Christoph Bussler

AI

AI and Databases

Vector Databases

"Vector Databases (are All The Rage)" (https://medium.com/google-cloud/vector-databases-are-all-the-rage-872c888fa348) is a blog post that I maintain continously collecting new and existing databases implementing similarity search.

It is noteworthy that in principle there are two classes of vector databases: vector database systems that are special engineered for vector similarity search (like for example Milvus or Zilliz) and existing database systems that add vector similarity search to an existing implementation (like for example PostgreSQL or Oracle).

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

An AI architecture called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) (https://www.google.com/search?q=retrieval+augmented+generation) uses vector databases as its fundamental storage technology for vectors derived from any type of media by means of an AI model that for a given object generates a vector.

A basic RAG architecture based on AlloyDB AI is discussed by me in the following blog: https://medium.com/google-cloud/core-rag-architecture-with-alloydb-ai-7c7388f33ff1. It shows that not only similarity search, but also embedding generation is possible from within SQL statements.

A distributed RAG architecture on a global level is supported by database partitioning in Cloud Spanner. In this blog I show how geo-local and global similarity queries can be executed: https://medium.com/@chbussler/distributed-ai-global-and-geo-partitioned-rag-architecture-with-google-cloud-spanner-for-aba9a75fc4c3 . This demonstrates a combination of core database technology (partitioning), with a global implementation of Cloud Spanner combined with vector database functionality (similarity search).

Books

• "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies", Nick Bostrom, Oxford University Press, 2014
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies
• "AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable", Roman V. Yampolskiy, Chapman & Hall/CRC Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Series, 2024
  • https://www.routledge.com/AI-Unexplainable-Unpredictable-Uncontrollable/Yampolskiy/p/book/9781032576268

Business

• "AI: Are we in another dot-com bubble?", Kelvin Mu, 2024
  • https://kelvinmu.substack.com/p/ai-are-we-in-another-dot-com-bubble
• "AI's 600B Question", David Cahn, 2024
  • https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/
• "The AI summer", Benedict Evans, 2024
  • https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/7/9/the-ai-summer

Data

• "FineWeb: decanting the web for the finest text data at scale", Guilherme Penedo, Hynek Kydlíček, Loubna Ben Allal, Anton Lozhkov, Colin Raffel, Leandro Werra, Thomas Wolf
  • https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceFW/blogpost-fineweb-v1

Ethics and Civility

• "Civility in the Age of Artificial Intelligence", Roberto Zicari, February 2016
  • (https://www.odbms.org/2016/02/civility-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/)

Fun

• "IBM's Watson Gets a Swear Filter After Learning the Urban Dictionary"
  • (https://news.slashdot.org/story/13/01/10/2315252/ibms-watson-gets-a-swear-filter-after-learning-the-urban-dictionary)

Lex Friedman Podcast

• Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development | Lex Fridman Podcast #371
  • (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVfceTsD0A)
• Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #431
  • (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNr6gPelJ3E)

Organizations and Government

• "Agreements Regarding AI Safety Research, Testing and Evaluation", U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute
  • (https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/08/us-ai-safety-institute-signs-agreements-regarding-ai-safety-research)
• "Center for AI and Digital Policy"
  • (https://www.caidp.org/)
  • "The Center for AI and Digital Policy aims to promote a better society, more fair, more just — a world where technology promotes broad social inclusion based on fundamental rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law."
• "Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law", Treaty No. 225, Council of Europe
  • (https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=treaty-detail&treatynum=225)
• Future of Life Institute
  • (https://futureoflife.org/)
  • https://newsletter.futureoflife.org/p/fli-newsletter-august-2024
• "Humane Intelligence"
  • (https://www.humane-intelligence.org/)
• "SB-1047 Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act.(2023-2024)", California Legislative Information
  • (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB1047)
• "Stop Killer Robots"
  • (https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/)
  • "With growing digital dehumanisation, the Stop Killer Robots coalition works to ensure human control in the use of force. Our campaign calls for new international law on autonomy in weapons systems."
• "The EU Artificial Intelligence Act", August 2024
  • (https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/)
  • "The AI Act is a European regulation on artificial intelligence (AI) – the first comprehensive regulation on AI by a major regulator anywhere. The Act assigns applications of AI to three risk categories. First, applications and systems that create an unacceptable risk, such as government-run social scoring of the type used in China, are banned. Second, high-risk applications, such as a CV-scanning tool that ranks job applicants, are subject to specific legal requirements. Lastly, applications not explicitly banned or listed as high-risk are largely left unregulated."
• "The Final Report", National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), February 2016
  • (https://reports.nscai.gov/final-report/)
  • "The mandate of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) is to make recommendations to the President and Congress to “advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States."

Research

• "ChatGPT is bullshit", Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
  • (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5)

Safety

• "Towards Guaranteed Safe AI: A Framework for Ensuring Robust and Reliable AI Systems", David "davidad" Dalrymple, Joar Skalse, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Sanjit Seshia, Steve Omohundro, Christian Szegedy, Ben Goldhaber, Nora Ammann, Alessandro Abate, Joe Halpern, Clark Barrett, Ding Zhao, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Jeannette Wing, Joshua Tenenbaum, 2024
  • (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06624#)
• "Artificial Intelligence Safety and Cybersecurity: a Timeline of AI Failures", Roman V. Yampolskiy, M. S. Spellchecker, 2016
  • (https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07997)

TED Talks

• Your Right to Repair AI Systems | Rumman Chowdhury | TED
  • (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxE0TWcT-kA)

© Christoph Bussler