A selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about AI.
General News, Articles, and Analyses
Microsoft Trustworthy AI: Unlocking human potential starts with trust
Author: Takeshi Numoto
(Tuesday, September 24, 2024) “As AI advances, we all have a role to play to unlock AI’s positive impact for organizations and communities around the world. That’s why we’re focused on helping customers use and build AI that is trustworthy, meaning AI that is secure, safe and private. At Microsoft, we have commitments to ensure Trustworthy AI and are building industry-leading supporting technology. Our commitments and capabilities go hand in hand to make sure our customers and developers are protected at every layer.”
As AAA companies drool over AI, Shigeru Miyamoto says “Nintendo would rather go in a different direction” | GamesRadar+
Author: Anna Koselke
(Wednesday, September 25, 2024) “While other video game developers turn to controversial emerging technology like generative AI, Nintendo remains true to what makes it “special” – and that’s certainly not artificial intelligence.”
Selling Is Hard Right Now. Here’s How to Win Business in the Gen AI Era | Andreessen Horowitz
https://a16z.com/selling-winning-new-business-genai/
Authors: Justin Kahl; David George; and Alex Immerman
(Thursday, September 26, 2024) “It feels like software is shrinking while everyone is scrambling to buy generative AI. What’s changed, and how can you get a leg up?”
HHS Invests in Project to Accelerate the Discovery and Development of New Antibiotics Using Generative AI
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/09/26/development-new-antibiotics-using-generative-ai.html
(Thursday, September 26, 2024) “Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced funding for the Transforming Antibiotic R&D with Generative AI to stop Emerging Threats (TARGET) project, which will use AI to speed the discovery and development of new classes of antibiotics. This program is another action to support the United States’ longstanding commitment to combating antimicrobial resistance (AMR), from groundbreaking innovation to international collaboration. The U.S. is a global leader in the fight against AMR and has a demonstrated track record of progress in protecting people, animals, and the environment from the threat of AMR domestically and globally.”
AI Can (Mostly) Outperform Human CEOs | Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2024/09/ai-can-mostly-outperform-human-ceos
Authors: Hamza Mudassir; Kamal Munir; Shaz Ansari; and Amal Zahra
(Thursday, September 26, 2024) “Generative AI has demonstrated the potential to significantly outperform human CEOs in strategic decision-making by excelling in data-driven tasks like product design and market optimization. In an experiment simulating the automotive industry, AI models outpaced human participants in market share and profitability but faltered in handling unpredictable disruptions, leading to faster dismissals by virtual boards. While AI’s ability to analyze complex data sets and iterate rapidly could revolutionize corporate strategy, it lacks the intuition and foresight required to navigate black swan events. Rather than fully replacing human CEOs, AI is poised to augment leadership by enhancing data analysis and operational efficiency, leaving humans to focus on long-term vision, ethics, and adaptability in dynamic markets. The future of leadership will likely be a hybrid model where AI complements human decision-making.”
AI Chipsets
Intel launches Xeon 6 and Gaudi 3 AI chips to boost AI and HPC performance | VentureBeat
Author: Dean Takahashi
(Tuesday, September 24, 2024) “Intel is launching new Xeon 6 processors with performance cores as well as Gaudi 3 AI accelerators to stay competitive in the AI wars. The new Xeon 6 processors have performance cores (P-cores) that can double AI vision performance and the Gaudi 3 AI accelerators have 20% more throughput.”
IBM’s NorthPole achieves new speed and efficiency milestones – IBM Research
https://research.ibm.com/blog/northpole-llm-inference-results
(Thursday, September 26, 2024) “In new experimental results, the brain-inspired NorthPole research prototype chip has achieved lower latency and higher energy efficiency than comparable GPUs.”
Articles Related to Other News
The Mushroom Kingdom That Shigeru Miyamoto Built – The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/arts/design/shigeru-miyamoto-interview-nintendo-museum.html
Author: Zachary Small
(Tuesday, September 24, 2024) “Decades after Miyamoto invented Mario and Zelda, he explains what makes Nintendo special and its transformation into a global entertainment brand.”
Technical Papers, Articles, and Preprints
[2409.17995] Joint Localization and Planning using Diffusion
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17995
Authors: Beyer, L. Lao and Karaman, S.
(Thursday, September 26, 2024) “Diffusion models have been successfully applied to robotics problems such as manipulation and vehicle path planning. In this work, we explore their application to end-to-end navigation – including both perception and planning – by considering the problem of jointly performing global localization and path planning in known but arbitrary 2D environments. In particular, we introduce a diffusion model which produces collision-free paths in a global reference frame given an egocentric LIDAR scan, an arbitrary map, and a desired goal position. To this end, we implement diffusion in the space of paths in SE(2), and describe how to condition the denoising process on both obstacles and sensor observations. In our evaluation, we show that the proposed conditioning techniques enable generalization to realistic maps of considerably different appearance than the training environment, demonstrate our model’s ability to accurately describe ambiguous solutions, and run extensive simulation experiments showcasing our model’s use as a real-time, end-to-end localization and planning stack.”
