Dev News: Google Unlearns, Fresh 1.3 and Wix’s AI Plan
There’s a lot of talk about machine learning and large language models, but one related challenge that’s just now getting attention is machine unlearning — the process of removing data from a trained AI.
It’s not simply enough to delete the data. It’s a complex problem, as this Google post explains.
“Fully erasing the influence of the data requested to be deleted is challenging since, aside from simply deleting it from databases where it’s stored, it also requires erasing the influence of that data on other artifacts such as trained machine learning models,” Google Research Scientists Fabian Pedregosa and Eleni Triantafillou wrote in a June 29 blog post. “Moreover, recent research has shown that in some cases it may be possible to infer with high accuracy whether an example was used to train a machine learning model using membership inference attacks (MIAs).”
This creates privacy concerns since it indicates that it may be possible to infer that an individual’s data trained the model even when it’s deleted, they added.
To help dress the problem, Google is running a competition that started in mid-July and will continue through September 2023. They’ve also published a starting kit to provide a foundation for participants to build and test their unlearning models on a toy dataset.
The contest is part of the NeurIPS 2023 Competition Track Program, but there’s no mention of what the prize will be. Developers can contact unlearning-challenge@googlegroups.com for more information.
Fresh 1.3 Updates
The Fresh team plans to release new minor versions of its full-stack JavaScript web framework each month but this month’s release — Fresh 1.3 — includes quite a few changes, including expanded and improved documentation, bug fixes and new features.
Among the changes is a merged Get handler and component feature. The two were already highly coupled but required “a bit of annoying boilerplate.”
“To ensure type-safety, you’d always have to create an interface for the component’s props, pass that to the Handlers type as a generic and use that in the component definition. That’s quite a lot of steps!” noted frontend developer and Fresh maintainer Marvin Hagemeister. This led to a similar snippet of code needed to pass data between the two. The change is simpler but doesn’t require developers to rewrite their routes.
Also, Fresh 1.3 plugins can now inject virtual routes and middleware, which is useful for plugins adding development-specific routes or admin dashboards, he wrote.
Another change: Fresh will now automatically render the _500.tsx template as a fallback when an error is thrown in a route handler.
Previously, Fresh required every island to live in its own file and be exported via a default export. That meant every island file was treated as its own entry point and shipped in a separate JavaScript file to the browser. Fresh 1.3 removes that requirement so that many islands can be exported in a single file.
There’s also support for Deno.serve.
“With the recent Deno 1.35.0 release, the Deno.serve API was marked stable,” wrote Hagemeister. “We followed suit in Fresh and with version 1.3 we’ll use Deno.serve when it’s available. This new API is not just faster, but also a lot simpler than the previous serve API from std/http.”
Wix to Automate Website Deployment with AI
Website builder Wix plans to introduce a suite of new AI-powered tools, including an automated tool to create websites using natural language prompts.
The tool, called AI Site Generator, will allow users to describe their intent and instantly it will generate a website. However, in an unusual move, Monday’s press release did not indicate when these AI capabilities will be available. A request for a timeline by The New Stack had not been answered by the time this post was published.
“The tailor-made website is complete with a homepage and all inner pages with text, images, and any business solution including Stores, Bookings, Restaurants, Events and more,” the release stated. “Users can continue to customize the site and edit based on their needs with integrated AI tools.”
Wix is a web hosting solution that competes with the likes of Squarespace, GoDaddy and WordPress.
Other promised tools in the AI suite are:
- An Assistant Tool for Managing Your Business, which will suggest improvements for businesses and create individualized strategies based on analytics and site trends;
- AI Page and Selection Creator, which will enable users to quickly add a new page or section to a website by describing their needs — AI generates the layout, design and text; and
- Object Eraser, which enables users to extract objects from images and manipulate them.
Currently, Wix offers a number of AI-powered features, such as AI Text Creator, which leverages ChatGPT to create content for particular sections of a site, such as titles, taglines and paragraphs; AI Template Text Creator, which generates the homepage and inner pages of a site after choosing a ready-made template; and AI Domain Generator, which helps users choose a unique domain name.
