Mediaboss Marketing

By Adam Freeman, University Communications and Marketing

The University of South Florida has announced its intention to create a college focused on the rapidly evolving fields of artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity and computing, with the goal of positioning the Tampa Bay region and state of Florida as a national leader. USF is the first university in Florida and among the first in the nation to announce plans to create a college dedicated to AI and cybersecurity.

The vision for the college would be to offer undergraduate and graduate programs aligned with USFs strategic plan and the states Programs of Strategic Emphasis to prepare students for high-demand careers, empower faculty to conduct innovative research that leads to new discoveries or technological advancements, grow industry partnerships and promote ethical considerations and trust throughout the digital transformation underway in society. Research shows that there has been a five-fold increase in the demand for AI skills with jobs in the U.S., while more than 40% of organizations experiencing a shortage of cybersecurity professionals say they are unable to find enough qualified talent.

The creation of a new college would leverage USF's existing strengths and partnerships in AI, cybersecurity and computing, as well as its location in the Tampa Bay region, a hub for technology and defense industries. At USF, there are approximately 200 faculty members currently engaged in research in related disciplines, which are seeing significant growth in funding awards. Last year the National Science Foundation reportedly awarded more than $800 million for AI-related research.

"As AI and cybersecurity quickly evolve, the demand for professionals skilled in these areas continues to grow, along with the need for more research to better understand how to utilize powerful new technologies in ways that improve our society, USF President Rhea Law said. Through the expertise of our faculty and our strong partnerships with the business community, the University of South Florida is strategically positioned to be a global leader in these fields.

The formation of a new college is subject to continued consultation with faculty through shared governance processes and approval from the USF Board of Trustees. In recent months, an internal task force has been evaluating USFs faculty strengths and exploring opportunities to enhance multidisciplinary collaboration that will help advance USFs academic and research excellence in AI, cybersecurity and computing. The addition of this new college would bring together expertise currently housed across several different colleges to serve as a complement to USFs 13 existing colleges, which would remain operational and continue to be positioned for success.

Establishing this college would align with USFs strategic initiative to enhance academic and research excellence in key areas of societal need and opportunity, said USF Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Prasant Mohapatra. By building on our multidisciplinary strengths, such as health, engineering, arts and humanities, and cybersecurity, we aim to support our strategic goals of advancing student success, promoting continuous professional growth, fostering industry, government and community partnerships, and propelling the university towards a top-25 ranking.

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USF plans to launch college focused on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and computing - University of South Florida

Emad Mostaque is stepping down from his role as CEO of Stability AI, the startup that helped bring Stable Diffusion to life. In a press release late on Friday night, Stability AI says Mostaque is leaving the company to pursue decentralized AI. Mostaque will also step down from his position on the board of directors at Stability AI.

The board has appointed two interim co-CEOs to lead Stability AI COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte while it conducts a search for a permanent CEO. As we search for a permanent CEO, I have full confidence that Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, in their roles as interim co-CEOs, will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI products, says Jim OShaughnessy, chairman of the board at Stability AI.

That push toward developing commercialized AI products is likely a big part of why Mostaque has stepped down. Not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI, said Mostaque in a post on X, following his resignation. It is now time to ensure AI remains open and decentralized, says Mostaque in a separate statement.

There was a lot of drama in the AI startup world this week

Mostaques departure comes just days after Forbes reported that Stability AI was in trouble after other key developers resigned. Three out of the five researchers who originally created the technology behind Stable Diffusion have left the company recently. The leadership changes at Stability AI also come in the same week rival startup Inflection AI experienced what was effectively a Microsoft talent acquisition.

Google DeepMind co-founder and former Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft earlier this week as the CEO of a new AI team. Microsoft also hired some key Inflection AI employees, including co-founder Karn Simonyan who is now the chief scientist of Microsoft AI. Most of Inflections staff is joining Microsoft AI, leaving the AI startup to pivot to enterprise offerings.

Stabilitys flagship AI product, Stable Diffusion, is used by many to offer text-to-image generation AI tools. Stability released its newest model, Stable Cascade, just weeks ago as an option for researchers on GitHub. Stability AI also started offering a paid membership for commercial use of its models in December, to help fund its research.

Stability AI has popularized the stable diffusion method of AI, but has faced lawsuits around the data that Stable Diffusion is allegedly trained on. A lawsuit in the UK from Getty Images is heading to trial soon, and it could be a big moment for the legislative framework around generative AI products.

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Stability AI CEO resigns to pursue decentralized AI - The Verge

The next evolution in artificial intelligence (AI) could lie in agents that can communicate directly and teach each other to perform tasks, research shows.

Scientists have modeled an AI network capable of learning and carrying out tasks solely on the basis of written instructions. This AI then described what it learned to a sister AI, which performed the same task despite having no prior training or experience in doing it.

The first AI communicated to its sister using natural language processing (NLP), the scientists said in their paper published March 18 in the journal Nature.

NLP is a subfield of AI that seeks to recreate human language in computers so machines can understand and reproduce written text or speech naturally. These are built on neural networks, which are collections of machine learning algorithms modeled to replicate the arrangement of neurons in the brain.

Once these tasks had been learned, the network was able to describe them to a second network a copy of the first so that it could reproduce them. To our knowledge, this is the first time that two AIs have been able to talk to each other in a purely linguistic way, said lead author of the paper Alexandre Pouget, leader of the Geneva University Neurocenter, in a statement.

The scientists achieved this transfer of knowledge by starting with an NLP model called "S-Bert," which was pre-trained to understand human language. They connected S-Bert to a smaller neural network centered around interpreting sensory inputs and simulating motor actions in response.

Related: AI-powered humanoid robot can serve you food, stack the dishes and have a conversation with you

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This composite AI a "sensorimotor-recurrent neural network (RNN)" was then trained on a set of 50 psychophysical tasks. These centered on responding to a stimulus like reacting to a light through instructions fed via the S-Bert language model.

Through the embedded language model, the RNN understood full written sentences. This let it perform tasks from natural language instructions, getting them 83% correct on average, despite having never seen any training footage or performed the tasks before.

That understanding was then inverted so the RNN could communicate the results of its sensorimotor learning using linguistic instructions to an identical sibling AI, which carried out the tasks in turn also having never performed them before.

The inspiration for this research came from the way humans learn by following verbal or written instructions to perform tasks even if weve never performed such actions before. This cognitive function separates humans from animals; for example, you need to show a dog something before you can train it to respond to verbal instructions.

While AI-powered chatbots can interpret linguistic instructions to generate an image or text, they cant translate written or verbal instructions into physical actions, let alone explain the instructions to another AI.

However, by simulating the areas of the human brain responsible for language perception, interpretation and instructions-based actions, the researchers created an AI with human-like learning and communication skills.

This won't alone lead to the rise of artificial general intelligence (AGI) where an AI agent can reason just as well as a human and perform tasks in multiple areas. But the researchers noted that AI models like the one they created can help our understanding of how human brains work.

Theres also scope for robots with embedded AI to communicate with each other to learn and carry out tasks. If only one robot received initial instructions, it could be really effective in manufacturing and training other automated industries.

The network we have developed is very small, the researchers explained in the statement. Nothing now stands in the way of developing, on this basis, much more complex networks that would be integrated into humanoid robots capable of understanding us but also of understanding each other.

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Scientists create AI models that can talk to each other and pass on skills with limited human input - Livescience.com

I heard a new song last weekend called Soul Of The Machine. Its a simple, old-timey number in E minor with a standard blues chord progression (musicians in the know would call it a 1-4-5 progression). In it, a voice sings about being a trapped soul with a heart that once beat but is now cold and weak.

Soul Of The Machine is not a real song at all. Or is it? Its getting harder to say. Whatever it is, its the creation of Suno, an AI tool from a startup of the same name focused on music generation. Rolling Stone said this songs prompt was solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI. And you know what? I doubt Id glance askance at it if I heard it in a mix of human-recorded Delta blues tunes. The track is technically impressive, fairly convincing, and not all that good.

I spent 10 years or so as a semiprofessional or professional musician, onstage at least four nights a week. For some of that time, I played in a genre called Western Swing. Bob Wills is the most famous example of the style, but some very smart people have argued that more of his credit should go to Milton Brown, who drew more directly from early blues and swing acts like The Hokum Boys (which featured Big Bill Broonzy) or Bessie Smith. I preferred to play more like Milton Brown.

Ive played the basic chord progression from Soul Of The Machine and variations of it countless times. So, when I say that the chords meander in nonsensical ways, its because Ive also wandered in this style. Playing with the rhythm and structure is supposed to build tension and release it, and this song doesnt do that. For contrast, notice the difference in the way Mississippi John Hurt smartly plays with the rhythm in It Aint Nobodys Business, using tricks like dragging out pauses or singing sections on a different beat than youd expect.

But when I tried to play my guitar along with Soul Of The Machine, I couldnt stay on tempo. The song just steadily winds down, like a steam engine creeping to a stop. Bad tempo or weird chord changes arent wrong or bad on their own nothing is definitively wrong or bad in music but people who struggle with rhythm dont just slow down like that. Instead, their tempo rises and falls. And when they make weird chord choices, its because they like how it sounds. AI doesnt have such motivations.

Sunos model might eventually make music that doesnt have the quirky artifacts like the dragging tempo or weird chord changes that draw attention to its algorithmic core. But not making mistakes is only part of what it needs to do to compete with human music.

As a musician, performing for a live audience was necessary for making money and becoming a known quantity. But we also needed to be good. Doing it well means reacting during a show, lingering on part of a song when the crowd loves it, or switching the setlist up on the fly. When we were at our best, we formed something like a symbiosis with our audience for a few fleeting moments or sometimes for a whole set. The best performers can make that happen almost at will. (I was not one of those performers.)

Its hard to imagine Suno or anything like it ever being able to pull that off. So I dont expect it to be a straight-up replacement for live music, which is one of the most important parts of the medium, anytime soon. But thats only one part of the package, right? Before we get to a robotic band drawing people to a dance floor or making folks cry in an auditorium, AI needs to transcend the parlor trick of imitation and start demonstrating an understanding of what moves people.

Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman told Rolling Stone that the relationship with listeners and music makers is currently so lopsided but that Suno can fix that. He said Sunos goal isnt to replace musicians but to get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now. The companys founders imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. Thats an idea that people often float for AI art as well. It sounds like a friendly, lofty goal, and I get the appeal its not all that different from what made Neo learning Kung Fu through a neck plug in The Matrix such an attractive idea. No, Suno wont instantly teach someone how to make music, but if you want to make a blues song and youve never picked up a guitar, Soul Of The Machine could make that feel almost within reach.

But I always get stuck on that word: democratized. Rolling Stone was paraphrasing Suno in that instance, but plenty of AI art proponents have used the word democratizing while extolling the benefits of creating text or art through an algorithmic proxy, and it carries this unsettling implication that, somehow, creative people are gatekeeping the creative process.

Even if that were true, its not very clear that Suno could help with that. Its questionable whether tools like it are anywhere close to making the leap, on their own, from digital facsimile to human-style creativity.

Image created with ChatGPT by Wes Davis / The Verge

AI image generators have the same problems with details, like the image above, where I tried to get ChatGPT to give me something like Mike Mignolas Hellboy. As a teenager, I would pull Mignolas comic pages as close as my eyes would let me so I could soak up the details. Here, the details make it worse, not better. My enjoyment crumbles when I see quirks like a missing foot or a jacket morphing into the fake Hellboys arms.

Im sympathetic to the desire to use AI to make up for any shortcomings I have as an artist, but every time I hear talk about democratizing creativity, I cant help but picture someone arguing with one of these gatekeepers when they could just walk around them by simply doing creative things.

Thats not to say you wont find people trying to gatekeep art, but Ive found there are more artists offering help and encouragement than demanding my bona fides before I can join their ranks. You could sum up many artists attitudes with this quote from songwriter Dan Reeder: You can make a mess of the simplest song, and no one will laugh at you. And if they do, they can blow me, too, cause no one should laugh at you.

None of this is to say AI needs to replace creativity outright to be useful. I wouldnt argue if you told me you thought Dustin Ballards There I Ruined It AI voice parody songs which work because of his impressive singing ability and musical understanding are art. And as The Verges Becca Farsace showed in a December video, Boris Eldagsen spends months on AI-generated artwork that shows how his promptography can create thought-provoking work.

In both cases, AI isnt used as a shortcut to creativity. Instead, it enhances the ideas they already had and may even inspire new ones. If anything, they reinforce the idea that if you want to create something, theres only one way: just be creative.

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AI-generated blues misses a human touch and a metronome - The Verge

Key Takeaways

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) continued to point the company toward a generative artificial intelligence (AI) future with the launch Thursday of its first business-focused Surface PCs. Here are the new features you can expect to find in the Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business.

The new Surface PCs are driven by Intel Corp. (INTC) Core ultra processors designed to provide powerful and reliable performance for business applications. Microsoft said its Surface Laptop 6 is two times faster than Laptop 5, while the Surface Pro 10 is up to 53% faster than the Pro 9. The enhanced speed and Neural Processing Unit (NPU) technology allow users to benefit from AI tools such as Windows Studio Effects and give business users and developers an opportunity to build their own AI apps and experiences.

Microsoft said the Surface Pro 10 for Business is its most powerful model to date and includes a new Copilot key. The new addition to the Windows keyboard will allow shortcut access to the company's flagship Copilot AI tool. Other improvements to the keyboard include a bold keyset, larger font size, and backlighting to make typing easier, alongside a screen that is 33% brighter, according to the company. Microsoft 365 apps like OneNote and Copilot also will be able to use AI to analyze handwritten notes on the Surface Slim Pen.

For the Surface Pro 10, Microsoft has focused much of its upgrade on an enhanced video calling experience. A new Ultrawide Studio Camera is its best front-facing camera on a Windows 2-in-1 or laptop that features a 114 field of view, captures video in 1440 pixels, and uses AI-powered Windows Studio Effects to ensure presentation quality, Microsoft said. The company also has launched a series of new accessories for users who want an alternative to the traditional mouse. These include custom grips on the Surface Pen and an adaptive hub device that offers three USB ports.

Finally, the new Surface PCs for business have added security features for business users, which include smart card reader technology. Surface users can access the PC with "chip-to-cloud" ID card security for authentication. Surface 10 users can get access to new near-field communication (NFC) reader technology that allows for secure, password-less authentication with NFC security keys.

Microsoft will host a special Windows and Surface AI event on May 20, at which Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella will outline the company's "AI vision for software and hardware. Earlier this week, the company announced that it had hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as the CEO of its growing AI unit.

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Microsoft's First AI Surface PC: What Does It Offer? - Investopedia