Glad to be at #BLAH8 , with two interesting projects from my group IDSIA NLP

Excited to announce our paper 'Exploring the Latest Highlights in Medical NLP across Multiple Languages: A Survey' published in the NLP section of the International Medical Informatics Association Yearbook 2023. Link here: thieme-connect.com/products/ejour…

100%! nature.com/articles/d4158…

Glad to report that our project proposal 'NLP in support of Pharmacovigilance: QUality Adverse Drug Reaction AcTIve Control (QUADRATIC)' has been approved by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

'From every 1,000 euros the academic community spends on publishing with Elsevier 380 Euros go into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders,' says Stefanie Haustein english.elpais.com/science-tech/2… 👇

Regulatory capture in a nutshell:

1) Get the uninformed general public terrified of vague threats
3) Frame it as 'for the greater good'
4) Employ true believers/well intention extremists
5) Co-opt ^^ useful idiots
6) Gov eliminates competition for you!

politico.com/news/2023/10/1…

A nice piece by Andrew Ng arguing that irrational fears about AI should not cause governments to regulate open source AI models out of existence.

Yap. As I've said for years:
Regulate applications of AI, not general/foundational model research.

Max Tegmark Rishi Sunak Ursula von der Leyen Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei are the ones doing massive corporate lobbying at the moment.
They are the ones who are attempting to perform a regulatory capture of the AI industry.
You, Geoff, and Yoshua are giving ammunition to those who are lobbying for a ban on open AI R&D.

If

The heretofore silent majority of AI scientists and engineers who
- do not believe in AI extinction scenarios or
- believe we have agency in making AI powerful, reliable, and safe and
- think the best way to do so is through open source AI platforms
NEED TO SPEAK UP !

Does working from home damage productivity? Just look at the data.  thehill.com/opinion/techno…

It feels so weird to me that people talk about open source as reckless and a risk when it comes to AI model.

Open source has been responsible for the last 20 years of technological revolution. Builders sharing their free knowledge to the world to benefit us all.

But suddenly

OpenAI: AI will kill us.
Anthropic: AI will kill us.
InflectionAI: AI will kill us.
Nvidia:

Following our previous open letter to the EU on the significance of open-source AI, LAION, backed by European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and a long list of very impactful AI researchers, we submit this new open letter to the EU laion.ai/blog/transpare…

AI systems are fast becoming a basic infrastructure.
Historically, basic infrastructure always ends up being open source (think of the software infra of the internet, including Linux, Apache, JavaScript and browser engines, etc)
It's the only way to make it reliable, secure, and

Suleyman joins Sam Altman pushing for regulation open source pre deployed AI. He even mentioned that one needs a license for develop.

It feels like we invited the tabac industry to discuss public health regulation. #opensource #UN #TechCouncil

The enthusiasm of big generative AI/foundation model companies to claim AI existential risks and ask to be regulated by the government is the same old story of “Regulation is the friend of the incumbent”, and especially damaging for open source, argues Bill Gurley.

HT Serafim Batzoglou

The government is being heavily pressured to ban open source. How can we prevent this? By campaigning in favor of open source and electing officials who understand the fundamental importance of it.

Excellent paper. My favorite takeaways: 1) The high number published over the past several years may lead us to mistake motion for progress. nature.com/articles/s4174…

Incredible news. The first Generalist Medical AI system is out.

DeepMind just announced Med-PaLM M, a Multimodal Generative AI model that understands:
1. Clinical language
2. Imaging
3. Genomics

The model reaches or surpasses SOTA on 14 different tasks all with the same set of