AI
Publishers facing existential threat from AI, Cloudflare CEO says
Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent to a publisher. Today, Anthropic crawls 60,000.
AI
Stochastic parrots, text extruders, extractive business models, and chatbots.
AI
Congress moves to cut off states' AI regulations
[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
Notable links
AI Is Not Your Friend
[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
AI
AI of dead Arizona road rage victim addresses killer in court
[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
AI
We Need to Talk About AI's Impact on Public Health
[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
AI
CaMeL offers a promising new direction for mitigating prompt injection attacks
[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
AI
Denial
[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
AI
Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown
[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?
AI
Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website
[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
AI
Let’s talk about AI and end-to-end encryption
[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
AI
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
[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
AI
Why OpenAI’s Structure Must Evolve To Advance Our Mission
[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