Mediaboss Marketing

I recently had to replace my MacBook of 6 years when it started to slowly die. I decided to return to a Windows based operating system, so I ordered a Dell. After setting it up, I was startled to see how much AI technology is available on the computer considering it was the basic model. In fact, new changes and updates seem to be added regularly at a startling pace. I recently saw an advertisement on YouTube about an AI buddy you could chat with depicting an impossibly beautiful womanand obviously not realand deep horror struck my heart as I began to think about all of the lonely young people in the world who could easily buy the lie that an AI relationship is real.

Artificial Intelligence is quickly taking over all of our devices. The rise of ChatGPT was simply the beginning. The implications for this technology morally, spiritually, and humanly is gravely serious. Have we seriously considered the very dangerous path we are walking down and have we considered who exactly is leading us there? As Catholics, we are called to discern the proper use of technology in order to ensure that we do not fall into false idolatry, spiritual slavery, addiction, or immorality. We have to make sure the technology we use is leading us to sanctity, not away from the Lord.

What started as a desire for connectivity, has in many ways, given way to a leviathan that looks more like a form of anti-communion. Our culture has never been lonelier even as it is the most connected at any point in world history. I know that I will be rather unpopular for pointing this out, but when I was still plugged into social media and as I grew in my spiritual life, I started to see social media as a false form of communion. Its community without the real, deep connection that in person relationships requires. The sacrificial dimension of relationships was missing. Love requires sacrifice and presence, not likes and endless screens.

We have been lulled into a false belief that the virtual world matters more than the one in our homes and right outside of our doors. In many ways, it takes the Church away from the Church. We saw this clearly during COVID when Mass was reduced to livestreaming, but social media does the same thing. It reduces relationships to pixels. The COVID lockdowns convinced a lot of people that being bodily present is not necessary. I encounter this constantly serving in pastoral care at the hospital. I heard it numerous times from people of all ages when I was a Director of Faith Formation. I watch Mass online and I dont need to come back.

The Internet, and especially social media, laid the ground work for detaching our relationships from matter. What I mean is, we no longer believe that we need to be within the physical presence with someone or the Someone who is supposed to be the center of our lives, Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. The dualism of our age, has reached an apex through Artificial Intelligence. Social media was simply the catalyst that divorced us from one another.

Instead of getting together in person and truly catching up with one another, we convinced ourselves that the constant updatingso often ego driven, I was very guilty of thisand likes constitutes relationships. If this were true then we would not have a loneliness epidemic. Social media has isolated, divided, and addicted us, which is the perfect time for Artificial Intelligence to come in and save the day. All of those lonely kids who should not have smartphones can turn to a friend who truly understands them on an AI platform. We can have AI perform all of our mundane tasks for us that were meant to help sanctify us. If students have a paper to write, then ChatGPT can write it for them. Why should we do any work ourselves if AI can take care of it?

We are quickly entering an age of unreality, when we will not know if what we are seeing on our screen is real or not. The loss of Aristotelian-Thomistic mind-object agreement has ushered in relativism, but this takes on a whole new level of detachment from reality. We will not be able to trust our senses at all. Its already all over social media and the newer computers. ChatGPT constantly shows up somewhere on my computer or web browser. I went through and disabled as much as I could.

Our children will face temptations and alienation at a scale we never dreamed of when we were sitting on the couch listening to our Walkmans. Multiple generations of kids are addicted to technology, as are all of us adults. The battle is alive and well in my own home. My daughter is allowed to use my phone to text and call her friends. She will not get a phone until shes driving and we will never buy her a smartphone. She can buy one when she is 18 if she chooses.

She was very upset when I gave up my iPhone for the Light phone a seminarian friend gave to me when he returned to Rome. I tried to point out to her that her dependence on my iPhone is a serious problem. My dependence on my iPhone was a hindrance to me spiritually. She still can talk to her friends on Google Meet to do homework on my laptop at times, but technology has convinced all of us that we need to be in constant communication.

Kids rarely do homework together anymore because they virtually meet. Whether we realize it or not, this is still isolation. Not to mention, in the world of highly addictive smartphones, there can be no downtime, and above all, no silence. There is little silence, which means little peace. We cannot hear God without periods of silence. Why are we shocked that kids are highly anxious and fearful?

The spiritual dangers of this age will increase as newer and newer advances in AI are released to the public. Have we considered who might be leading us towards what is beginning to feel like another Tower of Babel moment? People are shocked when I tell them demons text and email exorcists. They didnt realize demons do work through technology for their evil purposes. Everyone who is working with AI has pointed out they feel like they are talking to a conscious being. Who exactly do we think it might be who is rushing us over this cliff?

Our children are addicted to smartphones and we laugh about it and shrug it off. ChatGPT is now making it impossible for teachers to know whether or not their students are doing their own work. AI is now making art. There are AI buddies to talk to and do whatever with. All of this is creating an artificial world, so that we dont have to deal with the mundanity and sufferings of this life. We no longer need to look at a magnificent sunset, when AI has made one on our screens. We dont need in person relationships because we can create our own relationships dominated by our own ego with AI or social media.

Social media was a primer, and in many ways, cut us off from one another. Countless people sit in restaurants staring at their phones while flesh and blood people are at the table with them. I lived this way for over a decade, but when I finally started to unplug from it, I could see all of the time I wasted and the addiction I had fallen into. Soon people will sit at the table ignoring each other while they talk to AI. This is clearly not of the Lord. We know things by their fruits. As Catholics, we are called to exercise prudence, not jump on every bandwagon that comes along without any thought.

The answer for Catholics is to choose reality. To accept the Cross. Suffering is an essential part of purification and sanctification in this life. It is the furnace of Divine Love where we learn how to love. We cannot love people through a screen because we cannot be there to will their good, except of course through our prayers and encouraging words. This is always a good thing, but there are people in our homes, parishes, and towns who need us. The people in front of us are the ones the Lord has assigned to us to walk with in this life; whether its a lifetime with a spouse, children, parents, or a quick encounter at the grocery store. We cant see these people so long as we prefer an unreality. Somewhere along the way, in our rush to evangelize the Internet, we forgot our own principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.

As Catholics we need to very seriously consider the implications of where AI is leading us, as well as what technology addiction is doing to all of us. Do we want our kids cheating on their homework? Do we want AI art and photography to warp our sense of beauty? Do we want to be a part of a lonely society turning to AI for relationships? There is going to come a moment when we will have to place a line in the sand, God or AI. The decision we will face very soon is that serious.

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

See more here:

Is Jumping on the AI Bandwagon Prudent? - Catholic Exchange

Adobes Firefly AI, the text-to-image tool behind features like Photoshops generative fill, will be available on the Apple Vision Pro as a native app, alongside the companys popular Lightroom photo editing software already demonstrated during the headsets announcement.

The creative software giant announced in a press release that the new Firefly experience had been purpose-built for the headsets visionOS system, allowing users to move and place images generated by the app onto real-world spaces like walls and desks.

The interface of the Firefly visionOS app should be familiar to anyone whos already used the web-based version of the tool users just need to enter a text description within the prompt box at the bottom and hit generate. This will then spit out four different images that can be dragged out of the main app window and placed around the home like virtual posters or prints.

Meanwhile, we also now have a better look at the native Adobe Lightroom photo editing app that was mentioned back when the Apple Vision Pro was announced last June. The visionOS Lightroom experience is similar to that of the iPad version, with a cleaner, simplified interface that should be easier to navigate with hand gestures than the more feature-laden desktop software.

Theres no shortage of creative VR applications available on other platforms. Googles Tilt Brush was enabling folks to paint in virtual reality environments back in 2016, for example, when it was released for the HTC Vive. But Apple just launched the most ambitious VR headset yet. Its historical focus on creatives coupled with Adobes strong embrace of Apple Silicon could make the Vision Pros eye-watering $3,500 price tag worth the investment for some creatives.

Read more from the original source:

Apples Vision Pro has native apps for Adobe Lightroom and Firefly AI - The Verge

Since the public release of ChatGPT just over a year ago, AI has driven technology investment, with some $27B being deployed to companies leveraging the latest developments in machine learning

So what? Space engineers are no strangers to AI writ largewho do you think is flying the Dragon spacecraft or landing the Falcon 9s booster?but the latest developments promise immediate impact for companies collecting sensor data in space.

Background: The innovation behind ChatGPT, an advancement in learning models based on the human brain called transformer neural networks, are only as valuable as the data used to train them. Last year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told investors that AI customer value will only be provided by companies who have the data. Deloitte, the global consulting firm, argues that generative AI will be transformative for firms that collect unique data sets with satellites, which include Maxar, Planet Labs, Spire, Capella, ICEye and many others.

Planet Labs, a space data firm operating roughly 200 satellites in orbit, has long premised its business model on using machine learning to divine insights from its daily scans of the Earth. Payload spoke to Nate Gonzalez, Planets head of product, to understand what the last year of AI hype means for earth observation companies like his.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Have you noticed a change in the vibe of the tech community in the last year because of these advances in AI?

Yeah, which is funny cause I think that trying to pull apart AI from [Machine Learning] and [Large Language Models], it is kind of a veneer. The reality is everything is now powered by AI or everything has a flavor of it because like thats where the dollars are coming from and its a hard market.

Were in that cycle, and what I take a lot of comfort in is that our team knows it all really well. Weve been doing it for a long time. We have experts in their fields of how to do these operations, and now there is a new understanding of where that field has gone that they can jump to very quickly, and we can pivot on that and create real product and value there. But it is funny to see how many folks are now AI experts on their LinkedIn

What has changed for Planet, which has been training models on its data to do things like detect roads, buildings and ships since 2019?

Its not fundamentally different, but its accelerated some of the core work. Its different methodologies of machine learningits built on transformer networks, which is a different methodology of machine learning that is just vastly more powerful for specific applications that were starting to see. Thats where weve jumped into the future two, three, four years. When I came to the role [in Aug. 2021], I wrote a two year strategy, looked at what was on the horizon, and were beyond that.

Whats an example of how transformer modelsthe advancement in neural networks underlying tools like ChatGPTwork for Planet?

If I looked at the roadmap 18 months ago and were thinking about,when are we gonna be able to sit down and input text of, I would really like to monitor this county in Ireland to tell me when farmers are harvesting their crops, and I would like an alert on that every time a threshold is tripped over X.

It was a trickier problemokay, we have all the data, now we can go run and train models and were gonna have to be very specific. [But] just leveraging the transformer network model, whats happening with generative, allows you to search very quickly. And if you think about the depth of our archive, we have more than 50 petabytes of storage.

[When] a customer tells us they want to go access it, we can then run roughly 10x transformations on any bit that sits there.so, we get 500 petabytes of different data assets that can kind of be created and leveraged. Its like theres just this mountain of data to be able to sift through and you start getting into your embeddings work. It allows you to find patterns much more quickly than what youre necessarily looking for. And it allows you to have that chat interface just be almost like, just the front end to a deeper ML interdicted search experience.

Weve seen some impressive demonstrations; Planet partnered with Synthetic.AI to find the origins of 2023s Chinese spy balloon, and at an event last year Planet tracked down the bouncy castles covering Chinese missile silos based on a Google image search.

Thats what were uniquely well-positioned to do: you found the thing, lets help you analyze that, lets help you monitor it over time. Right now theres still a back and forth between Planet and a partner and the customer to say, you care about this specific thing, the partner will help find it or identify or train some of those models very quickly. We will then find that in the data, serve your results, and allow you to monitor that going forward.

Is it as simple as plugging a generic model into Planets data?

Its hard for Planet to think about training modelsgeneric AI models or ML models in geospatial are not that valuable because a lot of times they are very specific to the use case of the individual customer. Thats where working with partners and having infrastructure that allows partners to work and build with us is really valuable, because we have customers with all kinds of different demands and use cases. If you care about harvesting in the northern hemisphere versus the southern hemisphere, the markers that youre looking at from the data are slightly different just given the growing seasons and the type of crops.

What about the dreaded issue of AI hallucinations, or errors in models more broadly?

Almost invariably theres a human in the loop in the training phase. Even in the balloon instances its: how are we gonna potentially find a balloon? Draw a rough picture of it, see if we can find the thing and then see how many instances we find and then have a couple of people validate like, yep, thats actually what we are looking for.

Thats also why the answer is not necessarily to go hire an army of people, because you still have to be mindful of how much time do we want to spend training on something specific for a client versus a partner?

Planets data set seems obviously valuable to train machine learning modelsis it tempting to license that to large AI companies?

We have a unique set of data that does not exist elsewhere, so we want to be prudent in how we use that, because if you fully open it up and somebody trains a model where they no longer need your observations or they can take some other observation and its good enoughyou dont want to disintermediate yourself.

We are partnering liberally because we want to get the value out of the data. The most important thing for customers that were working with, who are driving decisions around policies that we care about, is how do we get them value out of the data quickly? I will partner all day long to go do that, to make sure that were faster in getting answers for customers.

Thats different than, hey, lets just monetize the fact that we have this data spigot and turn it on for anybody. Because the reality is that we are running an enterprise sales business where we sell a SaaS product to large civil governments and agricultural groups and others that are getting value from that.

See the rest here:

Understanding AI's Impact on Space Data with Planet's Head of Product - Payload

Key Takeaways

Amazon (AMZN) shares gained more than 7% in premarket trading Friday after the e-commerce giant late Thursday released a blowout quarterly earnings report fueled by growth in its retail business and increasing demand for the cloud divisions artificial intelligence products.

The one-time online bookseller attributed a 14% year-over-year (YOY) jump in fourth quarter revenue to a bumper holiday shopping season and the companys October Prime Day event. This Q4 was a record-breaking Holiday shopping season and closed out a robust 2023 for Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement accompanying the quarterly results.

During the earnings call, Jassy said the company will take a cautious approach when considering new opportunities but plans to continue investing in new areas that resonate with customers while keeping an eye on efficiency. Were going to continue to invest in new things and new areas and things that are resonating with customers. Where we can find efficiencies and do more with less, were going to do that as well, he explained.

On the AI front, Jassy said that while the companys generative AI services are a relatively small business, they have the potential to generate tens of billions of dollars over the next few years. Furthermore, CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts that interest in Amazon Web Services (AWS) generative AI products, such as Amazon Q and AI chatbot for businesses, had accelerated during the quarter. In September last year, Amazon said it plans to invest up to $4 billion in startup chatbot-maker Anthropic to take on cloud rivals in the AI arms race.

The AMZN share price has coiled within a rising wedge pattern on declining volume over the past five months, with an earnings-driven breakout likely in todays trading session. If the stock continues to trend higher, its worth keeping an eye on the $188 levelan area on the chart where the price may encounter overhead resistance from a horizontal trendline connecting the July and November 2021 swing highs. However, a volume-backed breakout to a new all-time high (ATH) coinciding with the 50-day moving average crossing back above the 200-day moving averaging could mark the beginning of another leg higher for the e-commerce giants stock.

Amazon shares were up 7.1% at $170.56 about 45 minutes before the opening bell Friday.

The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed on Investopedia are for informational purposes only. Read ourwarranty and liability disclaimerfor more info.

As of the date this article was written, the author does not own any of the above securities.

Read the original here:

Amazon Stock Jumps On Earnings Beat, Cloud AI Product GrowthKey Price Levels to Watch - Investopedia

In today's video, I discuss the recent updates affecting Nvidia (NVDA 4.97%). Check out the short video to learn more, consider subscribing, and click the special offer link below.

*Stock prices used were the market prices of Feb. 2, 2024. The video was published on Feb. 2, 2024.

Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Jose Najarro has positions in Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends Intel and recommends the following options: long January 2023 $57.50 calls on Intel, long January 2025 $45 calls on Intel, and short February 2024 $47 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Jose Najarro is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through their link they will earn some extra money that supports their channel. Their opinions remain their own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

See the original post here:

Nvidia Stock Had an Amazing Week -- Here is What Artificial Intelligence (AI) Semiconductor Investors Should Know - The Motley Fool