AI
[Khari Johnson in The Markup] The Republican legislature is working on ensuring that AI is unencumbered by regulations or protections: "The moratorium, bundled in to a sweeping budget reconciliation bill this week, also threatens 30 bills the California Legislature is currently considering to regulate artificial intelligence, including one that
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[Mike Caulfield in The Atlantic] A smart analysis and suggestion about the current state of AI by Mike Caulfield: "I would propose a simple rule: no answers from nowhere. This rule is less convenient, and that’s the point. The chatbot should be a conduit for the information of
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[Cy Neff in The Guardian] This is straight out of Black Mirror: "Chris Pelkey was killed in a road rage shooting in Chandler, Arizona, in 2021. Three-and-a-half years later, Pelkey appeared in an Arizona court to address his killer. Sort of. [...] Pelkey’s appearance from beyond the grave was
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[Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren in IEEE Spectrum] An interesting finding on the energy use implicit in training and offering AI services. I do think some of these principles could apply to all of cloud computing - it’s out of sight and out of mind, but certainly uses a
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[Simon Willison] Prompt injection attacks have been one of the bugbears for modern AI models: it's an unsolved problem that has meant that it can be quite dangerous to expose LLMs to direct user input, among other things. A lot of people have worked on the problem, but
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[Jeremy Keith] Jeremy Keith highlights the hammering that the public service internet is getting from LLM vendors: "When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they were trained on other people’s
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[Allison Morrow at CNN] It's refreshing to see this kind of AI skepticism in a major outlet: "Apple, like every other big player in tech, is scrambling to find ways to inject AI into its products. Why? Well, it’s the future! What problems is it solving?
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[Maxwell Zeff at TechCrunch] I know "don't be evil" is from another era of Google, but still, this rankles: "Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company
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[Matthew Green] I think this is the most important discussion with respect to AI: "[...] I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot
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[Things we learned about LLMs in 2024] Simon's overview of what happened in the LLM space during 2024 is genuinely excellent. For example, on the environmental impact: "Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are all spending billions of dollars rolling out new datacenters, with a very
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[OpenAI] OpenAI's for-profit arm is becoming a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation: "Our plan is to transform our existing for-profit into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation(opens in a new window) (PBC) with ordinary shares of stock and the OpenAI mission as its public benefit interest. The PBC
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[Michael Kennedy and Isobel Cockerell in Coda Story] Just one example of many of AI being used to take agency away from ordinary workers: "The upshot was, it took away our ability to advocate for patients. We couldn’t point to a score and say, ‘This patient is too