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The first 'AI election'
Research: AI agent navigates complex open world
Jack Shields
November 16, 2023
Welcome back!
AI-generated media is sweeping through Argentina as the country prepares for a presidential run-off on Nov. 19. This could be an early sign of the things to come in the U.S. prior to the 2024 presidential election.
We’ll also dive into new research on AI agents and some big announcements from Microsoft. Let’s go.
In today’s Daily Update:
🗞️ Argentina’s presidential candidates campaign with synthetic media
🤖 AI agent learns how to play Minecraft
📸 Microsoft announces custom AI chip to compete with Nvidia
🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits
Read time: 2 minutes
TOP STORY
🗞️ Argentina’s presidential candidates campaign with synthetic media
Screenshot: Instagram
This year’s general election in Argentina has emerged as a testing ground for AI in political campaigns, as presidential candidates Sergio Massa and Javier Milei are trading blows with AI-generated media.
The details:
Massa’s campaign created an AI system that can create synthetic images and videos of other candidates, running mates and political allies.
The system has been used to portray Massa as a strong and charismatic leader, while portraying Milei as unstable.
Milei’s campaign struck back with images that depicted Massa as a Chinese communist leader.
AI’s prominent role in this election has sparked debates among voters over whether real videos are actually real.
The relevance: To this point, concerns toward AI-generated election content have been about its ability to deceive voters into thinking events that never occurred actually happened. Voters in Argentina are now encountering the opposite problem, as they are struggling to believe the content of real videos.
RESEARCH INSIGHT
🤖 AI agent learns how to play Minecraft
Source: Adobe Firefly
Researchers have developed an AI agent called JARVIS-1 that is capable of completing a wide variety of tasks while playing the open-world game Minecraft.
Key points:
JARVIS-1 uses a multimodal language model to achieve humanlike planning and control.
This is an especially difficult task in open-world environments where tasks could potentially be infinite.
JARVIS-1 performed nearly perfectly across 200 varying tasks, and achieved a completion rate of 12.5% on a complex diamond pickaxe task.
The system demonstrated the ability to self-improve and react to in-game situations dynamically.
Why it matters: This is a huge leap for AI agents that can act autonomously in complex environments. The next step will be applying this breakthrough to real-world robotics.
BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT
📸 Microsoft announces custom AI chip to compete with Nvidia
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft unveiled two custom chips at its Ignite conference in Seattle yesterday.
The rundown:
The Maia 100 chip can be used to train and run AI models, and could compete with Nvidia’s highly sought-after GPUs.
The Cobalt 100 Arm chip is designed to run general computing tasks and could compete with Intel processors.
Microsoft has been developing its custom AI chip in secret since 2019.
The significance: Most companies developing AI models currently rely on Nvidia’s top-of-the-line GPUs, which are sold out until 2024 with shortages expected to extend into 2025. We still know very little about how Microsoft’s chip stacks up against Nvidia’s, but it could be an alternative that accelerates the development of the next-generation of AI models.
MORE TRENDING NEWS
🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits
Source: Adobe Firefly
More Microsoft: The company also launched a deepfake creator at yesterday’s Ignite conference.
Smart Security: Amazon repurposes its Astro robot for businesses.
Synthetic Social Media: Instagram adds new AI features including custom stickers and photo filters.
Overwhelming Demand: OpenAI pauses new user subscriptions for ChatGPT Plus.
THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY