Comment by Riaz Haq on December 19, 2022 at 4:46pm

How the algorithm tipped the balance in Ukraine

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/19/palantir-algorit...

Vast data battlefield
The “kill chain” that I saw demonstrated in Kyiv is replicated on a vast scale by Ukraine’s NATO partners from a command post outside the country. The system is built around the same software platform developed by Palantir that I saw in Kyiv, which can allow the United States and its allies to share information from diverse sources — ranging from commercial satellite imagery to the West’s most secret intelligence tools.

This is algorithmic warfare, as Karp says. Using a digital model of the battlefield, commanders can penetrate the notorious “fog of war.” By applying artificial intelligence to analyze sensor data, NATO advisers outside Ukraine can quickly answer the essential questions of combat: Where are allied forces? Where is the enemy? Which weapons will be most effective against enemy positions? They can then deliver precise enemy location information to Ukrainian commanders in the field. And after action, they can assess whether their intelligence was accurate and update the system.

Data powers this new engine of war — and the system is constantly updating. With each kinetic strike, the battle damage assessments are fed back into the digital network to strengthen the predictive models. It’s not an automated battlefield, and it still has layers and stovepipes. The system I saw in Kyiv uses a limited array of sensors and AI tools, some developed by Ukraine, partly because of classification limits. The bigger, outside system can process highly classified data securely, with cyber protections and restricted access, then feed enemy location data to Ukraine for action.

To envision how this works in practice, think about Ukraine’s recent success recapturing Kherson, on the Black Sea coast. The Ukrainians had precise intelligence about where the Russian were moving and the ability to strike with accurate long-range fire. This was possible because they had intelligence about the enemy’s location, processed by NATO from outside the country and then sent to commanders on the ground. Armed with that information, the Ukrainians could take the offensive — moving, communicating and adjusting quickly to Russian defensive maneuvers and counterattacks.

And when Ukrainian forces hit Russian command nodes or supply depots, it’s a near certainty that they have received enemy location data this way. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, told me that this electronic kill chain was “especially useful during the liberation of Kherson, Izium, Kharkiv and Kyiv regions.”

What makes this system truly revolutionary is that it aggregates data from commercial vendors. Using a Palantir tool called MetaConstellation, Ukraine and its allies can see what commercial data is currently available about a given battle space. The available data includes a surprisingly wide array, from traditional optical pictures to synthetic aperture radar that can see through clouds, to thermal images that can detect artillery or missile fire.

To check out the range of available data, just visit the internet. Companies selling optical and synthetic aperture radar imagery include Maxar, Airbus, ICEYE and Capella. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sells simple thermal imaging meant to detect fires but that can also register artillery explosions.

In our Kherson example, Palantir assesses that roughly 40 commercial satellites will pass over the area in a 24-hour period. Palantir normally uses fewer than a dozen commercial satellite vendors, but it can expand that range to draw imagery from a total of 306 commercial satellites that can focus to 3.3 meters. Soldiers in battle can use handheld tablets to request more coverage if they need it. According to a British official, Western military and intelligence services work closely with Ukrainians on the ground to facilitate this sharing of information.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 19, 2022 at 4:47pm

How the algorithm tipped the balance in Ukraine

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/19/palantir-algorit...


A final essential link in this system is the mesh of broadband connectivity provided from overhead by Starlink’s array of roughly 2,500 satellites in low-earth orbit. The system, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, allows Ukrainian soldiers who want to upload intelligence or download targeting information to do so quickly.

In this wizard war, Ukraine has the upper hand. The Russians have tried to create their own electronic battlefield tools, too, but with little success. They have sought to use commercial satellite data, for example, and streaming videos from inexpensive Chinese drones. But they have had difficulty coordinating and sharing this data among units. And they lack the ability to connect with the Starlink array.

“The Russian army is not flexible,” Lesya, the Ukrainian officer, told me. She noted proudly that every Ukrainian battalion travels with its own software developer. Ukraine’s core advantage isn’t just the army’s will to fight, but also its technical prowess.

Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister, listed some of the military tech systems that Ukraine has created on its own, in a response to my written questions. These include a secure chat system, called “eVorog,” that has allowed civilians to provide 453,000 reports since the war started; a 200-strong “Army of Drones” purchased from commercial vendors for use in air reconnaissance; and a battlefield mapping system called Delta that “contains the actual data in real time, so the military can plan their actions accordingly.”


The “X factor” in this war, if you will, is this Ukrainian high-tech edge and the ability of its forces to adapt rapidly. “This is the most technologically advanced war in human history,” argues Fedorov. “It’s quite different from everything that has been seen before.”

And that’s the central fact of the extraordinary drama the world has been watching since Russia invaded so recklessly last February. This is a triumph of man and machine, together.

Next: How “algorithmic warfare” evolved over the past decade — and some very human worries.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 10, 2023 at 7:04pm

Why do your homework when a chatbot can do it for you? A new artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT has thrilled the Internet with its superhuman abilities to solve math problems, churn out college essays and write research papers.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1143912956/chatgpt-ai-chatbot-homewo...

After the developer OpenAI released the text-based system to the public last month, some educators have been sounding the alarm about the potential that such AI systems have to transform academia, for better and worse.

"AI has basically ruined homework," said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, on Twitter.

The tool has been an instant hit among many of his students, he told NPR in an interview on Morning Edition, with its most immediately obvious use being a way to cheat by plagiarizing the AI-written work, he said.

Academic fraud aside, Mollick also sees its benefits as a learning companion.

He's used it as his own teacher's assistant, for help with crafting a syllabus, lecture, an assignment and a grading rubric for MBA students.

"You can paste in entire academic papers and ask it to summarize it. You can ask it to find an error in your code and correct it and tell you why you got it wrong," he said. "It's this multiplier of ability, that I think we are not quite getting our heads around, that is absolutely stunning," he said.

A convincing — yet untrustworthy — bot
But the superhuman virtual assistant — like any emerging AI tech — has its limitations. ChatGPT was created by humans, after all. OpenAI has trained the tool using a large dataset of real human conversations.

"The best way to think about this is you are chatting with an omniscient, eager-to-please intern who sometimes lies to you," Mollick said.

It lies with confidence, too. Despite its authoritative tone, there have been instances in which ChatGPT won't tell you when it doesn't have the answer.

That's what Teresa Kubacka, a data scientist based in Zurich, Switzerland, found when she experimented with the language model. Kubacka, who studied physics for her Ph.D., tested the tool by asking it about a made-up physical phenomenon.

"I deliberately asked it about something that I thought that I know doesn't exist so that they can judge whether it actually also has the notion of what exists and what doesn't exist," she said.

ChatGPT produced an answer so specific and plausible sounding, backed with citations, she said, that she had to investigate whether the fake phenomenon, "a cycloidal inverted electromagnon," was actually real.

When she looked closer, the alleged source material was also bogus, she said. There were names of well-known physics experts listed – the titles of the publications they supposedly authored, however, were non-existent, she said.

"This is where it becomes kind of dangerous," Kubacka said. "The moment that you cannot trust the references, it also kind of erodes the trust in citing science whatsoever," she said.

Scientists call these fake generations "hallucinations."

"There are still many cases where you ask it a question and it'll give you a very impressive-sounding answer that's just dead wrong," said Oren Etzioni, the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, who ran the research nonprofit until recently. "And, of course, that's a problem if you don't carefully verify or corroborate its facts."

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 12, 2023 at 7:17pm

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a trending buzzword for some time. It’s a term commonly used for machines, computer-controlled robots, and software systems performing intelligent tasks such as learning, planning, reasoning, and interacting – simulating the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2366462/artificial-intelligence-in-pak...

Usually, when people think about AI, they associate it with human-like robots taking over the world, as depicted in Hollywood movies like I, Robot, Ex Machina, and Westworld, to name a few.

Those films portray a highly advanced version of AI, formally known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is currently close to impossible. Unlike Hollywood, AI today focuses on narrow problems, such as autonomous driving, stock prediction, virtual assistants, and solving impactful real-world problems.

Most of the fundamental AI concepts have existed for many decades. The term “AI” was coined in 1956 by Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy.

The past decade, however, has shown unprecedented growth in the development of AI technologies – mainly unlocked by the availability of compute power, the enormous amount of training data made available by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and the decrease in cloud storage and computing costs.

As a result, AI technologies are already revolutionising most industries, businesses, and lifestyles.

We have sophisticated smart assistants such as Siri on our phones, self-driving cars are closer to becoming a part of our everyday lives, robots help farmers protect their crops from weeds by monitoring and spraying weedicide on plants, AI models can paint and generate images from text, and AI systems are already assisting doctors in the early detection of diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular and neurological disorders.

The global AI software industry is growing rapidly. Statista reports that it is expected to reach $126 billion by 2025. It is considered an engine of economic growth and the next big disruptor.

Many countries have developed dedicated AI frameworks and policies to facilitate education programmes and research and development (R&D) centres to forward technological advancements and economic growth.

Examples include China’s “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” the US executive order on “AI leadership,” and “AI Made in Germany”, to name only a few. Pakistan must follow suit and invest in programmes to promote youths’ enthusiasm about AI and modern technologies. This means investing in education programmes, research centres, and industry readiness training programmes.

After all, Pakistan has great potential in AI, with its scope ranging from solving local problems in agriculture, governance, climate change, and manufacturing, to creating tech unicorns and services companies specialising in hi-tech/ AI software exports.

In fact, a few research labs, companies, and startups are already making strides in the AI space and contributing to the global tech ecosystem. For example, a group of professors at Information Technology University (ITU) Lahore are solving impactful problems and publishing their research at top-tier AI conferences.

One of the most exciting works from their Intelligent Machines Lab is an economic indicators predictor that uses satellite and aerial imagery. They are developing computer vision/ AI tech that examines a satellite image and responds with a poverty estimate for an area, providing government and policymakers the data to make informed decisions.

The National Centre of Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) is a technological initiative established by the government of Pakistan in 2018.

It aims to become a leading hub of innovation, scientific research, knowledge transfer to the local economy, and training in the area of AI and its closely affiliated fields. It consists of nine research labs from six universities in Pakistan.

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 12, 2023 at 7:31pm

While healthcare is in the midst of a digital revolution - Artificial Intelligence has been at the forefront of it. Previously, CT scans, MRIs and many other health records were benefitting from Artificial Intelligence. However, dentistry will provide patients with a first-hand experience with AI. The ability of computers to interpret x-rays with greater diagnostic accuracy, efficient access to data and enhanced management are some of the courses AI has taken in dentistry.

https://www.dentalnewspk.com/02-Sep-2022/implications-of-artificial...

Dental disease prediction is another great tool which allows the dentist to evaluate oral conditions. These predictions help dentists to come up with treatment modalities before the onset of the disease resulting in a customised treatment approach for the patients.

Machine learning algorithms also proved to outperform dentists in diagnosing tooth decay or predicting whether a tooth should be extracted, retained, or have restorative treatment.

"AI is not responsible for the dental examination and does not reach decisions on the treatment. However, dentalXrai Pro raises dentistry to a standardized, high-quality level and immensely speeds up the analysis of X-rays, so that dentists can use the time more effectively for talking to patients." Says the co-founder of dentalXrai.

Applications Of Artificial Intelligence In Dentistry
While AI is expanding its influence on patient care and dental practices. Here are three different ways dentistry is making use of AI.

1. Dental Data Analytics
The data analytics tools allow a thorough evaluation of your dental setting while providing tools to manage and monitor your services. These tools help the dentist tread the line between patient care and business setting making communication and patient dealing easier.

2. Oral Health & General Health
AI can help bridge the gap between patient oral health and systemic health while allowing thorough evaluation of oral conditions and their implications on systemic health. The data-based evaluation allows analysis and treatment planning as it alerts the patients to certain susceptibilities in their dental/overall health.

3. Communication & Treatment Modalities
The multiple layers of applications offered by AI also include integrated imaging technology to gain deeper details about the diagnostic data. These details are used for assistance and treatment planning. AI has also transformed surgeries via robotic capabilities which can be applied under the guidance of an expert surgeon.

Overjet CEO, Wardah Inam, articulated some of the advantages of using AI in dentistry. According to her, the applications can be divided into three broad categories.

Practice, Diagnostic and a Managerial level.

"How do you communicate with the patient better in terms of their diseases and such that they’re more informed about their diseases as well.” - Practice

"Being able to provide a more comprehensive diagnosis where things that might have been missed previously or might not be on their radar, those aspects can be brought to them at the right time, while the patient is in the chair and their data is analyzed.” - Diagnostic.



"Right now for the first time ever, you can actually monitor and track your clinical performance. So you’re looking at how your practices are doing clinically rather than just financially. That helps to determine how you can improve that performance and where the risks and opportunities are.” With “what is possible” in mind, let’s explore some leading applications of AI in dentistry that you can use now." - Managerial

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 9, 2023 at 2:30pm

Top Artificial Intelligence Companies in Pakistan

https://clutch.co/pk/developers/artificial-intelligence

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 1, 2023 at 5:17pm

The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be

https://www.opindia.com/2023/02/chahat-fateh-ali-khan-the-latest-vi...


By Cade Metz

Sam Altman sees the pros and cons of totally changing the world as we know it. And if he does make human intelligence useless, he has a plan to fix it.

I first met Sam Altman in the summer of 2019, days after Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion in his three-year-old start-up, OpenAI. At his suggestion, we had dinner at a small, decidedly modern restaurant not far from his home in San Francisco.

Halfway through the meal, he held up his iPhone so I could see the contract he had spent the last several months negotiating with one of the world’s largest tech companies. It said Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment would help OpenAI build what was called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.

Later, as Mr. Altman sipped a sweet wine in lieu of dessert, he compared his company to the Manhattan Project. As if he were chatting about tomorrow’s weather forecast, he said the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb during the Second World War had been a “project on the scale of OpenAI — the level of ambition we aspire to.”

He believed A.G.I. would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.


---------------

Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.

He told me that it would be a “very slow takeoff.”

When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.

If he’s wrong, he thinks he can make it up to humanity.

He rebuilt OpenAI as what he called a capped-profit company. This allowed him to pursue billions of dollars in financing by promising a profit to investors like Microsoft. But these profits are capped, and any additional revenue will be pumped back into the OpenAI nonprofit that was founded back in 2015.

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.

But as he once told me: “I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 27, 2023 at 7:58am

#China Defense Minister Wants to ‘deepen and expand’ #military ties with #Pakistan for mutual interests and to jointly protect regional #peace and #stability. “China and Pakistan are all-weather strategic cooperative partners and close friends...no matter how the international situation changes, China always gives Pakistan priority" https://aje.io/78u6aw via @AJEnglish

China says it will work with Pakistan’s military to “further deepen and expand” the two nations’ mutual interests and jointly protect regional peace and stability.

A statement by the Chinese defence ministry on Wednesday said Zhang Youxia, the vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, made the comments during his meeting with Pakistan’s army chief, General Syed Asim Munir, who is on his maiden visit to Beijing.

“Noting that China and Pakistan are all-weather strategic cooperative partners and close friends, Zhang said that no matter how the international situation changes, China always gives Pakistan priority in its neighbourhood diplomacy,” said the statement.

Another statement released by the Pakistan army’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), said Munir was given a warm welcome and presented with a guard of honour upon his arrival at the People’s Liberation Army headquarters in Beijing on Wednesday.

“Matters of mutual security interests and military cooperation were discussed. Both military commanders reiterated the need for maintaining peace and stability in the region and enhancing military to military cooperation,” the Pakistani statement said.

The ISPR said Munir will hold further meetings with military officials in China to enhance the “longstanding relations between the two militaries” during his four-day visit.

Muhammad Faisal, an Islamabad-based foreign policy analyst and close observer of Pakistan-China ties, told Al Jazeera Munir’s visit is crucial as it comes amid political, economic and security crises in Pakistan.

“Of late, Pakistan’s dependency on China for economic stability and regional security coordination has grown in the face of financial challenges, renewed threat of terrorism and India-centric challenges,” he said.

Pakistan and China have ongoing border disputes with India, threatening regional security.

Munir’s predecessor General Qamar Javed Bajwa visited China two months before his retirement in November last year. That month also saw Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif making a trip to Beijing and meeting President Xi Jinping.

China has invested $60bn in the ambitious China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project and is Pakistan’s key economic and defence partner.


The South Asian country owes nearly $30bn – 23 percent of its total debt – to China.

As Islamabad struggles to resume a much-needed $1.1bn loan programme with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it has sought help from its allies, mainly China, to roll over some of its existing loans.

Analyst Faisal said while the Pakistani military remains engaged with China on regional security, economy has also taken over as a central agenda in the meetings between the military commanders of the two nations.

“This is a new development and indicates that Chinese military is closely following Pakistan’s economic challenges,” he told Al Jazeera.

As China continues to help Pakistan economically, the last few years saw multiple attacks on Chinese nationals and facilities carried out by the armed groups in Pakistan.

Earlier this month, a Chinese national working at a hydropower plant being constructed by a Chinese company in northern Pakistan was accused of blasphemy – a sensitive issue in Muslim-majority Pakistan.

The Chinese man is currently in a two-week judicial custody which ends on May 2.

Two years ago, 13 people, including nine Chinese nationals working at the same hydropower project, were killed in an attack claimed by the Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 1, 2023 at 8:59pm

The Godfather of #AI Leaves #Google, Warns of #Danger Ahead. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things”. Google bought a company started by Dr. Hinton that led to creation #ChatGPT & Google #Bard. #technology
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-eng...


In the 1980s, Dr. Hinton was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, but left the university for Canada because he said he was reluctant to take Pentagon funding. At the time, most A.I. research in the United States was funded by the Defense Department. Dr. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers.”

In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.


Google spent $44 million to acquire a company started by Dr. Hinton and his two students. And their system led to the creation of increasingly powerful technologies, including new chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Mr. Sutskever went on to become chief scientist at OpenAI. In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.

Around the same time, Google, OpenAI and other companies began building neural networks that learned from huge amounts of digital text. Dr. Hinton thought it was a powerful way for machines to understand and generate language, but it was inferior to the way humans handled language.

Then, last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others. “Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.”

As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.

His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 4, 2023 at 8:04am

Factbox: Governments race to regulate AI tools

https://www.reuters.com/technology/governments-efforts-regulate-ai-...

April 14 (Reuters) - Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT are complicating governments' efforts to agree laws governing the use of the technology.

Here are the latest steps national and international governing bodies are taking to regulate AI tools:

AUSTRALIA
* Seeking input on regulations

The government is consulting Australia's main science advisory body and is considering next steps, a spokesperson for the industry and science minister said in April.

BRITAIN
* Planning regulations

Britain's competition regulator said on Thursday it would start examining the impact of AI on consumers, businesses and the economy and whether new controls were needed.

Britain said in March it planned to split responsibility for governing AI between its regulators for human rights, health and safety, and competition, rather than creating a new body.

CHINA
* Planning regulations

China's cyberspace regulator in April unveiled draft measures to manage generative AI services, saying it wanted firms to submit security assessments to authorities before they launch offerings to the public.

Beijing will support leading enterprises in building AI models that can challenge ChatGPT, its economy and information technology bureau said in February.

EUROPEAN UNION
* Planning regulations

Members of the European Parliament reached a preliminary deal on the draft of the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act, that could pave the way for the world's first comprehensive laws governing the technology.

The draft, which will be voted by a committee of lawmakers on May 11, identified copyright protection as central to the effort to keep AI in check.

Members of European Parliament raced to update the rules to catch up with an explosion of interest in generative AI, Reuters interviews with four lawmakers and two other sources found.

The European Data Protection Board, which unites Europe's national privacy watchdogs, said in April it had set up a task force on ChatGPT, a potentially important first step towards a common policy on setting privacy rules on AI. The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) has joined in the concern about ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, calling on EU consumer protection agencies to investigate the technology and the potential harm to individuals.

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