Blockchain's Power Play in Energy and Finance industries, Alibaba's AI Ascent vs EU's Oversight, Quantum's Q3 Dip, Meta's Reality Lab Reshuffle!
Hi Everyone,
Welcome to QX Snapshots - a weekly recap of the key news on emerging technologies. In this newsletter, you will get a "digest" of the latest info on AI, Quantum Technology, Metaverse, and Enterprise Blockchain.
Hope it brings you value :)
[Blockchain] Blockchain Advancements in Energy, Banking, and Cross-Border Payments. The oil and gas consortium Blockchain for Energy launched a blockchain solution to automate transport logistics - the Commodity Transport Web3 Field Automation solution. It aims to provide benefits such as delivery validation verified by the decentralized consortium blockchain, timely delivery visibility to monitor delivered goods and services in near real-time, and operational program management to monitor and enforce expected deliveries and behaviors at the item, product, or treatment level. Member base includes industry heavyweights like Saudi Aramco, EQT, and ExxonMobil. Meanwhile, Project Mandala, a new BIS project was launched to address compliance with regulatory requirements for cross-border transactions including CBDCs and tokenized deposits. In other news, Hyperledger added members reflecting growing enterprise blockchain interest. Deloitte, Japan's central clearinghouse, Norway's central bank, and India's payments corporation joined. Separately, the Bank of Korea announced a wholesale CBDC pilot to support tokenized bank deposits on a shared ledger. It will also explore the BIS' Unified Ledger concept. A working group of regulators will oversee the project, which started its IT integrator selection process.
[AI] Alibaba deep dives into AI as Europe prepares for oversight. Chinese tech giant Alibaba is delving deep into generative AI, launching its powerful chatbot, Tongyi Qianwen, positioned as a Q&A bot, similar to ChatGPT. Integrated with the retail platform Taobao, it offers improved product recommendations and is part of Alibaba's voice AI for smart speakers and workplace apps. It integrates the chatbot into retail, voice assistants, messaging, and more to summarize meetings, generate copy, and automate tasks. Alibaba launched Modelscope to develop custom AI solutions and aims to enable businesses to build their own apps with its tech. Additionally, Alibaba's Tongyi Wanxiang model focuses on image generation, and many of their models, including Tongyi Qianwen, have been open-sourced, possibly in compliance with China's AI transparency legislation. Alibaba's CEO, Eddie Wu, emphasizes the company's future lies in being more customer-centric and AI-driven. Meanwhile, The Netherlands, the U.N., and the European Commission have initiated a project to equip European national agencies for AI oversight. This comes in anticipation of the forthcoming AI Act, which will regulate AI usage in Europe. UNESCO will gather data on current European AI supervision and create "best practices" recommendations, while the Dutch digital infrastructure agency assists in liaising with European national working groups. UNESCO's previous ethical guidelines on AI were adopted by all its member states in 2021.
[Quantum Technology] Quantum Tech Funding Dips in Q3 2023; PQC Coalition Forms to Champion Quantum-Safe Cryptography. Quantum technology funding declined dramatically in Q3 2023 after years of growing investment, The Quantum Insider's quarterly report revealed. While some raises occurred, the number and size dropped considerably versus previous quarters. However, despite waning investment interest, research advances are continuing as academic and commercial teams make progress on key hurdles like error correction. If research breakthroughs make quantum less risky and more viable, investment could eventually surge again, potentially dramatically. The report also covered top business and research stories and industry insights. Though funding fell, government backing continues and scientific breakthroughs inch closer that could reignite investor enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Coalition launched with founding members IBM Quantum, Microsoft, MITRE, PQShield, SandboxAQ, and University of Waterloo. The group aims to advance adoption of post-quantum cryptography and NIST's quantum-resistant encryption algorithms. It will focus on standards, education, open-source code, and cryptographic agility to facilitate the migration to quantum-safe cryptography before quantum computers can break current encryption.
[Metaverse] Meta Trims Reality Labs Amid Yuga Labs' Strategic Push into Metaverse with Hadean. Meta is set to make cuts in its Reality Labs division, particularly in the Facebook Agile Silicon Team (FAST) unit, which focuses on custom silicon development for the metaverse. This news, revealed by insiders and noted on Meta's internal forum, may impact its ambitious augmented and virtual reality projects, including AR glasses touted to transform tech interactions. Despite its 600-strong FAST team aiming to innovate custom chips, Meta has faced challenges, often relying on external chipmakers like Qualcomm. Since last November, Meta has eliminated around 21,000 positions, driven by concerns over escalating costs, slowed revenue growth, and the financial performance of Reality Labs. Meanwhile, Yuga Labs has made a significant strategic investment in spatial computing startup Hadean to bolster its upcoming Otherside metaverse. Hadean's technology supported over 7,200 simultaneous players in a recent playtest. While the exact investment amount remains undisclosed, it's deemed substantial compared to Hadean's previous funding rounds, which included a $30 million Series A in September 2022 involving Epic Games. This investment will finance a US-based team from Hadean to work with Yuga Labs, aiming to enhance the metaverse's capacity for "mass concurrency" or hosting numerous players simultaneously.
[General technology] UK invests in health tech as EU assesses risks in critical technologies. The UK government is investing £30 million in innovative medical technology for the NHS to reduce waiting lists, expedite diagnosis, and enhance patient treatment. Integrated care systems (ICSs) can bid for a portion of this fund to adopt new technologies. This could include expanding virtual wards for at-home care, deploying wearable devices to remotely monitor conditions, or utilizing 3D imaging to speed up diagnoses. The investment aims to ease winter pressures, support overstretched staff, get patients treated faster, and deliver new ways of providing care. It builds on previous funding for AI diagnostics and is part of wider measures to boost NHS resilience ahead of winter. Meanwhile, the European Commission has recommended conducting risk assessments in four critical technology areas: advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and biotechnologies, to ensure the EU's economic security. These areas were chosen based on their transformative potential, dual-use in civil and military sectors, and possible misuse in human rights violations. The Commission and Member States will collectively assess these areas by year-end, considering factors like technology's potential for economic growth and risk reduction. The outcomes won't prejudge future actions but will guide discussions on necessary measures for these technologies. This recommendation aligns with the European Economic Security Strategy's three-pillar approach.
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FEATURED: ‘An Introduction to the Problems of AI Consciousness’
By: Nick Alonso
“Once considered a forbidden topic in the AI community, discussions around the concept of AI consciousness are now taking center stage, marking a significant shift since the current AI resurgence began over a decade ago. For example, last year, Brad Lemoine, an engineer at Google, made headlines claiming the large language model he was developing had become sentient [1]. CEOs of tech companies are now openly asked in media interviews whether they think their AI systems will ever become conscious [2,3].
Unfortunately, missing from much of the public discussion is a clear understanding of prior work on consciousness. In particular, in media interviews, engineers, AI researchers, and tech executives often implicitly define consciousness in different ways and do not have a clear sense of the philosophical difficulties surrounding consciousness or their relevance for the AI consciousness debate. Others have a hard time understanding why the possibility of AI consciousness is at all interesting relative to other problems, like the AI alignment issue.
This brief introduction is aimed at those working within the AI community who are interested in AI consciousness, but may not know much about the philosophical and scientific work behind consciousness generally or the topic of AI consciousness in particular. The aim here is to highlight key definitions and ideas from philosophy and science relevant for the debates on AI consciousness in a concise way with minimal jargon.
Why Care about AI Consciousness?
First, why should we care about the prospective development of conscious AI? Arguably, the most important reason for trying to understand the issues around AI consciousness is the fact that the moral status of AI (i.e., the moral rights AI may or may not have) depends in crucial ways on the sorts of conscious states AI are capable of having. Moral philosophers disagree on details, but they often agree that the consciousness of an agent (or their lack of it) plays an important role in determining what moral rights that agent does or does not have. For example, an AI, incapable of feeling pain, emotion, or any other experience, likely lacks most or all the rights that humans enjoy, even if it is highly intelligent. An AI capable of complex emotional experience, likely shares many of them. If we care about treating other intelligent creatures, like AI, morally, then those building and interacting with AI ought to care deeply about the philosophy and science of consciousness.
Unfortunately, there is little consensus around the basic facts about the nature of consciousness, for reasons discussed below. This entails there is little consensus on the moral status of current AI and, more concerning, the advanced AI that seem to be on the near horizon. Let’s frame this general concern as follows:
The AI Moral Status Problem: Scientists and philosophers currently lack consensus/confidence about basic facts concerning the nature of consciousness. The moral status of AI depends in crucial ways on these facts. AI is advancing quickly, but progress on consciousness is slow. Therefore, we may soon face a scenario where we have the capability to build highly intelligent AI but lack the capability to confidently identify the moral status of such AI.
Some philosophers have argued that, without directly addressing this problem, we are in danger of a kind of moral catastrophe, where we massively misattribute rights to AI (i.e., either massively over-attribute or under-attribute rights) [4]. Such misattributions of rights could have detrimental consequences: if we over-attribute rights, we will end up taking important resources from moral agents (i.e., humans) and give them to AI lacking significant moral status. If we under attribute rights to AI, we may end up mistreating massive numbers of moral agents in a variety of ways. Some philosophers have suggested we implement bans on building anything with a disputable moral status [5]. Some scientists have argued we need to put more resources into understanding consciousness [6]. In any case, progress on this issue requires that researchers in philosophy, neuroscience, and AI have a shared understanding of the foundational definitions, problems, and possible paths forward on the topic of AI consciousness. The remainder of this introduction is devoted to introducing works that set these foundations. ”
Read the full article: here.
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Retropreneur | Startup Founder | AI Applications Developer | Chief Product Officer | Author of "The Two But Rule" (Wiley)
1yDid it really launch a blockchain or did it launch a digitization effort and used a blockchain because someone didn’t get the memo that using “blockchain” to boost awareness and remove inertia for things that don’t really need blockchain was tired three years ago? Seriously…fascinated to know what they really needed a blockchain for.