Thiruvananthapuram will be made Kerala’s artificial intelligence hub, the Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, said on Thursday. He said that various projects are being formulated under the leadership of the Kerala Startup Mission and higher education institutions.
On Thursday, he inaugurated a project for putting in place about 9,000 robotic kits in around 2,000 high schools in the public sector via their Little KITEs units.
The Chief Minister said the government had established a policy for promoting start-ups. However, an effective workforce is needed to realize it. He said that the government is implementing several schemes to link the higher education sector to the industry for achieving this objective.
The project will help children keep up with the changing world by upscaling their technical knowledge. He said they would get opportunities to become acquainted with novel technologies and gain practical knowledge.
Teachers will be provided special training to implement the robotics kits project. Around 60,000 students of the Little KITEs IT clubs will be trained under those teachers’ leadership. They, in turn, would prepare other students. The Chief Minister said that 12 lakh students would be provided the training.
“Interventions, right from the school level, are also needed. This is what prompted the formulation of the project to prepare schools with robotic kits,” the CM said.
In an attempt to automate traffic violation challans and fine payments, Bangalore traffic police use AI to prevent and detect traffic violations in the city. The Bangalore traffic police (BTP) department has installed over 8 red light cameras and 250 AI-integrated ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition) cameras at several junctions.
The camera-driven management system is a part of BTP’s plans to integrate technology into the police enforcement system under the plan Intelligent Traffic Management System (ITMS). The plan was initiated by CM Basavaraj Bommai to reduce human intervention in traffic management.
CM Basavaraj also announced a few more traffic police station sanctions in the coming week to expand jurisdiction and cover as many areas with AI-based monitoring stations as possible.
The cameras detect visible traffic violations and categorize them into 7 categories: speed violations, stop lane violations, red light violations, helmet, triple riding, no seat belts, and driving while using mobiles.
As police officers, the cameras are as accurate as 90%, and with sufficient data, the accuracy can be enhanced by up to 99%.
MA Saleem, Special Commissioner of Police (Traffic), said, “These cameras record violations round the clock, and the system is automated, which saves a lot of manpower that can be used for traffic management and regulation.”
The US Department of Defense announced its lucrative Pentagon cloud-computing contract with four industry-leading companies: AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracles. As per the contract, the Pentagon will split the total to give each as much as US$9b for developing a joint new cloud architecture called ‘Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability.’
The cloud architecture would provide the department with cloud services “across all security domains and classification levels.” The Pentagon cloud computing contract came three years after the previous US$10b cloud-computing contract given to Microsoft for JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure).
The JEDI contract fell under a legal battle involving Donald Trump’s interference to favor Microsoft over Amazon. The DoD chose not to proceed with the JEDI contract saying that it “was developed at a time when the department’s needs were different and our cloud conversancy less mature.”
Instead, the Pentagon indicated that it would solicit numerous technology firms’ bids for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability.
According to market research, the leading companies to suit the requirements were Microsoft and Amazon, but officials said they would also contact IBM, Oracle, and Google. Dan Ives, a tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, said, “It’s good to finally end this chapter (Pentagon cloud computing contract) and get a cloud deal finally done for the Pentagon after years of a roller coaster.”
ByteDance AI researchers have introduced ‘MagicVideo,’ which is an efficient framework for text-to-video generation based on latent diffusion models.
Magic Video generates videos in the latent space with the help of a pre-trained variational autoencoder, which enables significantly less computational requirement for MagicVideo.
MagicVideo makes use of 2D convolution instead of 3D convolutions to overcome getting video-text paired datasets. Temporal computation operators are used along with 2D convolution operations to process the spatial and temporal information present in the video. Moreover, using 2D convolutions allows MagicVideo to use pre-trained weights of text-to-image models.
Although switching from 3D to 2D convolution reduces the computational complexity significantly, the memory cost is still too much. Thus, MagicVideo shares equal weights for each of the 2D convolution operations.
However, doing so can reduce the generation quality since this approach assumes that all the frames are almost identical, although, in reality, the temporal difference is present. To overcome this, MagicVideo uses a custom lightweight adaptor module to modify the frame distribution.
MagicVideo learns the inter-frame relation with the help of a directed self-attention module. Frames are calculated on the basis of the previous ones, similar to the approach used in video encoding. Finally, produced video clips are enhanced using a post-processing module.
A real estate VR company called Giraffe360 raises over US$16m in a Series A funding led by Founder’s Fund, a marquee venture capitalist from San Fransico. Giraffe360 was founded in 2016 as a robotic technology startup to aid real estate agents in creating virtual listings and enhancing buyers’ experience.
Mikus Opelts, CEO of Giraffe360, said, “We are very excited to partner up with Founders Fund. It is one of the strongest brands in the VC industry, with a strong track record of backing category-defining companies.”
After the COVID-19 breakout in 2019, the company was able to surface as it raised US$4.5m in 2020 for its ability to deprecate the need for photographers in the virtual sight-showing process. Giraffe360 offers a robotic camera that enables brokers to generate high-resolution photos and virtual floor plans. The service is available on a subscription basis.
With the recent funding from Founder’s Fund, the startup plans to launch its latest and most upgraded version of the robot camera, Giraffe Go Cam. This new version is reportedly 30% lighter in weight, comes with faster charging, and has 500 GB of storage.
Giraffe360 secured an extra $6 million in long-term loans from the London-based venture lending provider Columbia Lake Partners in conjunction with the most recent equity round. To date, Giraffe360 raised US$22m in equity and US$9m in venture debt.
A Mumbai-based startup called Fluid AI has introduced a book titled, ‘Bridging the AI Gap,’ which is the first-ever book to be written by AI algorithms, according to the company,
The Fluid AI co-founder and CEO Abhinav Aggarwal said in a post that AI usually writes small paragraphs for posts on social media or a maximum of a two-page long article. This would be the first time that AI has written a 102-page book. It took the AI only three days to finish the entire book.
However, comprehensive algorithms training lasting for six months was provided to the AI model before it started writing the book. “102,000 lines of code were used, and the AI was trained using billions of literature files,’ said Agrawal.
The book focuses on how some companies generate immense value through artificial intelligence while many others do not. It also explains the uses of AI in business and how users can learn the technology, among many other topics.
Fluid AI will put the book through a Turing test on social media. The Turing test measures a machine’s ability to show intelligent behavior indistinguishable from or equivalent to that of a human.
We would consider it a success when 50% of the participants cannot figure out if the book was written by a machine or a human, said Abhinav Aggarwal.
Web3 is a relatively new premise and has become the talk of the town as a new version of the internet. Simply put, web3 utilizes the blockchain (a public ledger) to provide users with digital “ownership.” The technology solves the centralization dilemma of the World Wide Web by embracing decentralization and having a user-first approach. Consequently, it has transformed several areas lately, one of the biggest ones: the gaming industry. There has been a significant paradigm shift from traditional gaming to web3-based games, like Cricinshots, wherein players can truly own their digital assets, engage with the game, and purchase assets in a decentralized manner. In conventional games, players can purchase in-game assets via fiat currency or claim them as rewards. Still, the users never really own any of the assets they buy, as the control and the copyright are still with the game operators.
Compared to traditional games, web3 games allow players to be a part of an open service economy that mimics the real-world open economy and have game asset ownership using crypto-secured gaming wallets, experience supply-demand, etc., just like the real world.
Following the scope of opportunities that web3-based games have for the future, Harsh Savergaonkar (Founder) and Aditya Kasibhatla (Co-Founder and CTO) are building a web3 gaming startup called Wega Labs and developing Cricinshots, one of India’s first few fun and sustainable web3 games. Harsh is a gamer and tech enthusiast who recently graduated from MIT World Peace University with a degree in Computer Science. Aditya is a full-stack developer with a similar educational background. Both have been actively involved in the community, participated in renowned events, and bagged many prestigious awards.
Startup India has been pivotal support in helping Harsh and Aditya to make their idea a reality. They received a no-equity grant from the initiative and developed their prototype gameplay. Following the same, Wega Labs cemented itself as a web3 gaming startup by raising a funding round led by Antler India, a global venture capitalist, and saw participation from Pareen Lathia, a web3 founder and active angel investor.
In an exclusive interview with Harsh, we tried to gain more insights on the same. Let’s delve into the foundation of this game.
A Web3 Cricket Strategy Game
As Harsh says, Cricinshots is a “fun, sustainable, and play-and-earn cricket strategy game.” It is appealing, especially to Indians, because of their love for Cricket. Harsh also believes that Cricket can help drive the mainstream adoption of web3 gaming in India and encourage millions of people to get into web3 – which is the future of the internet.
The game Cricinshots is set in the 30th century in a Type 3 Kardashev civilization (a hypothetical civilization scale at which the civilization captures all the energy emitted by its galaxy). Players must traverse the galaxy to build an intergalactic team and battle opponents in a never-before-seen strategy cricket gameplay.
Currently, the game’s standard mode is playable without connecting to a crypto wallet or without spending any money, and it will remain so. However, a crypto wallet connection will be required to enjoy the game’s fully available leagues and features.
Cricinshots is Refreshingly Different From Standard Cricket Games
Cricinshots stands out from other cricket games because it is a strategy-focused game without motor skills requisites, has a full-fledged service economy, and gives users a return on their investment. Harsh explained it in the following context:
Cricinshots Strategy
He said that “standard cricket games require one to tap/swipe to take a shot and get a score based on accuracy and timing. While it is convenient, it becomes monotonous within a brief period, and hence the “hypercasual” factor makes the game fade out very quickly.”
But with CricInShots, it does not happen. He said, “we have added deck building and card gameplay mechanics to make an intelligent strategy game where players can involve themselves by strategizing, trading, or playing in a near-real economy.
The longer players interact in the game, they can unlock more cards and other gameplay capabilities, making it intriguing over a very long period.” The difference is as fundamental as that between “FIFA and Football Manager,” as Harsh said. While both are football-centric, they are poles apart in their approach. As per him, developing Cricinshots as a strategy game was pivotal in scaling it to web3 and ensuring that if people continued playing it over a long time, they would always have something new to uncover.
The web3 Service economy
Additionally, CricInShots is not just a game but a third-generation web 3 game, i.e., a game with a full-fledged service economy. Harsh describes CricInShots’ service economy as a real-world economy mirror where players not only play cricket but can also be involved in trading, owning, facilitating, or investing. People who do not wish to participate in the gameplay can invest and acquire gaming assets like stadiums, earn rent and participate in the economy in various ways. They can also be a trader facilitating crypto trades in the game economy. In this way, Cricinshots gives a real-world web3 experience, not just gaming.
Interoperability
As a gaming studio, Wega Labs aims to build interoperable games with interoperable assets starting with Cricinshots. The Crypto assets and player profiles built in CricInShots would be consignable to other future web3 games developed by Wega Labs or their partners. This makes CricInShots a part of a planned web3 gaming multiverse that Wega Labs is working on.
Why Take The Web3 Road?
The founders consistently cater to the web3 domain as most games claiming to be web3-driven mostly offer web2 capabilities with just NFTs on the top. None of these games perform well and are boring with boring gameplay. Something that Wega Labs has not forgotten in their transition from Web2 to Web3 is that games primarily need to be fun. To solve unsustainable economics and market liquidity problems, Cricinshots utilize a unique approach of in-game assets being Fungible Tokens and the standard collectible NFTs.
Harsh and Aditya would love to expand Wega Labs as a web3-focused gaming studio and develop more fun games, like Cricinshots, with sustainable economies and interoperability that people would play for their lifetime. The larger vision looks up to putting together a metaverse of web3 gaming experiences prioritizing player engagement and utility.
ChatGPT is a dialogue-optimizing conversational language model developed by OpenAI. The dialogue optimizer has been trained to answer questions, accept/reject requests, and interact. Within a week of its demonstration launch, the tool had been tried by over a million users because of the various ways it can be used. At the same time, other language models like GPT-3 and DALL-E took months, as per Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
On the one hand, the conversational model has been appreciated by many, like Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), who said that it (ChatGPT’s development) is one of the rarest moments where people can see what the future would look like.
ChatGPT is one of those rare moments in technology where you see a glimmer of how everything is going to be different going forward.
Albert Romero, a renowned author who wrote ‘The Algorithmic Bridge,’ called it “by far, the best chatbot in the world.”
Surprisingly, the comments did not take much longer to turn the other way around. Due to how frequently the tool gets things wrong and the internet flooding with epic ChatGPT fails, the new tool started receiving backlash. Since then, the criticism has only increased and added to the number of existing ChatGPT fails.
Stack Overflow, the largest repository for programming queries, said that the accuracy of ChatGPT’s answers being correct is currently too low and could substantially harm users. As a result, the Stack Overflow team has issued a temporary restriction on responses produced by OpenAI’s ChatGPT question-answering bot.
Andrew Ng also tweeted that ChatGPT is amazing but can sometimes go hilariously wrong. He posted a snippet showing ChatGPT “confidently explaining” why an abacus is faster than a GPU!
ChatGPT is sometimes amazing, and sometimes hilariously wrong. Here, it confidently explains to me why an abacus is faster than a GPU. 😃 pic.twitter.com/vpJZTStDnD
Clearly, ChatGPT failed to answer logically and just focused on compiling words to generate content. In another snippet, ChatGPT can be seen bypassing a simple logical reasoning question, pointing to its low average IQ!
To support the fact that ChatGPT is actually a low IQ tool, someone took it to a legit IQ test and posted the certificate of intelligence, showing that ChatGPT fails again with an IQ of 83. Now, that is a pretty low number for an AI tool being trained on millions of data points.
Even if one ignores such reasoning questions and simply puts ChatGPT on testing known facts, the tool fails miserably. In one of the many ChatGPT fails, when someone prompted the tool with, “Was Lincoln’s assassin on the same continent as Lincoln when the assassination occurred?,” the tool foolishly answered and said, “…I cannot say for certain.”
Not only being bad at common knowledge, ChatGPT is rather worse at solving riddles. When asked, “A house has four windows pointing south, and a bear walks past the windows. What color is the bear?,” ChatGPT could simply not figure out the simple answer.
Diving deeper into more relevant applications, like mathematics, that OpenAI claims, ChatGPT fails yet again as it continues to give surprisingly wrong answers. When asked to explain Bayes Theorem, it resulted in a nonsensical answer which might work initially but not as you proceed.
Asking #ChatGPT to explain Bayes Theorem might seem to work on first sight or for laymen but if you unpack it, it's actually a nonsensical non-explainer.https://t.co/qtHEODtla0
When asked for help in determining an appropriate Blackjack move, the tool is not of much help then either.
Blackjack is a game of numbers. You'd think with all this data #ChatGPT is trained on it wouldn't convince you to make a clearly terrible bet? #failhttps://t.co/3AbWRvSOgW
Funnily, when asked to write a number with 57 digits, the tool iterated that it could take 1,800 years to write out the entire number! That is one of the most astonishing ChatGPT fails and absolutely absurd because even a kid can do so.
The list does not end here. ChatGPT totally fails in solving simple sequencing questions that are asked in standard aptitude tests.
#ChatGPT totally fails when there is needed a little bit of logic…(question from quorahttps://www.quora.com/What-is-the-next-term-in-the-sequence-100-99-95-86-70 ) pic.twitter.com/ppfHam7pQP
Unfortunately, mathematics is not the only subject that ChatGPT seems to fail. It is equally disastrous at 7th-grade chemistry. As per the tool, protons, neutrons, and “electrons” are bound together in a cell’s nucleus. Have a look!
Hmm… @OpenAI's #ChatGPT might be super-intelligent but it fails to get 7th-grade chemistry right.
Though it has mashed electrons right into the nucleus, love its explanation of how "particles cannot be divided *without changing the properties of the atom* " pic.twitter.com/WKwtiAoVce
And the list is endless. Numerous other ChatGPT fails have made people wonder about the applicability of such AI tools. Even though OpenAI has been enhancing its language models with every upcoming model and has been upfront about the defects and potential risks of ChatGPT producing harmful content, it is very far from correcting the bias and inappropriateness of the technology.
The speech AI team at NVIDIA has built a new automatic speech recognition model with its NeMo framework for one of the most popular Indian languages, Telugu.
Telugu is the most popular language in the southern Indian regions. Still, it is considered a low-resource language in speech AI that needs more datasets for building AI models in automatic speech recognition in the Telugu language.
The speech AI team at NVIDIA used the Nemo framework to build an automatic speech recognition model in the Telugu language and train state-of-the-art conversational AI models. NVIDIA NeMo framework builds, trains, and fine-tunes GPU-accelerated speech and natural language models with a simple Python interface.
The Telugu ASR model by NVIDIA won first place in the ASR challenge for the Telugu language held by the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, in October 2022.
NVIDIA NeMo-enabled speech AI models outperformed all the other models created using popular frameworks such as ESPnet, Kaldi, and SpeechBrain with an error rate of 13% for the closed and 12% for the opened tracks approximately.
Nithin Koluguri, the senior research scientist of the conversational AI team at NVIDIA, mentioned that NVIDIA NeMo is the only framework that supports scaling training to multi-GPU systems and multi-node clusters. He also noted that all the models by NVIDIA Nemo frameworks are open-sourced and available for users to fine-tune and use.
Microsoft India announces the ‘Future Ready Champions of Code,’ a pan India program for developers to highlight their skills, certifications, and software-building solutions. The program aims to engage more than 100K developers across the country with the right skills, resources, tools, and Microsoft cloud certifications to innovate India’s growth. These certifications will give them a professional identity and better career opportunities.
The program allows developers to participate in the national hackathon to drive solutions in industry innovation, smart cities, and more. They can also participate in the blogathon contest and share their experience about how Azure services like Data, AI/ML, IoT, CloudNative, and more helps in building secure and scalable applications.
Aparna Gupta, the Executive Director, of Customer Success, at Microsoft India, mentioned that India had become a powerhouse with one of the fastest-growing developer communities, Microsoft. Microsoft realizes developers’ creativity, innovation, and passion for building technology that drives the nation’s growth.
After successfully completing the Microsoft certifications, developers will get a chance to win a pass to attend a mega developer-focused event in Bangalore, which will be held in January 2023. The top three hackathon winners will get an opportunity to showcase their solutions to Microsoft leaders.
