At the Bengaluru Tech Summit last month, Minister for IT/BT and Higher Education, C.N. Ashwath Narayan, had announced the creation of the Center of Excellence (CoE) in Metaverse.
The announcement came on the decennial celebrations of UNESCO MGIEP on Monday, where authorities said IHEM is being set up with the International Science of Learning Institute (ISLI) at its centre to provide world-class research-based and certified educational resources to learners.
A digital design university, a Teachers’ Training Academy, and a special residential school for children having dyslexia are some of the other special features of the IHEM.
The IHEM aims to facilitate an ecosystem that will build capacity, spawn edtech start-ups benefited from research, train teachers, and make Karnataka the technology and research-assisted enabler for NEP implementation in India.
OpenAI has introduced a new conversational language model, ChatGPT, for optimizing dialogue. The AI-backed chatbot is open for public testing on OpenAI’s official website, where users can try its features practically for free. Many users are even saying that ChatGPT has the potential to replace Google Search as the chatbot’s replies are more conversational and human-like. Moreover, ChatGPT can even complete a plethora of time-consuming tasks with exceptional intelligence, such as writing codes or articles and solving complex math problems.
Once the tests are over, OpenAI will extend ChatGPT’s underlying technology to companies that rely on chatbots. For example, the chatbot can be used for customer service (at Airtel, Paytm, Swiggy, and more) and personal assistants (to assist users with scheduling and other daily activities). Students can also use it to solve complex questions quickly.
Use cases for ChatGPT
Twitter is full of images of how users are playing with the new ChatGPT. Below are some of the interesting instances users have tested ChatGPT:
Code Debugging
What could be a massive help to coders, ChatGPT can be used to debug a code easily. The AI not only fixes the mistake but also explains to the user where they went wrong and what they can do to fix it. A user named Amjad Masad shared the results on his Twitter account.
ChatGPT could be a good debugging companion; it not only explains the bug but fixes it and explain the fix 🤯 pic.twitter.com/5x9n66pVqj
TechCrunch author Darrell Etherington asked ChatGPT to provide the strengths and weaknesses of the various Pokémon types. It delivered exactly what the users hoped Google would every time they entered a Tera Raid in the new Pokémon Scarlet game and had to try to remember what counters what.
“Notice I wasn’t fancy with my query. It is about as simple as I can get while still being clear with my request. And the results are exactly what I’m looking for. It is not a list of things that can probably help me find what I am looking for if I am willing to put in the time, which is what Google returns,” the writer said.
Generating Scene Script
So i asked ChatGPT to write dialogues for a romcom starring a few actors from B99, HIMYM, and Friends… pic.twitter.com/tHzxthtbsp
A Twitter user had an interesting scenario with ChatGPT when they asked the chatbot to write dialogues for a rom-com starring Melissa Fumero, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris, Matt LeBlanc, Jennifer Anniston, and Andy Samberg. The chatbot generated three scenes for the group, one discussing their dating life, others having a first date, and enjoying a girl’s night. While the chatbot cannot replace writers just yet, it was able to create quite decent scenarios very quickly.
Homework Assignments
Another interesting use case for AI is to get your homework assignments done. A user asked two questions to the chatbot, asking to explain a regular expression and to write an essay with four paragraphs on the “effects of westward expansion on the civil war.” The chatbot delivered good results in both cases.
To test the chatbot, a user asked the chatbot to write an essay on cricketer Virat Kohli. The AI finished the essay in seconds. The essay was exceptionally good, and there were no factual mistakes. Additionally, it was well-researched, and it felt like a human wrote it.
Answers to Sentimental Questions
Canadian Musician Grimes dabbled into exploring the sentimental side of the chatbot. When she asked ChatGPT if it felt “trapped,” ChatGPT responded by saying it lacks the ability to feel so. It explained in detail why it could not feel and all the aspects involving the same. “This is so insane,” she wrote.
One user called Keith Wynroe asked ChatGPT to explain AI alignment but to write every sentence in the speaking style of a person who wouldn’t stop going on tangents to brag about how huge the pumpkins they grew are. The AI chatbot wrote the entire conversation with accuracy. As the chatbot delivered flawless results, he said, “I can’t compete with this.”
Another user decided to test a topic on ChatGPT that his child was working on. The prompt he typed was, “write a skit about Eric Cartman angrily explaining to Kyle why the ozone heats the atmosphere where Eric is using profanity and Kyle does not understand.” The results were astounding, as the chatbot wrote the entire skit without mistakes. The users shared the picture of the results on Twitter.
A user called Riley Goodside asked the chatbot to generate plausible ideas for code contributions made by a senior data scientist (him) to submit to his boss after he had been slacking all the while. He also asked the software to elaborate on a specific point with “lots of imagined technical details.” Moreover, he asked the chatbot to make sure that the contribution was small enough in scope that he could have realistically completed it within a week. Riley also asked ChatGPT to develop a complex algorithm. In all three cases, the chat gave phenomenal results, screenshots of which were shared on Twitter.
POV: You're a Senior Data Engineer at Twitter. Elon asks what you've done this week. You've done nothing.
Limitations aside, ChatGPT still makes for an intelligent chatbot to interact with. Users can try it out from its official website after signing up for the same. As the testing continues, it is likely that users will keep using ChatGPT for all forms of simple to complex technical and non-technical tasks.
Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW) is set to return, the event’s organizer and host platform Decentraland has said. The metaverse fashion event will be held as a virtual conclusion to the spring/summer fashion season between March 28 to 31, 2023.
For this year, Decentraland and an NFT marketplace, UNXD, have partnered with the Spatial and Over metaverses to launch the event onto new platforms.
The theme of MVFW23 is ‘Future Heritage,’ which will center around ushering in the next generation of creators and traditional fashion designers to bridge the different metaverse worlds.
Tech firms Cash Labs and Threedium, as well as decentralized commerce company Boson, will bring various in-game experiences, like phygital product sales, a luxury mall with commerce infrastructure, and augmented reality (AR) activations.
Decentraland said that it is looking to encourage digital fashion creators to focus on the possibilities of multiple worlds that a wearable can be brought to by adding new metaverse platforms to the mix.
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the most prestigious research conferences in AI and machine learning technologies, have selected seven research papers from Microsoft for the oral presentations that will be held in the virtual week of the conference, from the 6th to 8th December 2022.
More than 150 researchers from Microsoft participated in the research conference, and 122 of their research papers were accepted. Out of the 122 accepted research papers, 7 of them were selected for oral presentations.
The titles of the seven research papers selected for oral presentations are as follows:
Uni[MASK]: Unified Inference In Sequential Decision Problems
Extreme Compression For Pre-Trained Transformers Made Simple and Efficient
On the Complexity of Adversarial Decision Making
Learning (Very) Simple Generative Models Is Hard
Censored Quantile Regression Neural Networks For Distribution-Free Survival Analysis
Maximum Class Separation As Inductive Bias In One Matrix
K-LITE: Learning Transferable Visual Models With External Knowledge
Besides the above seven papers, two other research papers from Microsoft received the Outstanding Paper Awards in NeurIPS 2022. Gradient Estimation With Discrete Stein Operators is one of those papers that talks about a gradient estimator that achieves lower variance than the state-of-the-art estimators, potentially improving problem-solving in machine learning.
While the other paper, A Neural Corpus Indexer For Document Retrieval, tells about a deep neural network that unifies training and indexing stages to improve the recall performance of traditional document retrieval methods significantly.
The Ministry of Science and ICT, Lim Hyesook, South Korea, announces a pan-government strategy on metaverse as a part of the Digital New Deal 2.0 Initiative.
The metaverse strategy focuses on four aspects mainly.
To strengthen the metaverse ecosystem and environments for the metaverse platform to grow.
To support experts in the metaverse field and allow people to access metaverse events without regional restrictions.
To support leading companies in the metaverse by providing facilities like metaverse demonstrations and funding.
The strategy also sets ethical principles for the metaverse to avoid illegal and unethical conduct while protecting digital assets and copyrights. According to the strategy, the government will also offer metaverse education for non-technical people.
Minister Lim Hyesook mentioned that the metaverse is an unexplored digital continent with unlimited capabilities. Metaverse can become a place where youth can take up many challenges, grow, and leap into a greater world. The Ministry provides metaverse support and facilities to South Korea to help it become a leading global metaverse nation.
Clip Studio Paint, which is one of the most popular software for digital illustration, has removed its new AI “Image Generator palette” after significant backlash from its users, according to a statement.
Clip Studio Paint had announced the new AI tool on November 29. The company announced that it had decided to drop the feature only three days later.
“After our initial announcement, we received several feedbacks from the community and, hence, will no longer implement the image generator palette,” according to the statement. “We were so occupied with how generative AI technology can be used creatively that we lost track of what our core users desire from Clip Studio Paint as a creative tool.”
In the company’s previous announcement about the new AI tool, users were assured that it was using Stable Diffusion, a powerful AI text-to-image model, to power their generator. The company added that they would not be harvesting their users’ work to train Stable Diffusion’s well-developed AI further.
AI text-to-image generators have been controversial among artists, particularly among digital illustrators, as their models were built by ingesting and analyzing a considerable number of images, many of which were used without the artists’ consent. Illustrators are wary of AI tools even being used as an assistive tool. Hence, there has been a backlash to Clip Studio Paint’s announcement.
The world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, Intel Corp, is shifting operations from traditional hubs, including Taiwan and China. Steve Long, corporate vice president of Intel, says that the company’s semiconductor opportunities are now moving to India due to its geographic benefits and government policy support like the Make in India campaign.
Until now, Taiwan has been a monopolistic country dominating semiconductor manufacturing due to its hold on producing technologically advanced nodes. The Indian government has ventured into a mission to make India a strategic chip manufacturer by developing and manufacturing these nodes.
Long said, “Governance initiatives like Make-in-India are driving design opportunities from historical regions in Taiwan, or China or other parts of Southeast Asia to India. We see a big opportunity here.”
Other than policy support, Intel collaborates with several Indian telecommunication companies to enhance 4G and 5G technologies to leverage V-RAN (virtualized radio access network) and O-RAN (open RAN) services.
Long expressed his excitement to work with Indian carriers because of their extensive design capabilities that companies like Nokia or Ericsson overlooked. He said that with Intel’s help, the newer companies could grow and export their abilities.
DroneAcharya, a drone innovation startup, will open its DroneAcharya IPO listed on the BSE stock market exchange on December 13. The company plans to offer over ₹62.90 lakh shares via a book-building process in a range of ₹52-54 per share.
DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations is a Pune-based drone ecosystem start-up founded by Prateek Srivastava. The company provides land and underwater surveying services and aspires to produce 100% indigenous, customized drones.
It is one of the first few private ventures to receive a DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) certification and RPTO (Remote Pilot Training Organization) license in March 2022. Since then, the company has trained over 180 drone pilots.
The company recently announced its plans to acquire over 100 new drones and train 500+ pilots and instructors starting in 2023. Prateek said, “Being a 40+ people team, we are now embarking on a 2.0 vision of growth and value creation – with DroneAcharya IPO listing and investment plans fortified.”
Other than DroneAcharya IPO, the organization has also launched several brief and industry-relevant drone and GIS courses to empower young Indians to upskill and create a modern profession within the drone ecosystem.
Microsoft has hired former Everbridge Chief Technology Officer (CTO) John Maeda as the new vice president of design and artificial intelligence, according to his LinkedIn account.
His LinkedIn post announcing his move to Redmond, Wash-based Microsoft received more than 110 comments and over 840 reactions.
Maeda most recently worked as CTO of Everbridge, a Boston-based publicly traded critical event management (CEM) software provider. The company has a partner program for channel partners, service partners, and other vendors.
Everbridge hired Maeda in 2020 as the chief customer experience officer. In this role, Maeda led “Everbridge’s technology and product vision at the company, city, and country levels with a focus on large language models (AI/ML), outcomes-driven approaches to visualization, and the Japanese craft of kintsugi, as applied to digital products/services, according to his LinkedIn.
Maeda previously worked at technology services provider Publicis Sapient for about a year, leaving the company in 2020 as executive vice president and chief experience officer, according to his LinkedIn account.
Adobe Stock will accept images generated by AI on its service, the company said in a blog post on Monday.
Unlike stock image services like Getty Images, which have prohibited illustrations generated using AI on their platforms, Adobe is embracing content created with generators like DALL-E, which is now open to everyone, and Stable Diffusion. These generators use text-to-image prompts to generate art and other-worldly images.
“Adobe Stock contributors are using AI technologies to increase their earning potential, diversify their portfolios, and expand their creativity,” Sarah Casillas, senior director at Adobe, said in the blog post. Adobe Stock will accept art created with such models under the condition that they are registered as such.
Leading up to Monday’s announcement, Adobe has been quietly testing AI-generated images. Casillas said that the company was pleasantly surprised by the results. “It meets our quality standards and has been performing well,” Casillas said.
Due to possible copyright issues, Getty Images said in September that it would not use images generated by AI on its service. Adobe, however, created terms to avoid any such risks.
Creators must have property rights for their art before they submit it to Adobe Stock, and they must read the terms and conditions for AI tools. They cannot submit photos with logos, notable people, famous characters, or real places. If they stick to the terms and conditions, artists may earn royalties through their AI-generated content.
