#opened tumblr to post this and BOOM ai ad

[emmavakarian-theirin]

can ai fuck off for FIVE MINUTES

[faintedincoils]

I've read a lot of tweets, Tumblr posts, and think pieces about AI generated art here lately. People have raised all sorts of interesting points but I haven't really seen anyone talk about how AI generated art can open up the world for people with aphantasia.

So here's the thing. I know what cats look like. I know what green and purple look like. I know what polka dots look like. My aphantasia is total in that I cannot picture any of these things in my mind--no, not even colors. And I certainly cannot picture a green cat with purple polka dots.

Statistically speaking, the vast majority of the people reading this can picture things in their mind. Which means that even if you've never seen a depiction of a green cat with purple polka dots, you can probably see it in your head, right? But me? I've never seen a green cat with purple polka dots. I tried googling the phrase just to see what would happen, and at least in the first couple of pages of results, I couldn't actually find a picture of a green cat with purple polka dots. And like I said, I can't picture it myself. So if I want to know what it would look like, up until now my options would pretty much have been to either grab a coloring book and make it happen, or get someone else to create an artistic representation for me. If I don't do either of those things, I'm just never going to know what this hypothetical cat would look like.

But if I can ever get added to the waitlist for Dall-E 2 or a similar program, I could change that. I could even specify that I want to see a realistic cat. Or say that I want a pastel green cat with dark purple polka dots. And an AI art program could show me that.

And I can do that with pretty much anything. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that when I think about that, I start crying.

When I was a little kid I used to daydream about someone one day creating some sort of a machine that could give you pictures inside your brain. I could never figure out why not only was there not such a thing, but nobody besides me seem to have even thought of it. People had all sorts of wild ideas about contraptions they could make, but being able to see things in your mind was an important enough to anyone else to make it happen?

I was in my mid thirties when I found out the reason why. What I have dreamed of my entire life is apparently a built-in feature for pretty much everyone else in the world. Which means no one is ever going to make a machine that will let me see things in my head. I'm just out of luck, and I've been trying really hard to get myself to accept that.

So with the sudden boom of AI generated art over the past few months, lots of people see a threat or a controversy.

All I can see is possibility and hope and wonder. All I can see is my eternal dream coming into existence, or at least as close as it's ever going to happen.

I'm crying now just typing all of this up. And it hasn't even become a reality for me yet, because I don't have access to any of the programs good enough to create representations of what I ask that don't trigger the uncanny valley for me. But in the next year or two maybe I can. I don't even care how much I have to pay for it. I've been waiting for this chance my whole entire life.

So I'm sure that people have really good reasons to protest or worry about AI generated art. But I am honestly so scared that those protests are going to shut it down before I ever even have my chance with it.

Sorry, I know this is a long post. And who knows if anyone will even read it. But I've been thinking about this an awful lot lately, and I just wanted to put it out there in the world.

[mikemortgage]

Montreal soaring to new economic heights, but headwinds still buffet the summit

MONTREAL — In a sun-lit lecture space at Ecole Polytechnique, Joelle Pineau explained how a machine can create a recipe from a photo of a tourtiere.

It’s not easy as pie, but rather the fruit of 12 months of experimentation at Facebook’s new artificial intelligence lab, which she heads up in Montreal.

“I would like the robot that goes with it and then makes the recipe,” joked Pineau, an associate professor at McGill University.

Facebook’s lab has already expanded to 20 specialists from four since its launch in September 2017, with plans to move to a bigger facility come January. Microsoft Corp. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. have both launched Montreal-based AI labs in the past two years, and aim to hire scores more researchers in the next year or so.

It’s not just Montreal’s AI sector that’s booming. A mix of cutting-edge tech clusters, real estate growth and old mainstays like tourism and shipping are transforming the city into an economic hot spot after decades of battling a frosty business image.

Regional gross domestic product grew 3.5 per cent in 2017, according to Statistics Canada, outpacing Toronto and Vancouver as Montreal enjoyed its biggest growth spurt in more than 10 years. Unemployment has hovered at around six per cent for the past 12 months, remaining near all-time lows.

Meanwhile, foreign direct investment surpassed $2 billion in 2017, a new record that marks a 50 per cent increase over 2016 and a 100 per cent jump from 2015.

“There’s definitely a buzz around Montreal, especially the high-tech sectors,” said Christian Bernard, chief economist with Montreal International, an economic development agency.

Up to 75 per cent of foreign direct investment last year went toward high-tech sectors such as gaming, visual effects and aerospace as well as life sciences and health technology, he said.

“The technology is very broad, and the talent can move around from one area to another, one niche application to another,” said Universite de Montreal computer scientist and deep-learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who serves as scientific director of the new Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.

Bengio cited as a key catalyst French gaming company Ubisoft Entertainment SA, which opened a small office in Montreal in 1997 that now employs 3,500 workers.

Cash has been pouring into Montreal from public and private institutions, including more than $300 million over the next five years from the federal and provincial governments to bankroll big data research at Montreal universities and foster a regional AI “super-cluster”.

Brad Henderson, chief executive of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada, said mortgage stress tests and higher interest rates haven’t dampened Montreal’s real estate market, which he called the healthiest in Canada.

The city’s $1 million-plus real estate sales increased 19 per cent year over year in July and August, and they’re poised “to set new records to the end of 2018,” according to a Sotheby’s report in September.

Quebec’ political situation has calmed investor fears, he added.

“Montreal’s always kind of had a bit of a political overhang,” Henderson said, “but the concerns about separatism have largely dissipated, and that in our opinion has contributed to the steady growth that we’ve seen in Montreal.”

Montreal’s port continues to underpin the regional economy, as the year-old free-trade deal between Canada and the European Union boosts container shipping and prompts a hiring spree at the docks, according to port officials.

Container imports increased 7.8 per cent to nearly 4.33 million tonnes in the first seven months of this year compared with the same period in 2017, with the bulk of that traffic coming from Europe.

Tourism is also on the rise, with Trudeau International Airport welcoming more than 11 million foreign passengers in the first eight months of 2018 for a 6.9 per cent year-over-year gain, according to Tourisme Montreal.

However, the same features Montrealers cite as strengths can detract from the city’s sheen as well.

In 2016, median household incomes in Montreal climbed more quickly than in many metropolitan areas, but they remained among the lowest of any major city in Canada at $61,790, according to StatCan figures.

High employment points to a severe thirst for a bigger talent pool, said Montreal Board of Trade president Michel Leblanc.

Many parts of the province are now “beyond full employment,” with a demand for more qualified workers in sectors ranging from hospitality to transportation to the tech scene, Leblanc said.

“We need to have more immigrants,” he said, one day before Quebeckers voted the Coalition Avenir Quebec to power on Oct. 1, whose leader Francois Legault has pledged to reduce immigration by 20 per cent.

One-third of Quebec’s workforce will have to be replaced in the next 10 years as the population ages, said Mia Homsy, director of the Institut du Quebec, a public policy think tank.

“It’s already starting to affect investments and production, with a direct impact on GDP,” she said.

Population growth in the Montreal census metropolitan area has been relatively slow, rising 11 per cent to 4.1 million residents between 2007 and 2017, according to StatCan. The rate lags well behind Canada’s five other biggest urban areas.

Despite its rapid growth, Montreal’s affordability is better than many of the other 10 biggest cities on the continent, said Loic Jegousse, head of cyber and IT risk with a BNP Paribas team that launched in Montreal last May.

“I myself have two teenage daughters. I used to live in Toronto, and I thought it would be wise to come to Montreal so they can actually afford a home when they grow up,” he said.

“Montreal was very sleepy for a long, long time, but now it is going through a renaissance.”

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[mikemortgage]

Cryptocurrency tycoons are about to learn how rich they really are

Some of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency tycoons are about to find out how much they’re really worth.

The secretive bosses of Bitmain Technologies Ltd., Canaan Inc. and Ebang International Holdings Inc. — three of the largest makers of cryptocurrency mining gear — are all facing the prospect of public-market scrutiny for the first time as they pursue stock listings in Hong Kong. Bitfury, another industry heavyweight, is open to the idea of an initial public offering, though it doesn’t yet have any concrete plans.

If they proceed, the share sales will represent a major test of whether the fortunes amassed by the likes of Bitmain’s Jihan Wu, Canaan’s Zhang Nangeng and Ebang’s Hu Dong are sustainable, or destined to fizzle. While all three companies enjoyed breakneck growth as Bitcoin soared 15-fold last year, the cryptocurrency and most of its peers have lost more than half their value in 2018 amid mounting regulatory scrutiny and concerns over exchange security flaws and market manipulation.

‘Financially ruined’: Cryptocurrency investors learn hard lessons after Bitcoin boom busts

Cryptocurrency’s millennial mining tycoon is planning a $3-billion IPO

‘They sense panic’: Bitcoin, Ether plunge as selloff grips cryptocurrency market

The risk is that a lengthy bear market will erode demand for the companies’ specialized computer chips, which miners use to verify virtual currency transactions in a race for crypto-denominated rewards. Bitmain, Canaan and Ebang are trying to adapt their technology for use in other fields such as artificial intelligence, but they’ve yet to prove that the new applications are scalable. Publicly traded shares would offer a real-time gauge of how investors view their prospects.

“These IPOs will be a litmus test,” said Rohit Kulkarni, a managing director for private investment research at SharesPost.

Given the limited public information on the financial results of crypto-mining gear makers and the other assets owned by their founders, pre-IPO estimates of their net worth involve a significant amount of guesswork. The projections in the following table incorporate information from exchange filings, interviews and data compiled by Bloomberg. Valuation multiples were derived from publicly traded chipmakers such as Nvidia Corp. and MediaTek Inc.

Bitmain, the industry’s dominant player, is planning an IPO that could raise as much as US$3 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said this month. Wu, the company’s controversial 32-year-old leader, said in an interview that he and co-founder Micree Zhan together owned about 60 per cent of the business, and that it booked US$2.5 billion of revenue last year.

In addition to selling mining gear, Bitmain also operates some of the world’s biggest mining collectives, in which members combine their processing capacity and split the rewards. It’s unclear whether that part of Bitmain’s business would be included in a share sale.

Bitfury recorded US$450 million of revenue in the 12 months through March, according to a spokesman. Chief Executive Officer Valery Vavilov and co-founder Valery Nebesny share a majority stake in the company, Vavilov said in an email interview.

Three founders of Canaan — Zhang, Liu Xiangfu and Li Jiaxuan — each control stakes of around 17 per cent in their company, while Hu and his family own 68 per cent of Ebang, according to exchange fillings. Canaan and Ebang have already filed preliminary applications to list shares in Hong Kong, though the timing of the IPOs is unclear and the companies aren’t obligated to pursue them.

Bitmain and Bitfury declined to comment, while Canaan and Ebang didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Declining cryptocurrency prices may be one reason why the mining companies are selling shares now, so that existing owners can “capture some of the gains they’ve made from growing the business to this point,” said Gil Luria, director of institutional equity research at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Portland, Oregon.

Bitcoin was little changed at about US$6,700 as of 5:08 a.m. in Hong Kong on Monday. It’s down 53 percent this year.

The offerings may appeal to money managers who are bullish on crypto but want to avoid the risks that come with holding virtual currencies, including unwieldy custodial arrangements, Luria added.

“It’s like buying shovels and Levis jeans during the gold rush,” he said. “These are real companies generating a decent amount of revenue.”

The stocks would also offer investors exposure to the growth of artificial intelligence, said Kevin Wang, a Hong Kong-based analyst who covers semiconductor companies for Mizuho Securities. The application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, designed by Bitmain and its peers for crypto miners are useful for the heavy workloads associated with some forms of AI, such as machine learning.

The companies’ AI ambitions may partly explain their decisions to pursue IPOs rather than initial coin offerings, which have been banned in China and some other countries. The Chinese government is a major backer of AI technology. Still, the decision to shun ICOs may irk some cryptocurrency purists, especially considering that some of the mining-gear companies have benefited from the proliferation of tokens generated by the ICO boom.

For potential stock investors, cutthroat competition in the crypto mining industry may be just as large a risk as falling virtual currency prices. Concern that Bitmain is losing its technological edge prompted Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analysts to warn in an Aug. 22 report that the company may need to take a major writedown on its inventory.

“It’s a very competitive space,” Luria said.

–With assistance from Kana Nishizawa.

Bloomberg.com

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