We’re one step closer to reading an octopus’s mind • An octopus’s remarkable intelligence makes it a unique subject for marine biologists and neuroscientists. Researchers at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan tracked and monitored three captive but freely moving octopuses, analyzing their brain waves for the first time. Using recording electrodes, the researchers found a type of brain wave never before seen, along with brain waves that may be similar to some seen in human brains, possibly providing hints about the evolution of intelligence. • (Ars Technica, Kenna Hughes-Castleberry) / April 8

AI Is Coming for Voice Actors. Artists Everywhere Should Take Note. • The risks of AI go beyond worries about a flood of bad art. Rather, there are immediate concerns about its effects on actors’ livelihoods and, most importantly, their intellectual property rights. There’s a chance AI could even upend how we think about casting. It’s common to hire celebrities for animation projects, banking on the recognizability of their voice to draw viewers. What if Morgan Freeman has a scheduling conflict or simply wants a new passive income stream and licenses his voice to Pixar for the next decade? The actor in question doesn’t even need to be alive—a few key decisions by a celebrity’s estate and, all of a sudden, contemporary voice actors might find themselves going up against the legendary Mel Blanc for their next gig. • (The Walrus, Tajja Isen) / April 5

Google’s Cloud TPU v4 provides exaFLOPS-scale ML with industry-leading efficiency • Two legendary Google engineers describe the “secret sauce” that has made Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) v4 a platform of choice for the world’s leading AI researchers and developers for training machine learning models at scale. Norm Jouppi is the chief architect for all Google’s TPUs, from TPU v1 to TPU v4. He is a Google Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). David Patterson, a Google Distinguished Engineer, shared the ACM A.M. Turing Award and the NAE Charles Draper Prize. David is one of the creators of RISC and RAID, and his recent research has been on the CO2e emissions from machine learning. TPU v4 is the first supercomputer to deploy a reconfigurable optical circuit switches (OCS), which dynamically reconfigure their interconnect topology to improve scale, availability, utilization, modularity, deployment, security, power, and performance while being much cheaper, lower power, and faster than Infiniband. TPU supercomputers are also the first with hardware support for embeddings, a key component of Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs). • (Google, Norm Jouppi and David Patterson) / April 5

Samsung workers made a major error by using ChatGPT • The company allowed engineers at its semiconductor arm to use the AI writer to help fix problems with their source code. But in doing so, the workers inputted confidential data, such as the source code itself for a new program, internal meeting notes data relating to their hardware. Since ChatGPT retains user input data to further train itself, these trade secrets from Samsung are now effectively in the hands of OpenAI, the company behind the AI service. • (TechRadar, Lewis Maddison) / April 4

AI is entering an era of corporate control • A new report on AI progress highlights how state-of-the-art systems are now the domain of Big Tech companies. It’s these firms that now get to decide how to balance risk and opportunity in this fast-moving field. The 2023 AI Index — compiled by researchers from Stanford University as well as AI companies including Google, Anthropic, and Hugging Face — suggests that the world of AI is entering a new phase of development. Over the past year, a large number of AI tools have gone mainstream, from chatbots like ChatGPT to image-generating software like Midjourney. But decisions about how to deploy this technology and how to balance risk and opportunity lie firmly in the hands of corporate players. The AI Index states that, for many years, academia led the way in developing state-of-the-art AI systems, but industry has now firmly taken over. • (The Verge, James Vincent) / April 3