Meta's artificial intelligence model can now make videos and illustrations

Meta's tool spins up surrealist videos from text prompts, another generates children's book illustrations from prose

Facebook-owner Meta published an artificial intelligence (AI) model on Wednesday that can pick out individual objects from within an image, along with a dataset of image annotations that it said was the largest ever of its kind.

The company’s research division said that its Segment Anything Model, or SAM, could identify objects in images and videos even in cases where it had not encountered those items in its training.
 

Using SAM, objects can be selected by clicking on them or writing text prompts. In one demonstration, writing the word ‘cat’ prompted the tool to draw boxes around each of several cats in a photo.
 

 

Meta has teased several features that deploy the type of generative AI popularised by ChatGPT, which creates brand new content instead of simply identifying or categorising data like other AI, although it has not yet released a product.
 

Examples include a tool that spins up surrealist videos from text prompts and another that generates children’s book illustrations from prose.
 

Meta does already use technology similar to SAM internally for activities like tagging photos, moderating prohibited content and determining which posts to recommend to users of Facebook and Instagram. 

Additionally, a New York start-up called Runway AI generated a short video in less than 2 minutes of a tranquil river in a forest, after it received a short description of the same. 

Runway, which plans to open its service to a small group of testers this week, is one of several firms building AI technology that will soon let people generate videos simply by typing several words into a box on a computer screen.

Google bets on speed

Google released new details about the supercomputers it uses to train its AI models, saying the systems are both faster and more power-efficient than comparable systems from Nvidia. Google has designed its own custom chip called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). The Google TPU is now in its fourth generation. 

Google published a paper detailing how it has strung more than 4,000 of the chips together into a supercomputer using its own custom-developed optical switches.

Biden eyes dangers from AI, says tech firms must make sure products are safe

US President Joe Biden said it remains to be seen whether artificial intelligence (AI) is dangerous, but underscored that technology companies had a responsibility to ensure their products were safe before making them public.
 

Biden told science and technology advisers that AI could help in addressing disease and climate change, but it was also important to address potential risks to society, national security and the economy. “Tech companies have a responsibility, in my view, to make sure their products are safe before making them public,” he said at  a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The president said social media had already illustrated the harm that powerful technologies can do without the right safeguards.
 

He reiterated a call for Congress to pass bipartisan privacy legislation to put limits on personal data that technology firms collect, ban advertising targeted at children, and to prioritise health and safety in product development.

Australian mayor readies world’s first defamation lawsuit over ChatGPT content

A regional Australian mayor, Brian Hood, said he may sue OpenAI if it does not correct ChatGPT’s false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery, in what would be the first defamation lawsuit against the automated text service.

- Agencies