Stochastic parrots, text extruders, extractive business models, and chatbots.
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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
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[Julian Fell at Australian ABC News] "Ecovacs robot vacuums, which have been found to suffer from critical cybersecurity flaws, are collecting photos, videos and voice recordings – taken inside customers' houses – to train the company's AI models." So in effect these robot vacuums are tiny spies
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[Matthew Hutson at Nature] "Beyond the ability to fine-tune open models for focused applications, Kal’tsit says, another advantage of local models is privacy. Sending personally identifiable data to a commercial service could run foul of data-protection regulations. “If an audit were to happen and you show them you’
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[Kyle Orland at ArsTechnica] "Microsoft and Constellation Energy have announced a deal that would re-open Pennsylvania's shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The agreement would let Microsoft purchase the entirety of the plant's roughly 835 megawatts of energy generation—enough to power approximately 800,000
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[Jason Koebler at 404 Media] "The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project
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[Robin Rendle] Robin Rendle on Sarah Jeong's article about the implications of the Pixel 9's magic photo editor in The Verge: "But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of
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[tante] Tante responds to Amazon's claim that using its internal AI for coding saved 4500 person years of work: "Amazon wants to present themselves as AI company and platform. So of course their promises of gains are always advertising for their platform and tools. Advertising might have
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[Andy Jassy on LinkedIn] Andy Jassy on using Amazon Q, the company's generative AI assistant for software development, internally: "The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us
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[Open Society Foundations] "In February 2024, the Open Society Foundations issued a call for applications for a convening in which selected participants would share their visions of an AI-mediated future." I thought this, from the concluding observations, was telling: "Participants were generallyreluctant or unable to articulate exactly
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[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge] "“Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future,” Procreate said on the new AI section of its website. “We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a