Hello everyone!

We’ve got a lot to cover today! So let’s get right to it…

Here’s the agenda for today:

• IBM is replacing 7,800 jobs with AI

• The Godfather of AI regrets his life’s work

• ChatGPT and MidJourney Updates

• StarCoder allows everyone to write code

Reading time: 5 minutes and 23 seconds

News Reel:

Highlight 1: IBM is replacing 7,800 jobs with AI!

It’s finally happening… AI is officially replacing humans 😬. It was Buzzfeed and now IBM. Here’s a summary of what happened:

• IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has said that IBM is slowing or suspending hiring for any jobs that could be done by AI, which amounts to roughly 26,000 positions, including human resources and other non-customer-facing roles.

• Moreover, Krishna said that 30% of those jobs could get replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period🚫.

• IBM currently employs about 260,000 people, and it's unclear what may be on the chopping block next.

• This appears to be one of the first times a company has been this straightforward about its plans to replace human workers with AI, but it is not the first time it has happened, as BuzzFeed has already closed its news division and begun publishing AI quizzes and content📄.

It’s unclear, which other jobs may be replaced by AI but for now, it seems to be those that do not involve the customer front. Regardless, it doesn’t bode well for us looking for jobs😬.

Here’s the detailed article from Futurism.

Highlight 2: Geoffrey Hinton, regarded as the ‘The Godfather of AI,’ leaves Google and says he regrets his life’s work!

Geoffrey Hinton, widely considered ‘The Godfather of AI’ 🎩 changed the AI world twice: first with the concept of neural networks and second with deep learning (the foundation of ChatGPT). He announced that he was leaving Google and regrets his life’s work because he believes it could wipe out humanity 🤯. Here’s a summary of what Hinton said:

• A quote that really stuck with us - he said, ‘It is like aliens have landed on our planet and we haven’t quite realized it yet because they speak very good English.’ 📢

• He loathed the development of autonomous weapons and left his US job because of the State Department's funding of AI. He also is worried about its ability to spread fake news.

• Google has a large language model called Palm which has the capability of understanding humor. This shocked Hinton and made him think that this could be a better form of intelligence as it surpassed factual data analysis.

• Hinton believes that biological intelligence will be replaced by digital intelligence 🧠. With tech giants competing to be the ‘top dog,’ this process is speeding up.

• He blamed Microsoft for this situation. Hinton claims Google had AI for years but never released Chatbots but as soon as OpenAI gave ChatGPT to Microsoft, Google had to put what they had ‘out there.’⚔️

• Evolutions state that ‘the species that produce more viable offspring wins and AI is beating us in that race’. As soon as digital intelligence becomes more efficient, humans could be vulnerable to AI manipulation according to Hinton 🛡️.

Here’s the whole article from Spectator. We’d highly recommend going through it. It’s sure to scare you and think of AI differently than you did before.

Highlight 3: ChatGPT has a new plugin called Code Interpreter and MidJourney introduces a new version.

ChatGPT has introduced a code interpreter plugin that performs several basic tasks such as GIF creation, basic video editing, and creating visualization maps to name a few.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm since its inception; however, this new update could be the biggest one yet. Till now, ChatGPT was limited to text outputs but no more. Here’s a summary of the new update:

• OpenAI endows ChatGPT with the ability to browse the internet with the help of plugins, opening up new possibilities for developers 🧑‍💻.

• The ChatGPT code interpreter plugin provides a working Python interpreter that allows ChatGPT to solve mathematical problems🧮, perform data analysis and data visualization 🗺️, and convert files across formats.

• The plugin enhances ChatGPT's ability to produce codes from inputs in natural language (the English we speak) and offers results inside a dialogue box.

• The plugin is capable of performing basic video editing, converting GIFs into longer MP4 videos, and uploading location data to create a visualized map 📽️.

• It can also extract colors from an image to create a palette 🎨, compress large images and even analyze Bitcoin datasets🔮.

I recently tried the plugin and it is incredible🤯. I uploaded data about my Spotify most heard, playlists, and favorite artists and it understood my music taste pretty well! Here is another example of its use case:

Here is a detailed article for you from The Indian Express.

On another note, MidJourney has released its new version (5.1). They say that their new version is more coherent, sharp, and beautiful. From experience, it is also much better at recreating faces. Here’s a comparison of a basic prompt:

MidJourney has also added a “RAW” mode for expert users to reduce the 'opinionatedness' of our model and give you more creative control.

A.I. Tool Showcase:

StarCoder:

Tired of ChatGPT getting our code wrong? Here’s StarCoder, made by BigCode (an open-scientific collaboration working on the responsible development of Large Language Models for Code), now everyone can code in more than 80 programming languages📈!

Why is this special? A popular Python benchmark is HumanEval which tests if the model can complete basic functions. Both StarCoder and StarCoderBase outperform the largest models, including PaLM, LaMDA (Google’s Large Language Model), and LLaMA (Meta’s LLM), despite being significantly smaller. It scored 40% as compared to the others’ 36% 🏆.

Let’s use it. Simply chat with or play around with its multiple features. Some features of this tool are:

• It can help you write basic code.

• Help debug your code💻.

• Act as a tech assistant by explaining complex technical topics or even providing instructions to get certain tasks done.

Here’s the chatbot. Simply chat with it and ask it questions to get a code for it. As an example, I asked it to write a basic code in MATLAB that allows me to check whether a particular year is a leap year. This is what it gave me:

So I copied the code into MATLAB and it works perfectly. Here are my results:

There are several other features you should try out! Here’s a link to the HuggingFace blog that talks more about this tool. Also, here’s the official research paper for those interested.

For those interested in more details:

• StarCoder and StarCoderBase were trained on permissively licensed data from GitHub, resulting in models that outperform existing open Code LLMs and match or surpass closed models.

• The models can process input up to over 8,000 tokens, enabling a wide range of applications such as autocompletion, modification, and natural language explanations.

• The training data consists of permissively licensed code from The Stack 1.2, with personally identifiable information removed.

Here’s a great video by WorldofAI that explains StarCoder and its features really well!

What do you think about this? Would you still want to learn how to code?

A.I. Art of the Week:

Here is an image that we played around with this week:

Have a great week everyone!

-A.I. Bits