E-Paper News Feed Illustrates The Headlines With AI-Generated Images

September 19, 2023 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

It’s hard to read the headlines today without feeling like the world couldn’t possibly get much worse. And then tomorrow rolls around, and a fresh set of headlines puts the lie to that thought. On a macro level, there’s not much that you can do about that, but on a personal level, illustrating your news feed with mostly wrong, AI-generated images might take the edge off things a little.

Let us explain. [Roy van der Veen] liked the idea of an e-paper display newsfeed, but the crushing weight of the headlines was a little too much to bear. To lighten things up, he decided to employ Stable Diffusion to illustrate his feed, displaying both the headline and a generated image on a 7.3″ Inky 7-color e-paper display. Every five hours, a script running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W fetches a headline from a random source — we’re pleased the list includes Hackaday — and composes a prompt for Stable Diffusion based on the headline, adding on a randomly selected prefix and suffix to spice things up. For example, a prompt might look like, “Gothic painting of (Driving a Motor with an Audio Amp Chip). Gloomy, dramatic, stunning, dreamy.” You can imagine the results.

We have to say, from the examples [Roy] shows, the idea pretty much works — sometimes the images are so far off the mark that just figuring out how Stable Diffusion came up with them is enough to soften the blow. We’d have preferred if the news of the floods in Libya had been buffered by a slightly less dismal scene, but finding out that what was thought to be a “ritual mass murder” was really only a yoga class was certainly heartening.

Here’s Why GPUs Are Deep Learning’s Best Friend

September 3, 2023 by Donald Papp 20 Comments

If you have a curiosity about how fancy graphics cards actually work, and why they are so well-suited to AI-type applications, then take a few minutes to read [Tim Dettmers] explain why this is so. It’s not a terribly long read, but while it does get technical there are also car analogies, so there’s something for everyone!

He starts off by saying that most people know that GPUs are scarily efficient at matrix multiplication and convolution, but what really makes them most useful is their ability to work with large amounts of memory very efficiently.

Essentially, a CPU is a latency-optimized device while GPUs are bandwidth-optimized devices. If a CPU is a race car, a GPU is a cargo truck. The main job in deep learning is to fetch and move cargo (memory, actually) around. Both devices can do this job, but in different ways. A race car moves quickly, but can’t carry much. A truck is slower, but far better at moving a lot at once. Continue reading “Here’s Why GPUs Are Deep Learning’s Best Friend” →

Re-Creating Pink Floyd In The Name Of Speech

September 1, 2023 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

For people who have lost the ability to speak, the future may include brain implants that bring that ability back. But could these brain implants also allow them to sing? Researchers believe that, all in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.

In a new study published in PLOS Biology, twenty-nine people who were already being monitored for epileptic seizures participated via a postage stamp-sized array of electrodes implanted directly on the surface of their brains. As the participants were exposed to Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In the Wall, Part 1, the researchers gathered data from several areas of the brain, each attuned to a different musical element such as harmony, rhythm, and so on. Then the researchers used machine learning to reconstruct the audio heard by the participants using their brainwaves.

First, an AI model looked at the data generated from the brains’ responses to components of the song, like the changes in rhythm, pitch, and tone. Then a second model rejiggered the piecemeal song and estimated the sounds heard by the patients. Of the seven audio samples published in the study results, we think #3 sounds the most like the song. It’s kind of creepy but ultimately very cool. What do you think?

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A Hacker-Friendly Software Package For Your Next AI Project

August 31, 2023 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

If you’re interested in using Large Language Models (LLM) in a project, but aren’t plugged directly into the fast-developing world of artificial intelligence (AI), knowing what tool or software to use can be daunting. Luckily, [Max Woolf] created simpleaichat, which is complete with examples and documentation and minimal code complexity.

As [Max] puts it, the main motivations behind the project are to provide useful tools while making it easier for non-engineers to peer through the breathless hyperbole and see just how AI-based apps actually work. This project was directly inspired by [Max]’s own real-world software experiences in this area, particularly his frustrations with popular and much-hyped frameworks in which “Hello World” feels a lot more like Hell World.

simpleaichat is a Python package that provides easy and powerful ways to interface with the OpenAI API, makers of ChatGPT. Now, it is true that OpenAI’s models are not open source and access is not free, but they are easily one of the most capable and cost-effective services of their kind.

Prefer something a little more open, and a lot more private? There’s always the option to run an LLM locally on your own machine, possibly with the help of a tool like text-generation-webui or gpt4all. Running an LLM locally will not have the quality of OpenAI’s offerings, but it can still do the job. It’s also possible to give these local LLMs an interface that mimics OpenAI’s API, so there are loads of possibilities.

Are you getting ideas yet? Share them in the comments, or keep them to yourselves and submit a tip once your project is off the ground!

Smart Garbage Trucks Help With Street Maintenance

August 24, 2023 by Lewin Day 42 Comments

If you’ve ever had trouble with a footpath, bus stop, or other piece of urban infrastructure, you probably know the hassles of dealing with a local council. It can be incredibly difficult just to track down the right avenue to report issues, let alone get them sorted in a timely fashion.

In the suburban streets of one Australian city, though, that’s changing somewhat. New smart garbage trucks are becoming instruments of infrastructure surveillance, serving a dual purpose that could reshape urban management. Naturally, though, this new technology raises issues around ethics and privacy.

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Hackaday Links: August 13, 2023

August 13, 2023 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Remember that time when the entire physics community dropped what it was doing to replicate the extraordinary claim that a room-temperature semiconductor had been discovered? We sure do, and if it seems like it was just yesterday, it’s probably because it pretty much was. The news of LK-99, a copper-modified lead apatite compound, hit at the end of July; now, barely three weeks later, comes news that not only is LK-99 not a superconductor, but that its resistivity at room temperature is about a billion times higher than copper. For anyone who rode the “cold fusion” hype train back in the late 1980s, LK-99 had a bit of code smell on it from the start. We figured we’d sit back and let science do what science does, and sure enough, the extraordinary claim seems not to be able to muster the kind of extraordinary evidence it needs to support it — with the significant caveat that a lot of the debunking papers –and indeed the original paper on LK-99 — seem still to be just preprints, and have not been peer-reviewed yet.

So what does all this mean? Sadly, probably not much. Despite the overwrought popular media coverage, a true room-temperature and pressure superconductor was probably not going to save the world, at least not right away. The indispensable Asianometry channel on YouTube did a great video on this. As always, his focus is on the semiconductor industry, so his analysis has to be viewed through that lens. He argues that room-temperature superconductors wouldn’t make much difference in semiconductors because the place where they’d most likely be employed, the interconnects on chips, will still have inductance and capacitance even if their resistance is zero. That doesn’t mean room-temperature superconductors wouldn’t be a great thing to have, of course; seems like they’d be revolutionary for power transmission if nothing else. But not so much for semiconductors, and certainly not today.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: August 13, 2023” →

The AI Engine That Fits In 100K

August 2, 2023 by Al Williams 14 Comments

Running your own AI models is possible, but it requires a giant computer, right? Maybe not. Researchers at NVidia are showing off Perfusion, a text-to-image model they say is 100KB in size and takes four minutes to train. The model specializes in customizing a photo. For example, the paper shows a picture of a teddy bear and a prompt to dress it as a wizard. In all fairness, the small size and quick training are a little misleading, we think, because the results are still using the usual giant model. What’s small and fast is the customization of the existing model.

Customizing models is a common task since you often want to work with something the model doesn’t contain. For example, you might want to alter a picture of your face or your pet, which probably isn’t in the original model. You can create a special keyword and partially train the model for what you want using something called textual inversion. The problem the researchers identified is that creating textual inversions often causes the new training to leak to unintended areas.

They describe “key locking,” a technique to avoid overfitting when fine-tuning an existing model. For example, suppose you want to add a specific dog picture to the model. With typical techniques, a special keyword like dog* will indicate the custom dog image, but the keyword has no connection with generic dogs, mammals, or animals. This makes it difficult for the AI to work with the image. For example, the prompts “a man sitting” and “a dog sitting” require very different image generations. But if we train a specific dog as “dog*” there’s no deeper understanding that “dog*” is a type of “dog” that the model already knows about. So what do you do with “dog* sitting?” Key locking makes that association.

Continue reading “The AI Engine That Fits In 100K” →