Browsed by
Category: Technology

The rise of AI and the death of originality

The rise of AI and the death of originality

Ray Nayler writes: The problem for AI is that creative work is not predictable. It is not about statistical likelihood or simply mashing up the familiar—it is about leaps in logic and counterintuitive juxtapositions. It is about the unique experience of the individual, and seeking to do what has never been done before. It is about the least predictable next word or pixel. So the danger is not that AI programs will write the next great novel or create the…

Read More Read More

Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

TechXplore reports: Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often depicted as sentient agents poised to overshadow the human mind. But AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have found. While children and adults alike can solve problems by finding novel uses for everyday objects, AI systems often lack the ability to view tools in a new way, according to findings published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. AI language models like ChatGPT are passively…

Read More Read More

‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

+972 and Local Call reports: The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely…

Read More Read More

How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution

How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution

Stephen Witt writes: The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable…

Read More Read More

Powerful forces are fracking our attention. We can fight back

Powerful forces are fracking our attention. We can fight back

D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt write: The lament is as old as education itself: The students aren’t paying attention. But today, the problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions. High school and college teachers overwhelmingly report that students’ capacity for sustained, or deep attention has sharply decreased, significantly impeding the forms of study — reading, looking at art, round-table discussions — once deemed central to the liberal arts. By some measures you are…

Read More Read More

Why won’t OpenAI say what the Q* algorithm is?

Why won’t OpenAI say what the Q* algorithm is?

Karen Hao writes: Last week, it seemed that OpenAI—the secretive firm behind ChatGPT—had been broken open. The company’s board had suddenly fired CEO Sam Altman, hundreds of employees revolted in protest, Altman was reinstated, and the media dissected the story from every possible angle. Yet the reporting belied the fact that our view into the most crucial part of the company is still so fundamentally limited: We don’t really know how OpenAI develops its technology, nor do we understand exactly…

Read More Read More

The unbearable hubris of Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros

The unbearable hubris of Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros

Douglas Rushkoff writes: Even their downfalls are spectacular. Like a latter-day Icarus flying too close to the sun, disgraced crypto-god Sam Bankman-Fried crashed and burned this month, recasting Michael Lewis’s exuberant biography of the convicted fraudster – Going Infinite – into the story of a supervillain. Even his potential sentence of up to 115 years in prison seems more suitable for a larger-than-life comic book character – the Joker being carted off to Arkham Asylum – than a nerdy, crooked…

Read More Read More

Sam Altman has retaken the throne at OpenAI

Sam Altman has retaken the throne at OpenAI

Charlie Warzel writes: Five days after Sam Altman’s shocking dismissal from OpenAI and many twists later, the company has announced that he will, in fact, return as CEO. The company’s board of directors, at the core of the drama, is being overhauled. The dust finally appears to be settling. In the days after his firing, Altman managed to prove that he is far more than a figurehead, winning over a majority of OpenAI employees (including Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and…

Read More Read More

OpenAI researchers warned board of dangerous AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say

OpenAI researchers warned board of dangerous AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say

Reuters reports: Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The previously unreported letter and AI algorithm were key developments before the board’s ouster of Altman, the poster child of generative AI, the two sources said. Prior to his triumphant return late Tuesday, more than 700…

Read More Read More

How mathematics built the modern world

How mathematics built the modern world

Bo Malmberg and Hannes Malmberg write: In school, you might have heard that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by the Scientific Revolution, when Newton uncovered the mechanical laws underlying motion and Galileo learned the true shape of the cosmos. Armed with this newfound knowledge and the scientific method, the inventors of the Industrial Revolution created machines – from watches to steam engines – that would change everything. But was science really the key? Most of the significant inventions of the…

Read More Read More

Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating? Or why he just got fired?

Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating? Or why he just got fired?

Ross Andersen wrote in July: On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in…

Read More Read More

A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

Alex Wong/Unsplash By Hallam Stevens, James Cook University In 1993, Marc Andreessen was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also worked at the US-government funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications. With a colleague, the young software engineer authored the Mosaic web browser, which set the standard for cruising the information superhighway in the 1990s. Andreessen went on to cofound Netscape Communications, making a fortune in 1999 when the company was acquired by AOL for US$4.3 billion….

Read More Read More

As space gets more commercial how can it be governed ethically?

As space gets more commercial how can it be governed ethically?

Philip Ball writes: When he rode to the edge of space on board Jeff Bezos’s reusable New Shepard rocket, William Shatner found the experience was not quite as he’d imagined. The Canadian actor famous for his phlegmatic captaincy of the starship Enterprise said on his return to Earth that ‘when I looked … into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold … all I saw was death.’ ‘Everything I had expected to see was wrong,’ he went…

Read More Read More

How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington, diverting attention away current risks

How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington, diverting attention away current risks

Politico reports: An organization backed by Silicon Valley billionaires and tied to leading artificial intelligence firms is funding the salaries of more than a dozen AI fellows in key congressional offices, across federal agencies and at influential think tanks. The fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, which is financed primarily by billionaire Facebook co-founder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, are already involved in negotiations that will shape Capitol Hill’s accelerating plans to regulate AI. And they’re…

Read More Read More

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

The Washington Post reports: Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored…

Read More Read More

Energy consumption ‘to dramatically increase’ because of AI

Energy consumption ‘to dramatically increase’ because of AI

Yahoo Finance reports: Artificial intelligence is expected to have the most impact on practically everything since the advent of the internet. Wall Street sure thinks so. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 26% year to date thanks to the frenzy over AI-related stocks. But AI’s big breakout comes at a cost: much more energy. Take for example OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. Research done at the University of Washington shows that hundreds of millions of queries on ChatGPT can cost around 1 gigawatt-hour…

Read More Read More