TIME Magazine's 100 most influential in AI

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Microsoft and friends believe AI could be key to the preservation of the Amazon rainforest

The story: Microsoft’s AI For Good Lab is partnering with several organizations in Colombia help monitor and protect the Amazon rainforest in the country. Colombia contains about 13% of the Amazon rainforest within its borders. The new project will use satellite imagery, hidden cameras, and audio recordings to track deforestation patterns and biodiversity in the region.

More Details:

• Deforestation driven by mining and agriculture remains an urgent threat to the Amazon. In 2022 alone, Colombia lost nearly 1 million hectares of forest, primarily in the northwest region. Rampant deforestation destroys biodiversity and carbon-absorbing trees, dangerously throwing off ecological balance. If left unchecked, experts warn it could permanently damage the planet's climate patterns and ecosystem.

• The project (Guacamaya) takes a three-pronged approach, using satellite images to spot illegal deforestation from above, camera traps to monitor biodiversity on the ground, and bioacoustics to identify animal sounds.

• AI helps process the massive amounts of data from these sources much faster than manual analysis would allow. This helps all parties get a better picture of the ecosystem and develop critical reports to governmental bodies and conservation organizations,

• The open source models could eventually be replicated across the Amazon region as a collaborative effort between countries that share the rainforest.

Takeaways: The goal is to equip policymakers and conservationists with better data to combat the urgent threat of deforestation. Project Guacamaya’s innovative use of multimodal data and machine learning models provides a scalable data-driven angle to help tackle the complex challenges of preserving the Amazon rainforest. Hopefully this project can evoke the spirit of past international collaborations on environmental issues like the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer.

The new policy applies across Google’s entire platform, but is particularly pertinent to YouTube. Some political ads have already been using the technology - in April, the Republican National Committee in April released an AI-generated ad meant to show the future of the United States if President Joe Biden is re-elected.

Currently, the Federal Election Committee is in the midst of a 60-day public commentary window on the issue at the behest of advocacy group Public Citizen, who petitioned the agency to amend its regulations to explicitly prohibit the use of deliberately deceptive artificial intelligence in political campaign advertisements.

If you would like the FEC to hear your opinion on this matter, please comment here.

The collaboration will focus on building AI computing infrastructure and platforms using Nvidia technology like the Grace Hopper Superchip and DGX Cloud. This will help provide resources for developing AI solutions to address India's major challenges in areas like healthcare, agriculture, and weather prediction. Huang emphasized the potential for India to not just use AI domestically but become a leader in exporting AI technology globally.

Nvidia started the year with a $350b market capitalization; it’s total market value is now well over $1T, making it the 6th largest company in the world behind Amazon, Google, Saudi Oil, Microsoft, and Apple.

• TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI

• How they were chosen

• China suspected of using AI on social media to sway US voters, Microsoft says

• China and the US are in a battle over AI - experts say this is just the start

• European Federation of Journalists joins 17 media sector organizations to develop a charter aimed at regulating the use of AI in European media

• Artists sign open letter saying generative AI is good, actually

• A surprising explanation for the global decline of religion

• eBay's new 'magical' AI tool writes product descriptions for you from a single photo

• Why Meta’s Yann LeCun isn’t buying the AI doomer narrative

The author contrasts startups taking two paths: 1) His own startup, botkube, using public data and AI to augment human troubleshooting versus 2) AI startup Causely, who is specifically training on private data with a mission to replace operators entirely. It advocates for engineers to keep contributing public Kubernetes knowledge. While AI assistance has benefits, losing collective troubleshooting techniques makes operators dependent on black box systems.

• (Listing again for anyone who missed it Friday) Open Interpreter - an open-source Code Interpreter that runs locally

• Move over AI, quantum computing will be the most powerful and worrying technology

• What are Google Cloud TPUs? Google aiming for the cloud-based AI creation sector

• Casually running a 180B parameter LLM on a single Apple M2 Ultra