Former NSW digital government minister Victor Dominello has a new job after leaving politics at the March state election, signing on as the director of the university-based UNSW-UTS Trustworthy Digital Society Hub. The announcement comes on the same day Jihad Dib, the new Labor minister in charge of digital government marked Privacy Week, announcing the… Read more »
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ever more prevalent in our lives. It’s no longer confined to certain industries or research institutions; AI is now for everyone. It’s hard to dodge the deluge of AI content being produced, and harder yet to make sense of the many terms being thrown around. But we can’t have conversations… Read more »
Welcome to our regular column on the important things to see and do for the ANZ startup community, brought to you by the director of the Spark Festival, Maxine Sherrin. She picks out 3 things worth putting in the diary for the week ahead. If you’d like to know more, sign up to the Weekly Sparks,… Read more »
Each day, messages from Nigerian princes, peddlers of wonder drugs and promoters of can’t-miss investments choke email inboxes. Improvements to spam filters only seem to inspire new techniques to break through the protections. Now, the arms race between spam blockers and spam senders is about to escalate with the emergence of a new weapon: generative… Read more »
Rampant misuse of AI voice generation is stirring fear and speculation across multiple industries, as the rapidly developing technology spurs increasing cases of imitation, political deepfakes and security disruption. Five years on from the now-infamous PSA clip showing a deepfake of US president Barack Obama forewarning the dangers of misinformation due to burgeoning artificial intelligence… Read more »
Synthetic biology startup Cortical Labs, which is developing a new kind of artificial intelligence using human brain cells, has raised USD$10 million (A$15m). The Melbourne biotech rose to prominence in October last year when it combined 800,000 brain cells with a computer chip to learn to play the video gam Pong. The project was dubbed… Read more »
An Australian council mayor may become the first person in the world to sue AI platform ChatGPT for defamation over false claims he was imprisoned over a bribery scandal. The mayor of Hepburn Shire in Victoria, Brian Hood, discovered late last year that artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT was incorrectly claiming that he had pleaded guilty… Read more »
Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA) are shaking up the waste management game by deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in rubbish bins to keep tabs on public bin collections. The tech will be used to predict which spots generate more garbage so authorities can plan how frequently public bins should be emptied. UniSA PhD… Read more »
Last week, artificial intelligence pioneers and experts urged major AI labs to immediately pause the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. An open letter penned by the Future of Life Institute cautioned that AI systems with “human-competitive intelligence” could become a major threat to humanity. Among the risks,… Read more »
Is it time to put the brakes on the development of artificial intelligence (AI)? If you’ve quietly asked yourself that question, you’re not alone. In the past week, a host of AI luminaries signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of more powerful models than GPT-4; European researchers called for… Read more »
Recent public interest in tools like ChatGPT has raised an old question in the artificial intelligence community: is artificial general intelligence (in this case, AI that performs at human level) achievable? An online preprint this week has added to the hype, suggesting the latest advanced large language model, GPT-4, is at the early stages of… Read more »
Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and over 1300 academics, tech and business luminaries have signed a Future of Life Institute (FLI) open letter calling for a 6-month freeze on “out-of-control” AI development that, they say, poses “profound risks to society and humanity.” That development has accelerated at a furious rate since last November’s release of GPT-3… Read more »
The Commonwealth Bank (CBA) and Telstra have launched a pilot program to see if they can improve protection from phone scams, via an API. They’ve call the Telstra API Scam Indicator. It’s currently at proof-of-concept stage and to be piloted over the next few months. Early simulation results suggest it can help detect and prevent… Read more »
You may have heard the buzz about ChatGPT, a type of chatbot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to write essays, turn computer novices into programmers and help people communicate. ChatGPT might also have a role in helping people make sense of medical information. Although ChatGPT won’t replace talking to your doctor any time soon, our… Read more »
From cryptocurrencies to ChatGPT, digital and tech were headline news in 2022. That’s unlikely to change in the year ahead, although inevitably we will see the hype fade on some innovations to be replaced by the latest shiny new thing. The one constant that transcends the news cycle is the relentless pace of technological change,… Read more »
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