japan Companies Say (wsj.com) 116

Japan's largest telecommunications company and the country's biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative AI, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked. From a report: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, or NTT, and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings made the proposal in an AI manifesto to be released Monday. Combined with a law passed in March by the European Parliament restricting some uses of AI, the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.

The Japanese companies' manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology. Without giving specifics, it said AI tools have already begun to damage human dignity because the tools are sometimes designed to seize users' attention without regard to morals or accuracy. Unless AI is restrained, "in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars," the manifesto said. It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.

AI

Musk Predicts AI Will Overtake Human Intelligence Next Year 291

The capability of new AI models will surpass human intelligence by the end of next year [non-paywalled link], so long as the supply of electricity and hardware can satisfy the demands of the increasingly powerful technology, according to Elon Musk. From a report: "My guess is that we'll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year," said the billionaire entrepreneur, who runs Tesla, X and SpaceX. Within the next five years, the capabilities of AI will probably exceed that of all humans, Musk predicted on Monday during an interview on X with Nicolai Tangen, the chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management.

Musk has been consistently bullish on the development of so-called artificial general intelligence, AI tools so powerful they can beat the most capable individuals in any domain. But Monday's prediction is ahead of schedules he and others have previously forecast. Last year, he predicted "full" AGI would be achieved by 2029. Some of Musk's boldest predictions, such as rolling out self-driving Teslas and landing a rocket on Mars, have not yet been fulfilled. A number of AI breakthroughs over the past 18 months, including the launch of video generation tools and more capable chatbots, have pushed the frontier of AI forward faster than expected. Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google's DeepMind, predicted earlier this year that AGI could be achieved by 2030.

The pace of development has been slowed by a bottleneck in the supply of microchips, particularly those produced by Nvidia, which are essential for training and running AI models. Those constraints were easing, Musk said, but new models are now testing other data centre equipment and the electricity grid. "Last year it was chip constrained ... people could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year it's transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two [the constraint is] just electricity supply," he said.
Microsoft

Microsoft is Confident Windows on Arm Could Finally Beat Apple Silicon-Powered Macs 147

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for "AI PCs" next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple's M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks. After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft's latest consumer-focused Surface hardware.

Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it's planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have "faster app emulation than Rosetta 2" -- the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple's own processors.

App emulation has been a big problem for Windows on Arm over the past decade, but Microsoft did deliver x64 app emulation for Windows 11 more than two years ago. This helps ensure apps can run on Windows on Arm devices when there isn't a native ARM64 version. Native Arm apps are key for improved performance on upcoming Windows on Arm laptops, and Google has just recently released its own ARM64 version of Chrome ready for these upcoming devices.
Education

Professors Are Now Using AI to Grade Essays. Are There Ethical Concerns? (cnn.com) 102

A professor at Ithaca College runs part of each student's essay through ChatGPT, "asking the AI tool to critique and suggest how to improve the work," reports CNN. (The professor said "The best way to look at AI for grading is as a teaching assistant or research assistant who might do a first pass ... and it does a pretty good job at that.")

And the same professor then requires their class of 15 students to run their draft through ChatGPT to see where they can make improvements, according to the article: Both teachers and students are using the new technology. A report by strategy consultant firm Tyton Partners, sponsored by plagiarismâdetection platform Turnitin, found half of college students used AI tools in Fall 2023. Meanwhile, while fewer faculty members used AI, the percentage grew to 22% of faculty members in the fall of 2023, up from 9% in spring 2023.

Teachers are turning to AI tools and platforms — such as ChatGPT, Writable, Grammarly and EssayGrader — to assist with grading papers, writing feedback, developing lesson plans and creating assignments. They're also using the burgeoning tools to create quizzes, polls, videos and interactives to up the ante" for what's expected in the classroom. Students, on the other hand, are leaning on tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot — which is built into Word, PowerPoint and other products.

But while some schools have formed policies on how students can or can't use AI for schoolwork, many do not have guidelines for teachers. The practice of using AI for writing feedback or grading assignments also raises ethical considerations. And parents and students who are already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on tuition may wonder if an endless feedback loop of AI-generated and AI-graded content in college is worth the time and money.

A professor of business ethics at the University ofâVirginia "suggested teachers use AI to look at certain metrics — such as structure, language use and grammar — and give a numerical score on those figures," according to the article. ("But teachers should then grade students' work themselves when looking for novelty, creativity and depth of insight.")

But a writer's workshop teacher at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia "also sees uploading a student's work to ChatGPT as a 'huge ethical consideration' and potentially a breach of their intellectual property. AI tools like ChatGPT use such entries to train their algorithms..."

Even the Ithaca professor acknowledged to CNN that "If teachers use it solely to grade, and the students are using it solely to produce a final product, it's not going to work."
AI

In America, A Complex Patchwork of State AI Regulations Has Already Arrived (cio.com) 13

While the European Parliament passed a wide-ranging "AI Act" in March, "Leaders from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have all called for AI regulations in the U.S.," writes CIO magazine. Even the Chamber of Commerce, "often opposed to business regulation, has called on Congress to protect human rights and national security as AI use expands," according to the article, while the White House has released a blueprint for an AI bill of rights.

But even though the U.S. Congress hasn't passed AI legislation — 16 different U.S. states have, "and state legislatures have already introduced more than 400 AI bills across the U.S. this year, six times the number introduced in 2023." Many of the bills are targeted both at the developers of AI technologies and the organizations putting AI tools to use, says Goli Mahdavi, a lawyer with global law firm BCLP, which has established an AI working group. And with populous states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida either passing or considering AI legislation, companies doing business across the US won't be able to avoid the regulations. Enterprises developing and using AI should be ready to answer questions about how their AI tools work, even when deploying automated tools as simple as spam filtering, Mahdavi says. "Those questions will come from consumers, and they will come from regulators," she adds. "There's obviously going to be heightened scrutiny here across the board."
There's sector-specific bills, and bills that demand transparency (of both development and output), according to the article. "The third category of AI bills covers broad AI bills, often focused on transparency, preventing bias, requiring impact assessment, providing for consumer opt-outs, and other issues."

One example the article notes is Senate Bill 1047, introduced in the California State Legislature in February, "would require safety testing of AI products before they're released, and would require AI developers to prevent others from creating derivative models of their products that are used to cause critical harms."

Adrienne Fischer, a lawyer with Basecamp Legal, a Denver law firm monitoring state AI bills, tells CIO that many of the bills promote best practices in privacy and data security, but said the fragmented regulatory environment "underscores the call for national standards or laws to provide a coherent framework for AI usage."

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.
Microsoft

Is Microsoft Working on 'Performant Sound Recognition' AI Technologies? (windowsreport.com) 28

Windows Report speculates on what Microsoft may be working on next based on a recently-published patent for "performant sound recognition AI technologies" (dated April 2, 2024): Microsoft's new technology can recognize different types of sounds, from doorbells to babies crying, or dogs barking, but not limited to them. It can also recognize sounds of coughing or breathing difficulties, or unusual noises, such as glass breaking. Most intriguing, it can recognize and monitor environmental sounds, and they can be further processed to let users know if a natural disaster is about to happen...

The neural network generates scores and probabilities for each type of sound event in each segment. This is like guessing what type of sound each segment is and how sure it is about the guess. After that, the system does some post-processing to smooth out the scores and probabilities and generate confidence values for each type of sound for different window sizes.

Ultimately, this technology can be used in various applications. In a smart home device, it can detect when someone breaks into the house, by recognizing the sound of glass shattering, or if a newborn is hungry, or distressed, by recognizing the sounds of baby crying. It can also be used in healthcare, to accurately detect lung or heart diseases, by recognizing heartbeat sounds, coughing, or breathing difficulties. But one of its most important applications would be to prevent casual users of upcoming natural disasters by recognizing and detecting sounds associated with them.

Thanks to Slashdot reader John Nautu for sharing the article.
Privacy

Four Baseball Teams Now Let Ticket-Holders Enter Using AI-Powered 'Facial Authentication' (sfgate.com) 42

"The San Francisco Giants are one of four teams in Major League Baseball this season offering fans a free shortcut through the gates into the ballpark," writes SFGate.

"The cost? Signing up for the league's 'facial authentication' software through its ticketing app." The Giants are using MLB's new Go-Ahead Entry program, which intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple: Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on it), upload the selfie and, once you're approved, breeze through the ticketing lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance gate on their way to their seats...

The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB's test team for the technology in 2023. They're joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024...

[Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database — and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology facial recognition. "This is not the type of facial recognition that's scanning a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people," Karri Zaremba, a senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. "It's facial authentication. ... That's the only way in which it's being utilized."

Privacy advocates "have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition technology may be something to be wary of," the article acknowledges. But it adds that using the technology is still completely optional.

And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants' senior vice president of ticket sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users "walking into the ballpark without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out."
Education

AI's Impact on CS Education Likened to Calculator's Impact on Math Education (acm.org) 102

In Communication of the ACM, Google's VP of Education notes how calculators impacted math education — and wonders whether generative AI will have the same impact on CS education: Teachers had to find the right amount of long-hand arithmetic and mathematical problem solving for students to do, in order for them to have the "number sense" to be successful later in algebra and calculus. Too much focus on calculators diminished number sense. We have a similar situation in determining the 'code sense' required for students to be successful in this new realm of automated software engineering. It will take a few iterations to understand exactly what kind of praxis students need in this new era of LLMs to develop sufficient code sense, but now is the time to experiment."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes it's not the first time the Google executive has had to consider "iterating" curriculum: The CACM article echoes earlier comments Google's Education VP made in a featured talk called The Future of Computational Thinking at last year's Blockly Summit. (Blockly is the Google technology that powers drag-and-drop coding IDE's used for K-12 CS education, including Scratch and Code.org). Envisioning a world where AI generates code and humans proofread it, Johnson explained: "One can imagine a future where these generative coding systems become so reliable, so capable, and so secure that the amount of time doing low-level coding really decreases for both students and for professionals. So, we see a shift with students to focus more on reading and understanding and assessing generated code and less about actually writing it. [...] I don't anticipate that the need for understanding code is going to go away entirely right away [...] I think there will still be at least in the near term a need to understand read and understand code so that you can assess the reliabilities, the correctness of generated code. So, I think in the near term there's still going to be a need for that." In the following Q&A, Johnson is caught by surprise when asked whether there will even be a need for Blockly at all in the AI-driven world as described — and the Google VP concedes there may not be.
Transportation

Elon Musk Says Tesla Will Unveil Its Robotaxi on August 8 (cnbc.com) 153

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Tesla "is poised to roll out its version of a robotaxi later this year, according to CEO Elon Musk." ("Musk made the announcement on social media saying 'Tesla Robotaxi unveil on 8/8.' His cryptic post contained no other details about the forthcoming line of autonomous vehicles.")

Electrek thinks they know what it'll look like. "Through Walter Issacson's approved biography of Musk, we learned that Tesla Robotaxi will be 'Cybertruck-like'."

8/8 (of the year 2024) would be a Thursday — although CNBC adds one additional clarification: At Tesla, "unveil" dates do not predict a near-future date for a commercial release of a new product. For example, Tesla unveiled its fully electric heavy-duty truck, the Semi, in 2017 and did not begin deliveries until December 2022. It still produces and sells very few Semis to this day.
"Tesla shares rose over 3% in extended trading after Musk's tweet."
AMD

AMD To Open Source Micro Engine Scheduler Firmware For Radeon GPUs 23

AMD plans to document and open source its Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware for GPUs, giving users more control over Radeon graphics cards. From a report: It's part of a larger effort AMD confirmed earlier this week about making its GPUs more open source at both a software level in respect to the ROCm stack for GPU programming and a hardware level. Details were scarce with this initial announcement, and the only concrete thing it introduced was a GitHub tracker.

However, yesterday AMD divulged more details, specifying that one of the things it would be making open source was the MES firmware for Radeon GPUs. AMD says it will be publishing documentation for MES around the end of May, and will then release the source code some time afterward. For one George Hotz and his startup, Tiny Corp, this is great news. Throughout March, Hotz had agitated for AMD to make MES open source in order to fix issues he was experiencing with his RX 7900 XTX-powered AI server box. He had talked several times to AMD representatives, and even the company's CEO, Lisa Su.

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