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The 26-year-old CEO who became Washington's AI whisperer

The 26-year-old CEO who became Washington's AI whisperer

Impressive paper: Segment Anything Meets Point Tracking

Saeed Ezzati
July 03, 2023

In today’s email:

🌬️ The 26-year-old CEO who became Washington's AI whisperer
📚 Another impressive paper: Segment Anything Meets Point Tracking
📣 Insights from OpenAI global conversations
🛠 Various AI-related tools and platforms, including Wondercraft AI, Submagic, MindOS, Myreader AI, Interview AI, Editby.AI, JanitorAI, MovieWiser, Podium, Picker AI, Swipefy, Waveline AI, and more.

Insights from OpenAI global conversations [Link]

We(OpenAI) are sharing what we learned from our conversations across 22 countries and how we will be incorporating those insights moving forward.

Users and developers are building valuable applications with OpenAI's tools, such as using ChatGPT for studying, incorporating OpenAI tools for public services, reducing food waste, and improving code efficiency.
Common hopes include expanding access to personalized education and healthcare, boosting economic growth, and reducing administrative tasks. Concerns include misinformation, economic displacement, and safety and security risks.
Policymakers are engaged in AI and seek to maximize benefits while managing risks. They want ongoing dialogue and safety commitments from AI labs and are supportive of a global framework for powerful AI systems.
OpenAI emphasizes its core values, including not training on customer data, investing in safety mechanisms, and improving based on user feedback.
Future focus areas include making products more useful, impactful, and accessible, improving governance practices for highly capable models, unlocking AI's benefits through literacy and support, and researching social and economic implications.
OpenAI will provide more updates in the coming months based on feedback and experiences gathered during the trip.

Read the full blog

Exploring SMOL developer ft. SWYX & Beyang Liu [Link]

The 26-year-old CEO who became Washington's AI whisperer [Link]

While OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been dominating the spotlight, another artificial intelligence CEO is increasingly influencing how the industry is perceived by Washington regulators.

Alexandr Wang, the 26-year-old chief executive of the billion-dollar company Scale AI, which manages an army of human AI trainers, was a familiar D.C. face long before the craze over ChatGPT began, securing lucrative government contracts and winning over members of Congress.

Wang, who dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to found Scale in 2016, has taken particular interest in speaking to lawmakers about his hawkish views on China, which he says is the greatest geopolitical competitor to the United States.

“China has stated that it will dominate AI in both the public and private sectors by 2030 and is throwing the resources behind the goal to make that happen,” Wang warned at Scale’s inaugural tech summit in the capital earlier this month.

What really makes him stand out in the California-centric tech industry, however, are his deep connections in Washington. “Alex and I are actually friends, not like fake D.C. friends, like real friends — we hang out,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., said during the summit. “We've known each other for three years now.”

Segment Anything Meets Point Tracking [Paper][GitHub]

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has established itself as a powerful zero-shot image segmentation model, employing interactive prompts such as points to generate masks. This paper presents SAM-PT, a method extending SAM's capability to tracking and segmenting anything in dynamic videos. SAM-PT leverages robust and sparse point selection and propagation techniques for mask generation, demonstrating that a SAM-based segmentation tracker can yield strong zero-shot performance across popular video object segmentation benchmarks, including DAVIS, YouTube-VOS, and MOSE. Compared to traditional object-centric mask propagation strategies, we uniquely use point propagation to exploit local structure information that is agnostic to object semantics. We highlight the merits of point-based tracking through direct evaluation on the zero-shot open-world Unidentified Video Objects (UVO) benchmark. To further enhance our approach, we utilize K-Medoids clustering for point initialization and track both positive and negative points to clearly distinguish the target object. We also employ multiple mask decoding passes for mask refinement and devise a point re-initialization strategy to improve tracking accuracy. Our code integrates different point trackers and video segmentation benchmarks and will be released at this https URL.

Read the paper