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Training AI with the energy of a lightbulb💡
ALSO: Building research dashboards with AI
Zain Kahn
July 02, 2024
Read time: under 4 minutes
Welcome back, Superhuman
If you want to train an AI model, you typically need aisles and aisles of powerful computers. But what if you could crunch the numbers with only the amount of energy needed to power a lightbulb? Researchers at UC Santa Cruz say they’ve found a way to do just that.
Today’s Insights
A new way to train AI models
Tutorial: Build learning dashboards from research papers
Using AI to analyze the brain
5 new AI tools to boost your productivity
Everything else you should know today
AI-Generated Images: Chocolates around the world
NEXT IN AI
A new approach could make training AI much more efficient
Source: Getty Images
By 2027, the AI industry is expected to gobble up roughly the same amount of energy each year as the Netherlands. Users aren’t off the hook either: A typical session with ChatGPT can require as much as 17 ounces of water — which is often used to cool data centers.
To address the problem, Microsoft is working on atomic fusion technology, while Alphabet is funding projects that dig thousands of feet into the ground in search of geothermal energy. But environmentalists say these Hail Marys have little chance of working — at least within the next few years.
A more sustainable approach might involve changing the way AI models operate in the first place. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz just revealed one promising method that could transform the way AI companies train their LLMs.
Here’s how it works: Most of today’s models rely on an energy-intensive process called matrix multiplication (MatMul), which, as the name suggests, involves multiplying numbers across several layers of a network. Often, those numbers have decimals, making it trickier to calculate each step in the process.
But the Santa Cruz computer scientists found a way to convert these numbers into ternary values. (Instead of binary, which uses 0’s and 1’s, ternary also adds -1 into the mix.) It makes each calculation much easier, since the computer is dealing with only three options at a time and can add them instead of multiplying.
How much energy can this approach save? The researchers said they were able to run a Llama-2-like model on a billion-parameter-scale with just 13 watts of power — on par with an LED light bulb. They managed to do this without any significant drop in performance.
Tech companies like OpenAI are already moving on to trillion-parameter models, which this approach isn’t compatible with just yet. Still, the researchers say they’ll be able to scale up their method, and that it can even be adapted to the hardware AI companies already own.
PRESENTED BY MASTERWORKS
This painting sold for millions, these everyday investors profited
When the painting by master Claude Monet (you may have heard of him) was bought for $6.8 million and sold for a cool $8 million just 631 days later, investors in shares of the offering received their share of the net proceeds.
All thanks to Masterworks, the award-winning platform for investing in blue-chip art. When Masterworks sells a painting – like the 23 it's already sold – investors reap their portion of the profits. In just the last few years, its investors have realized annualized net returns of 17.6%, 17.8%, 21.5% and more.
How does it work? Simple, Masterworks files each offering with the SEC so that nearly anyone can invest in highly coveted artworks for just a fraction of the price of the entire piece.
Shares of every offering are limited, but Superhuman AI readers can skip the waitlist
Disclaimer: Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Investing involves risk. See Important disclosures at https://www.masterworks.com/cd
AI AT WORK
How to build learning dashboards from research papers
Source: @Saboo_Shubham_ on X
Go to Claude’s website and log in.
Make sure you select Claude 3.5 Sonnet as your model.
Upload your research paper and use the prompt:
Create an interactive and detailed dashboard to present the
learnings from this research paper. Make it look good and professional.
Refine your prompt if needed. Wait for a few seconds and you are done.
PROMPT OF THE DAY
Add data & research to your writing
Prompt: I’m writing [describe the content and subject matter] for [target audience] and want to include relevant data and research. Can you review the following text and provide researched-backed statistics and insights on this topic?
You can adapt the prompt to your specific needs.
Source: Aytekin Tank / Forbes
PRESENTED BY TAPLIO
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AI & PROGRESS
An AI-powered study suggests there’s six shades of depression
According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 29% of Americans have been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime. That’s a record high — and up 10 points from 2015. But mental illness can be difficult to treat because not everyone experiences it the same way.
Neurologists think there are certain circuits in the brain that correspond with depression. A team of researchers from Stanford, Yale, and other institutions conducted scans on 800 people, each with depression or anxiety, to see whether they could spot differences in the participants’ brain activity. They then fed the data through a machine learning algorithm, which came up with six distinct subtypes.
People who displayed overactive brain activity were more likely to respond positively to antidepressants. Meanwhile, people whose brains were more active at rest found talk therapy most effective. Another group’s brain images looked identical to those of people without depression, suggesting we still have more to uncover about the disorder.
The study’s senior author, Leanne Williams, lost her partner to depression in 2015. She said the new classification could help patients figure out the best course of treatment from the start, instead of going through years of trial and error: “In essence, it’s a demonstration of a personalized medicine approach for mental health based on objective measures of brain function.”
PRODUCTIVITY
5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity
✅ Jasper: Ask a human-like chatbot to generate ideas, revise your content, or even make you laugh.
✅ Motiff: An AI-powered design tool that integrates cloud collaboration and optimized performance, setting a new standard in UI design.
✅ PromptEasy: Use natural language to fine-tune a custom AI model based on your needs.
✅ Globalseo: Translate your website into 93 languages to reach customers globally with the help of AI.
✅ Summer: Grow your sales and audience with a button that gives readers an AI-powered summary of your blog post.
PS: Want more? Check out our Top 100 AI Tools.
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AI & TECH NEWS
Everything else you need to know today
Source: AP
AI A-Team: At least five top executives at Adept, a company that develops autonomous AI agents, are joining a team at Amazon dedicated to building AGI.
Investing Evolves: Trading platform Robinhood has acquired Pluto Capital in a bid to integrate more AI-powered analytical features into its popular investing app.
Social Butterfly: Character AI — a platform that lets users interact with historical and fictional avatars — is reportedly considering deals with Google and Meta, who want access to the company’s proprietary AI model.
Fierce Competition: Chinese companies, especially Alibaba, took most of the top spots on Hugging Face’s new open LLM leaderboard, while US-based models like Meta’s Llama-3 have started lagging behind.
Hopping the Paywall: Quora’s Poe chatbot can reportedly get around newspaper paywalls by converting articles into HTML files. The trick has angered outlets that rely on subscriptions for revenue.
😄 One Fun Thing: An ad exec in Italy used Luma AI’s new Dream Machine to convert iconic advertisements into videos. The vintage commercials include riffs on Campbell’s 1962 “Soup on the Rocks” ad and Apple’s 1984 “Test Drive a Macintosh” ad.
AI-GENERATED IMAGES
Chocolates from around the world
Source: Reddit user u/Zodiatron on Midjourney
Prompt: An advertisement for [country demonym] chocolate. The chocolate pieces have a cute [country flag colors] design that reflects the colors of their country's flag. In the bottom right, there's an eye-catching logo that spells "["country's chocolates", in native tongue]". Use a [country flag colors] theme with realistic photography --ar 85:128 --personalize
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