Journalists and other writers are employed to improve the quality of chatbot
replies. The irony of working for an industry that may well make their craft
redundant is not lost on them
For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of
dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several
other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we
are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be
read by anyone outside the company.
That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.
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Tag - Computing
Ahead of the publication of his book about leadership – definitely not aimed at
Keir Starmer – the former prime minister talks about relinquishing power, why
he’s not fazed about a second Trump term and being an AI evangelist
Were you to board an aeroplane piloted by a man who has never previously sat in
a cockpit, you’d be alarmed. Were you to face surgery by a woman with no medical
qualifications, you’d be frightened. Politics is the one profession that can put
someone in a position of great power and responsibility without any prior
experience or demonstration of ability. “It’s bizarre,” Tony Blair says. “In any
other walk of life, that doesn’t happen.” When he became prime minister in 1997
he was in his early forties and an absolute neophyte at governing. He was much
better at it, he believes, towards the end of his decade at No 10 than at the
outset. So he’s written a book about the dos and the don’ts of leadership
“because government is a science as well as an art”.
In the first flush of taking power, leaders “listen eagerly” because they grasp
that they know little or nothing about governing. In the second stage, they know
enough to think they know everything and become impatient with listening. Hubris
becomes a danger, inviting nemesis. “You’ve got some experience, but your
experience makes you believe that you know more than you actually do. And that’s
the risk. That’s why I say stage two is the most difficult and many people never
get to stage three.” Maturity comes with the realisation that what they know is
not the sum total of political knowledge. Once again, “with more humility”, they
listen and learn.
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In isolation, Alexander Grothendieck seemed to have lost touch with reality, but
some say his metaphysical theories could contain wonders
One day in September 2014, in a hamlet in the French Pyrenean foothills,
Jean-Claude, a landscape gardener in his late 50s, was surprised to see his
neighbour at the gate. He hadn’t spoken to the 86-year-old in nearly 15 years
after a dispute over a climbing rose that Jean-Claude had wanted to prune. The
old man lived in total seclusion, tending to his garden in the djellaba he
always wore, writing by night, heeding no one. Now, the long-bearded seeker
looked troubled.
“Would you do me a favour?” he asked Jean-Claude.
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Doubling of quarterly revenues fails to allay concerns about production delays
to its next-generation of AI chips
* Business live – latest updates
Shares in the chip designer Nvidia have fallen after investors were spooked by
signs of slowing growth and production issues, despite the artificial
intelligence company posting a doubling of quarterly sales.
The Silicon Valley company posted a 122% rise in second-quarter revenues to
$30bn (£23bn) compared with the same period last year. While that beat average
analyst estimates of $28.7bn, investors were spooked by signs of a slowdown in
growth, particularly around its next-generation AI chips, code-named Blackwell.
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Journalists are using artificial intelligence avatars to combat Maduro’s media
crackdown since disputed election
The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who spent some of his
happiest years chronicling life in Caracas, once declared journalism “the best
job in the world”.
Not so if you are reporting on today’s Venezuela, where journalists are feeling
the heat as the South American country lurches towards full-blown dictatorship
under President Nicolás Maduro.
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Apple is about to launch a ChatGPT-powered version of Siri as part of a suite of
AI features in iOS 18. Will this change the way you use your phone – and how
does it affect your privacy?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to your iPhone soon and, according to
Apple, it’s going to transform the way you use your device. Launching under the
brand name “Apple Intelligence” the iPhone maker’s AI tools include a
turbocharged version of its voice assistant, Siri, backed by a partnership with
ChatGPT owner OpenAI.
Apple isn’t the first smartphone maker to launch AI. The technology is already
available on smartphones including Google’s latest Pixel and Samsung’s Galaxy
range.
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With adjustments to the way we teach students to think about writing, we can
shift the emphasis from product to process
It’s getting close to the beginning of term. Parents are starting to fret about
lunch packs, school uniforms and schoolbooks. School leavers who have university
places are wondering what freshers’ week will be like. And some university
professors, especially in the humanities, will be apprehensively pondering how
to deal with students who are already more adept users of large language models
(LLMs) than they are.
They’re right to be concerned. As Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media and
computer science at Washington University in St Louis, puts it: “If the first
year of AI college ended in a feeling of dismay, the situation has now devolved
into absurdism. Teachers struggle to continue teaching even as they wonder
whether they are grading students or computers; in the meantime, an endless AI
cheating and detection arms race plays out in the background.”
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Forget Hollywood depictions of gun-toting robots running wild in the streets –
the reality of artificial intelligence is far more dangerous, warns the
historian and author in an exclusive extract from his new book
Throughout history many traditions have believed that some fatal flaw in human
nature tempts us to pursue powers we don’t know how to handle. The Greek myth of
Phaethon told of a boy who discovers that he is the son of Helios, the sun god.
Wishing to prove his divine origin, Phaethon demands the privilege of driving
the chariot of the sun. Helios warns Phaethon that no human can control the
celestial horses that pull the solar chariot. But Phaethon insists, until the
sun god relents. After rising proudly in the sky, Phaethon indeed loses control
of the chariot. The sun veers off course, scorching all vegetation, killing
numerous beings and threatening to burn the Earth itself. Zeus intervenes and
strikes Phaethon with a thunderbolt. The conceited human drops from the sky like
a falling star, himself on fire. The gods reassert control of the sky and save
the world.
Two thousand years later, when the Industrial Revolution was making its first
steps and machines began replacing humans in numerous tasks, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe published a similar cautionary tale titled The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Goethe’s poem (later popularised as a Walt Disney animation starring Mickey
Mouse) tells of an old sorcerer who leaves a young apprentice in charge of his
workshop and gives him some chores to tend to while he is gone, such as fetching
water from the river. The apprentice decides to make things easier for himself
and, using one of the sorcerer’s spells, enchants a broom to fetch the water for
him. But the apprentice doesn’t know how to stop the broom, which relentlessly
fetches more and more water, threatening to flood the workshop. In panic, the
apprentice cuts the enchanted broom in two with an axe, only to see each half
become another broom. Now two enchanted brooms are inundating the workshop with
water. When the old sorcerer returns, the apprentice pleads for help: “The
spirits that I summoned, I now cannot rid myself of again.” The sorcerer
immediately breaks the spell and stops the flood. The lesson to the apprentice –
and to humanity – is clear: never summon powers you cannot control.
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My close read of the world’s most powerful posting addict turned up surprising
results. Plus, a viral press release about AI, and Nvidia is accused of ‘unjust
enrichment’
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“I hope I don’t have to cover Elon Musk again for a while,” I thought last week
after I sent TechScape to readers. Then I got a message from the news editor.
“Can you keep an eye on Elon Musk’s Twitter feed this week?”
I ended up doing a close-reading of the world’s most powerful posting addict,
and my brain turned to liquid and trickled out of my ears:
His shortest overnight break, on Saturday night, saw him logging off after
retweeting a meme comparing London’s Metropolitan police force to the Nazi SS,
before bounding back online four and a half hours later to retweet a crypto
influencer complaining about jail terms for Britons attending protests.
AI poses no existential threat to humanity – new study finds.
LLMs have a superficial ability to follow instructions and excel at proficiency
in language, however, they have no potential to master new skills without
explicit instruction. This means they remain inherently controllable,
predictable and safe.
Large language models, comprising billions of parameters and pre-trained on
extensive web-scale corpora, have been claimed to acquire certain capabilities
without having been specifically trained on them … We present a novel theory
that explains emergent abilities, taking into account their potential
confounding factors, and rigorously substantiate this theory through over 1,000
experiments. Our findings suggest that purported emergent abilities are not
truly emergent, but result from a combination of in-context learning, model
memory, and linguistic knowledge.
Our work is a foundational step in explaining language model performance,
providing a template for their efficient use and clarifying the paradox of their
ability to excel in some instances while faltering in others. Thus, we
demonstrate that their capabilities should not be overestimated.
A federal lawsuit alleges that Nvidia, which focuses on designing chips for AI,
took YouTube creator David Millette’s videos for its AI-training work. The suit
charges Nvidia with “unjust enrichment and unfair competition” and seeks class
action status to include other YouTube content creators with similar claims.
Nvidia unlawfully ‘scraped’ YouTube videos to train its Cosmos AI software,
according to the suit, filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California.
Nvidia used software on commercial servers to evade YouTube’s detection to
download ‘approximately 80 years’ worth of video content per day’, the lawsuit
says, citing an Aug 5 404 media report.
[Judge] Orrick found the artists had reasonably argued that the companies
violate their rights by illegally storing work and that Stable Diffusion, the AI
image generator in question, may have been built ‘to a significant extent on
copyrighted works’ and was ‘created to facilitate that infringement by design’.
Many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarising
their content.
That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with
its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results,
according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc’s Google the way sites have
blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be
discovered online.
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Artist Butterbro accused of walking fine line between parody and discrimination
and helping make racial slur mainstream
A song about immigrants whose music, vocals and artwork were entirely generated
using artificial intelligence has made the Top 50 most listened to songs in
Germany, in what may be a first for a leading music market.
Verknallt in einen Talahon is a parody song that weaves modern lyrics – many of
them based around racial stereotypes about immigrants – with 60s schlager pop.
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