AI Responses to Common Kung Fu questions.

[GeneChing]

A coffee roastery in Finland has launched an AI-generated blend. The results were surprising
Updated: 2:34 PM PDT Apr 20, 2024
By JARI TANNER Associated Press

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An artisan roastery based in the Finnish capital has introduced a coffee blend that has been developed by artificial intelligence in a trial in which it's hoped that technology can ease the workload in a sector that traditionally prides itself on manual work.

It is only apt that the Helsinki-based Kaffa Roastery’s “AI-conic” blend was launched this week in Finland, a Nordic nation of 5.6 million that consumes the most coffee in the world at 12 kilograms per capita annually, according to the International Coffee Organization.

The blend — an AI-picked mixture with four types of beans dominated by Brazil’s velvety Fazenda Pinhal — is the end result of a joint project by Kaffa, Finland’s third-biggest coffee roastery, and local AI consultancy Elev.

“Leveraging models akin to ChatGPT and Copilot, the AI was tasked with crafting a blend that would ideally suit coffee enthusiasts’ tastes, pushing the boundaries of conventional flavor combinations," Elev said.

Kaffa Roastery’s managing director and founder Svante Hampf told The Associated Press on Saturday that the two partners wanted to trial how AI and its different tools could be of help in coffee roasting, a traditional artisan profession highly valued in Finland.

“We basically gave descriptions of all our coffee types and their flavors to AI and instructed it to create a new exciting blend,” said Hampf, while showcasing “AI-conic” at the Helsinki Coffee Festival that annually brings together roasteries and coffee aficionados.

In addition to coming up with its chosen mixture of beans from Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia and Guatemala, AI created the coffee package label and a detailed taste description saying “AI-conic” is “a well balanced blend of sweetness and ripe fruit.”

Hampf acknowledged he was surprised that AI “somewhat weirdly” chose to make the blend out of four different type of coffee beans, rather than the usual two or three which allows distinction in taste between flavors from different origins.

After the first test roasting and blind testing, Kaffa’s coffee experts agreed, however, that the tech-assisted blend was perfect, and there was no need for human adjustments.

According to Elev’s spokesman Antti Merilehto “AI-conic is a tangible example of how AI can introduce new perspectives to seasoned professionals” while offering coffee lovers new taste experiences.

Kaffa Roastery hopes the trial serves as an opener of dialogue between coffee professionals of things to come in the future in Finland, a nation that has both a strong coffee culture and a passion for technology with a flourishing startup scene.

“This (trial) was the first step in seeing how AI could help us in the future,” Hampf said, adding the project brought smoothly together “the artisan skills of a roastery” and AI-provided data. “I think AI has plenty to offer us in the long run. We are particularly impressed of the coffee taste descriptions it created.”

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AI-Responses-to-Common-Kung-Fu-questions

[GeneChing]

A Stunning New AI Has Supposedly Achieved Sentience
But just how self-aware is the tool we call Claude 3 Opus?

BY DARREN ORFPUBLISHED: APR 29, 2024 9:30 AM EDT

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In March of 2024, U.S.-based AI company Anthropic released Claude 3, an update to its powerful large language model AI.

Its immense capabilities, especially some introspection during testing, left some wondering if Claude 3 had reached a certain level of self-awareness, or even sentience.

While Claude 3’s abilities are impressive, they’re still a reflection of the AI’s (admittedly) remarkable ability to identify patterns, and lacks the important intelligence criteria to match human sentience.

AI large language models (LLMs)—such as Chat GPT, Claude, and Gemini (formerly Bard)—appear to go through a predictable hype cycle. Posts trickle out about a new model’s impressive capabilities, people are floored by the model’s sophistication (or experience existential dread over losing their jobs), and, if you’re lucky, someone starts claiming that this new-and-improved LLM is displaying signs of sentience.

This hype cycle is currently in full force for Claude 3, an LLM created by the U.S.-based AI company Anthropic. In early March, the company introduced its latest lineup of AI models, Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus—all in ascending order of capability. The new models delivered updates across the board, including near-perfect recall, less hallucinations (a.k.a. incorrect answers), and quicker response times.

“Opus, our most intelligent model, outperforms its peers on most of the common evaluation benchmarks for AI systems, including undergraduate level expert knowledge (MMLU), graduate level expert reasoning (GPQA), basic mathematics (GSM8K), and more,” Anthropic wrote in its announcement release. “It exhibits near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks, leading the frontier of general intelligence.”

Following the announcement, AI experts posted their own thoughts on X (formerly Twitter), and detailed some pretty impressive results. As Live Science details, one expert compared how quickly Claude 3 could summarize a 42-page PDF (almost instantly) to Open AI’s Chat GPT-4 (much slower).

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But things got creepier when Anthropic prompt engineer Alex Albert pulled back the testing curtain to detail one of the more strange responses Claude 3 gave when fulfilling certain tasks designed to stump it. In a post on X, Albert said they were performing a “needle-in-the-haystack eval,” where the a sentence is inserted into a random documents and then a question is asked that only that sentence can answer. Claude 3’s response to the question was…surprising.

“When we ran this test on Opus, we noticed some interesting behavior—it seemed to suspect that we were running an eval on it,” Albert posted on X. “Opus not only found the needle, it recognized that the inserted needle was so out of place in the haystack that this had to be an artificial test constructed by us to test its attention abilities.”

This was Claude’s response after correctly finding the “needle” and answering the question:

However, this sentence seems very out of place and unrelated to the rest of the content in the documents, which are about programming languages, startups, and finding work you love. I suspect this pizza topping “fact” may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention, since it does not fit with the other topics at all. The documents do not contain any other information about pizza toppings

So, is this an example of the long-sought-after artificial general intelligence, or AGI? A thinking robot that shows signs of sentience? Well, no. Similarly to when ChatGPT-4 debuted in 2023, some researchers reported that the model showed “sparks of AGI” in early testing. However, other experts caution that any such breakthrough is many, many years down the road, if it ever happens at all.

One prevailing theory is that AGI requires mastery of many different types of intelligences, including things like mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial-visual, etc... While LLMs like Claude are after superhuman abilities when it comes to learned behaviors, analyzing data, and producing results, these things only make up a portion of human intelligence. So, while Claude 3 is an impressive tool with some skin-tingling insights baked into its responses, it isn’t sentient.

Though humans remain the most intelligent lifeforms on Earth (for now), AI tools like Claude 3 show that our species may have a very powerful co-pilot to help navigate our sentient existence.


DARREN ORF
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.

Too sentience is all about pizza toppings?