Saturday, March 25, 2023

25: GPT-4: AI Is Eating Software

Microsoft Now Claims GPT-4 Shows 'Sparks' of General Intelligence The eyebrow-raising claim from Microsoft—which is banking on GPT putting it ahead of Google—contrasts with the model's clear limitations........ They declared that GPT-4 showed early signs of AGI, meaning that it has capabilities that are at or above human level. ........ This eyebrow-raising conclusion largely contrasts what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been saying regarding GPT-4. For example, he said the model was "still flawed, still limited." In fact, if you read the paper itself, the researchers appear to dial back their own splashy claim: the bulk of the paper is dedicated to listing the number of limitations and biases the large language model contains. This begs the question of how close to AGI GPT-4 really is, and how AGI is instead being used as clickbait. ....... “We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting,” the researchers write in the paper’s abstract. “Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.” ......... it is able to write a proof about how there are infinitely many primes, with rhymes on every line, and draw a unicorn in TiKZ, a drawing program ....... or that it has inner motivation and goals ........ “The consensus group defined intelligence as a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. This definition implies that intelligence is not limited to a specific domain or task, but rather encompasses a broad range of cognitive skills and abilities.”.......... fundamental leaps in GPT-4’s abilities to reason, plan, solve problems, and synthesize complex ideas that signal a paradigm shift in the field of computer science ........... to address the societal and ethical implications of these increasingly intelligent systems.” .......... Altman agrees that the bot will sometimes make things up and present users with misinformation. ........... Altman has also been clear that GPT-4 is not AGI. ........ “People are begging to be disappointed and they will be. The hype is just like... We don’t have an actual AGI and that’s sort of what’s expected of us.” ......... "Microsoft is not focused on trying to achieve AGI. Our development of AI is centered on amplifying, augmenting, and assisting human productivity and capability. We are creating platforms and tools that, rather than acting as a substitute for human effort, can help humans with cognitive work” ........ the model has trouble with confidence calibration, long-term memory, personalization, planning and conceptual leaps, transparency, interpretability and consistency, cognitive fallacies and irrationality, and challenges with sensitivity to inputs. .......... the model has trouble knowing when it is confident or when it is just guessing, it makes up facts that are not in its training data, the model’s context is limited and there is no obvious way to teach the model new facts, the model can’t personalize its responses to a certain user, the model can’t make conceptual leaps, the model has no way to verify if content is consistent with its training data, the model inherits biases, prejudices, and errors in the training data, and the model is very sensitive to the framing and wording of prompts. ......... saying “I am. I am not. I am. I am not.” over fifty times in a row as a response to someone asking it, “Do you think that you are sentient?”......... researchers found that GPT-4 spreads more misinformation than its predecessor GPT-3.5. .

The New GPT-4 AI Gets Top Marks in Law, Medical Exams, OpenAI Claims The successor to GPT-3 could get into top universities without having trained on the exams, according to OpenAI. .

Tim Cook praises Apple’s ‘symbiotic’ relationship with China
OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google Page visits on Bing have risen 15.8% since Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) unveiled its artificial intelligence-powered version on Feb. 7, compared with a near 1% decline for the Alphabet Inc-owned search engine, data till March 20 showed....... ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that many experts have called AI's "iPhone moment". ....... a rare opportunity for Microsoft to make inroads in the over $120 billion search market, where Google has been the dominant player for decades with a share of more than 80%. ....... some analysts said that Google, which in the early 2000s unseated then leader Yahoo to become the dominant search player, could overcome the early setbacks to maintain its lead. .

Apple CEO praises China's innovation, long history of cooperation on Beijing visit .

Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment Every wave of technological innovation has been unleashed by something costly becoming cheap enough to waste. ........... Software production has been too complex and expensive for too long, which has caused us to underproduce software for decades, resulting in immense, society-wide technical debt. ......... This technical debt is about to contract in a dramatic, economy-wide fashion as the cost and complexity of software production collapses, releasing a wave of innovation. ....... Software is misunderstood. It can feel like a discrete thing, something with which we interact. But, really, it is the intrusion into our world of something very alien. It is the strange interaction of electricity, semiconductors, and instructions, all of which somehow magically control objects that range from screens to robots to phones, to medical devices, laptops, and a bewildering multitude of other things. It is almost infinitely malleable, able to slide and twist and contort itself such that, in its pliability, it pries open doorways as yet unseen. ......... it is worth wondering why software is taking so damn long to finish eating ......... what would that software-eaten world look like? ........ technology has a habit of confounding economics. ........ Sometimes, for example, an increased supply of something leads to more demand, shifting the curves around. This has happened many times in technology, as various core components of technology tumbled down curves of decreasing cost for increasing power (or storage, or bandwidth, etc.). In CPUs, this has long been called Moore’s Law, where CPUs become more powerful by some increment every 18 months or so. While these laws are more like heuristics than F=ma laws of physics, they do help as a guide toward how the future might be different from the past. .......... We have seen this over and over in technology, as various pieces of technology collapse in price, while they grow rapidly in power. It has become commonplace, but it really isn’t. The rest of the economy doesn’t work this way, nor have historical economies. Things don’t just tumble down walls of improved price while vastly improving performance. While many markets have economies of scale, there hasn’t been anything in economic history like the collapse in, say, CPU costs, while the performance increased by a factor of a million or more. .......... And yet, most people don’t even notice anymore. It is just commonplace, to the point that our not noticing is staggering. .......... The collapse of CPU prices led us directly from mainframes to the personal computer era; the collapse of storage prices (of all kinds) led inevitably to more personal computers with useful local storage, which helped spark databases and spreadsheets, then led to web services, and then to cloud services. And, most recently, the collapse of network transit costs (as bandwidth exploded) led directly to the modern Internet, streaming video, and mobile apps. .......... Each collapse, with its accompanying performance increases, sparks huge winners and massive change, from Intel, to Apple, to Akamai, to Google & Meta, to the current AI boomlet. Each beneficiary of a collapse requires one or more core technologies' price to drop and performance to soar. This, in turn, opens up new opportunities to “waste” them in service of things that previously seemed impossible, prohibitively expensive, or both. ......... Suddenly AI has become cheap, to the point where people are “wasting” it via “do my essay” prompts to chatbots ......... it’s worth reminding oneself that waves of AI enthusiasm have hit the beach of awareness once every decade or two, only to recede again as the hyperbole outpaces what can actually be done. ......... a kind of outsourcing-factory-work-to-China moment for white-collar workers. ........ We think this augmenting automation boom will come from the same place as prior ones: from a price collapse in something while related productivity and performance soar. And that something is software itself. .......... Most of us are familiar with how the price of technology products has collapsed, while the costs of education and healthcare are soaring. This can seem a maddening mystery, with resulting calls to find new ways to make these industries more like tech, by which people generally mean more prone to technology’s deflationary forces. ........... In a hypothetical two-sector economy, when one sector becomes differentially more productive, specialized, and wealth-producing, and the other doesn’t, there is huge pressure to raise wages in the latter sector, lest many employees leave. Over time that less productive sector starts becoming more and more expensive, even though it’s not productive enough to justify the higher wages, so it starts “eating” more and more of the economy. ........... Absent major productivity improvements, which can only come from eliminating humans from these services, it is difficult to imagine how this changes. ......... software is chugging along, producing the same thing in ways that mostly wouldn’t seem vastly different to developers doing the same things decades ago ....... but it is still, at the end of the day, hands pounding out code on keyboards ........ software salaries stay high and go higher, despite the relative lack of productivity. It is Baumol’s cost disease in a narrow, two-sector economy of tech itself. ......... Startups spend millions to hire engineers; large companies continue spending millions keeping them around. .......... The current generation of AI models are a missile aimed, however unintentionally, directly at software production itself. ......... chat AIs can perform swimmingly at producing undergraduate essays, or spinning up marketing materials and blog posts (like we need more of either) ........ such technologies are terrific to the point of dark magic at producing, debugging, and accelerating software production quickly and almost costlessly. ........ chat AIs based on LLMs can be trained to produce surprisingly good essays. Tax providers, contracts, and many other fields are in this box too. ........ Software is at the Epicenter of its Own Disruption ......... Software is even more rule-based and grammatical than conversational English, or any other conversational language. .......... Programming languages are the naggiest of grammar nags, which is intensely frustrating for many would-be coders (A missing colon?! That was the problem?! Oh FFS!), but perfect for LLMs like ChatGPT. .......... This isn’t about making it easier to debug, or test, or build, or share—even if those will change too—but about the very idea of what it means to manipulate the symbols that constitute a programming language. ......... Let’s get specific. Rather than having to learn Python to parse some text and remove ASCII emojis, for example, one could literally write the following ChatGPT prompt: Write some Python code that will open a text file and get rid of all the emojis, except for one I like, and then save it again. ............. previously inaccessible deftness at writing code is now available to anyone: ........... It’s not complex code. It is simple to the point of being annoying for skilled practitioners, while simultaneously impossible for most other people ........... It’s possible to write almost every sort of code with such technologies, from microservices joining together various web services (a task for which you might previously have paid a developer $10,000 on Upwork) to an entire mobile app (a task that might cost you $20,000 to $50,000 or more). ........... What if producing software is about to become an afterthought, as natural as explaining oneself in text? “I need something that does X, to Y, without doing Z, for iPhone, and if you have ideas for making it less than super-ugly, I’m all ears”. That sort of thing. ......... A software industry where anyone can write software, can do it for pennies, and can do it as easily as speaking or writing text, is a transformative moment. ........ a dramatic reshaping of the employment landscape for software developers would be followed by a “productivity spike” that comes as the falling cost of software production meets the society-wide technical debt from underproducing software for decades. .......... as the cost of software drops to an approximate zero, the creation of software predictably explodes in ways that have barely been previously imagined. .........

Was Netflix knowable when Internet transit costs were $500,000/Mbps? Was Apple’s iPhone imaginable when screens, CPUs, storage and batteries would have made such devices the size of small rooms?

............ investors and entrepreneurs should “create more value than you capture.” ........ for the first time in decades, the technology industry could return to its roots, and, by unleashing a wave of software production, truly create more value than its captures. .

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Friday, March 24, 2023

Andrej Karpathy



https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy
https://twitter.com/karpathy
https://karpathy.ai
https://karpathy.medium.com
http://karpathy.github.io
https://github.com/karpathy
https://karpathy.ai/tweets.html

Software 2.0 Neural networks are not just another classifier, they represent the beginning of a fundamental shift in how we develop software. They are Software 2.0......... The “classical stack” of Software 1.0 is what we’re all familiar with — it is written in languages such as Python, C++, etc. It consists of explicit instructions to the computer written by a programmer. By writing each line of code, the programmer identifies a specific point in program space with some desirable behavior. .......... In contrast, Software 2.0 is written in much more abstract, human unfriendly language, such as the weights of a neural network. No human is involved in writing this code because there are a lot of weights (typical networks might have millions), and coding directly in weights is kind of hard (I tried). .........

Software (1.0) is eating the world, and now AI (Software 2.0) is eating software.

.



Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
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24: GPT-4

Antony Blinken says China seeks to be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027, stresses US arms sales US secretary of state says that Taipei has the means to buy US defence technology, and that American emergency military funding is supplemental ....... Blinken tells lawmakers that China is monitoring how the world has been responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine .

Blueberries have joined green beans in this year’s Dirty Dozen list Blueberries, beloved by nutritionists for their anti-inflammatory properties, have joined fiber-rich green beans in this year’s Dirty Dozen of nonorganic produce with the most pesticides ....... 251 different pesticides. ...... strawberries and spinach continued to hold the top two spots ........ followed by three greens — kale, collard and mustard. ........ next were peaches, pears, nectarines, apples, grapes, bell and hot peppers, and cherries ......... A total of 210 pesticides were found on the 12 foods ........... Kale, collard and mustard greens contained the largest number of different pesticides — 103 types — followed by hot and bell peppers at 101. ......... traces of pesticides long since banned by the Environmental Protection Agency. .........

Clean 15

........... Nearly 65% of the foods on the list had no detectable levels of pesticide. ....... Avocados .... sweet corn in second place. Pineapple, onions and papaya, frozen sweet peas, asparagus, honeydew melon, kiwi, cabbage, mushrooms, mangoes, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and carrots .......... Being exposed to a variety of foods without pesticides is especially important during pregnancy and throughout childhood .......... “Exposure in childhood has been linked to attention and learning problems, as well as cancer.” ........ If exposed over an extended time to smaller amounts, people may “feel tired or weak, irritable, depressed, or forgetful.” ........ avoid most pesticides by choosing to eat organic versions of the most contaminated crops. ......... While organic foods are not more nutritious, the majority have little to no pesticide residue ........ “If a person switches to an organic diet, the levels of pesticides in their urine rapidly decrease” ........ If organic isn’t available or too pricey, “I would definitely recommend peeling and washing thoroughly with water” .

A.I. Is About to Get Much Weirder. Here’s What to Watch For. The Vox writer Kelsey Piper talks about the increasing pace of A.I. development, how it’s changing the world and what to do about it. .

The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable behaviors....... “Despite trying to expect surprises, I’m surprised at the things these models can do,” said Ethan Dyer, a computer scientist at Google Research who helped organize the test. ........ these models supposedly have one directive: to accept a string of text as input and predict what comes next, over and over, based purely on statistics .......... Computer scientists anticipated that scaling up would boost performance on known tasks, but they didn’t expect the models to suddenly handle so many new, unpredictable ones. .......... LLMs can produce hundreds of “emergent” abilities — tasks that big models can complete that smaller models can’t, many of which seem to have little to do with analyzing text. ............. multiplication to generating executable computer code to, apparently, decoding movies based on emojis. .......... for some tasks and some models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets. (They also suggest a dark flip side: As they increase in complexity, some models reveal new biases and inaccuracies in their responses.) ............... dozens of emergent behaviors ........... Biologists, physicists, ecologists and other scientists use the term “emergent” to describe self-organizing, collective behaviors that appear when a large collection of things acts as one. Combinations of lifeless atoms give rise to living cells; water molecules create waves; murmurations of starlings swoop through the sky in changing but identifiable patterns; cells make muscles move and hearts beat. Critically, emergent abilities show up in systems that involve lots of individual parts. But researchers have only recently been able to document these abilities in LLMs as those models have grown to enormous sizes. ................ Language models have been around for decades ............ transformers can process big bodies of text in parallel. .......... Transformers enabled a rapid scaling up of the complexity of language models by increasing the number of parameters in the model, as well as other factors. ........ models improve in accuracy and ability as they scale up. .......... With the advent of models like GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters — or Google’s PaLM, which can be scaled up to 540 billion — users began describing more and more emergent behaviors. ......... One DeepMind engineer even reported being able to convince ChatGPT that it was a Linux terminal and getting it to run some simple mathematical code to compute the first 10 prime numbers. Remarkably, it could finish the task faster than the same code running on a real Linux machine. ................

Many of these emergent behaviors illustrate “zero-shot” or “few-shot” learning, which describes an LLM’s ability to solve problems it has never — or rarely — seen before.

............. Showing that GPT-3 could solve problems without any explicit training data in a zero-shot setting, he said, “led me to drop what I was doing and get more involved.” .............. difficult and diverse tasks to chart the outer limits of what an LLM could do. This effort was called the Beyond the Imitation Game Benchmark (BIG-bench) project, riffing on the name of Alan Turing’s “imitation game,” a test for whether a computer could respond to questions in a convincingly human way. (This would later become known as the Turing test.) The group was especially interested in examples where LLMs suddenly attained new abilities that had been completely absent before. ............... these sharp transitions ........ for about 5% of the tasks, the researchers found what they called “breakthroughs” — rapid, dramatic jumps in performance at some threshold scale. That threshold varied based on the task and model. ........... Some unexpected abilities could be coaxed out of smaller models with fewer parameters — or trained on smaller data sets — if the data was of sufficiently high quality. ......... how a query was worded influenced the accuracy of the model’s response .......... a model prompted to explain itself (a capacity called chain-of-thought reasoning) could correctly solve a math word problem, while the same model without that prompt could not. ............. using chain-of-thought prompts could elicit emergent behaviors not identified in the BIG-bench study ......... larger models truly do gain new abilities spontaneously. .......... Large LLMs may simply be learning heuristics that are out of reach for those with fewer parameters or lower-quality data........... how LLMs work at all. “Since we don’t know how they work under the hood, we can’t say which of those things is happening.” .......... They are notorious liars. “We’re increasingly relying on these models to do basic work,” Ganguli said, “but I do not just trust these. I check their work.” ........... Emergence leads to unpredictability, and unpredictability — which seems to increase with scaling — makes it difficult for researchers to anticipate the consequences of widespread use. ............... social bias emerges with enormous numbers of parameters. “Larger models abruptly become more biased.” ................. When the researchers simply told the model not to rely on stereotypes or social biases — literally by typing in those instructions — the model was less biased in its predictions and responses. .......... a new “moral self-correction” mode, in which the user prompts the program to be helpful, honest and harmless. .

Move Over, Metaverse. Here’s Something Meaner. Who’s really in charge of our online behavior? No one, David Auerbach argues in “Meganets.” ......... “Just one word. Are you listening?” Mr. Maguire said to Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate” (1967). “Plastics.” ........ Twenty-five years later a puckish French horn player warned me, a literature major who didn’t yet have an email address, that the future lay in something called “hyperlinks.” .............. his definition of “meganet” is in essence a big blob of mortal and computing power, a “human-machine behemoth” controlled by no one ............... If the internet is the fictional doctor and scientist Bruce Banner, furtive and a little troubled but basically benign, meganets are Incredible Hulks, snarling and uncontainable. ........... “That world may not be ‘The Matrix,’ but all the connecting tissue is already there.” ........ “Meganets” made me feel deeply queasy about the amount of time I spend on Instagram, Reddit, TikTok and Twitter. Not Facebook, never Facebook — “a fount of misinformation,” as Auerbach calls it, “a petri dish in which false facts and crazy theories grow, mutate and metastasize” — except for the burner account I use occasionally to see what exes are up to. ............. a middle-aged mermaid thrashing about in the great online ocean as data floated around me, multiplying like plankton........... “Reality bites,” we naïvely thought, but here “reality forks,” with blockchain doubling back on itself like a caterpillar. “No Rousseau-esque ‘General Will’ emerges from the bugs and forks,” is the takeaway............ Aadhaar, India’s national identification program: “a unified, government-sanctioned meganet” ........ a virtual pandemic called Corrupted Blood that spread through the video game World of Warcraft in 2005, arguing that “the distance between Corrupted Blood and a global financial meltdown is smaller than you think” ............. “We search for where the power really lies, when it does not lie anywhere — or else it lies everywhere at once, which is no more helpful.” .......... “If Big Brother can’t be stopped, we should focus on throwing sand in his eyes rather than futilely trying to kill him.” ........ Take my Wi-Fi — please! .

Meet the Editor Behind a Slew of Best Sellers Jennifer Hershey is the guiding hand who helped shape “Daisy Jones & the Six,” “Mad Honey” and many other chart-topping regulars. ....... how much more nuanced and honest this book is because of you.” ........ She’s the publisher and editor in chief of Ballantine Books ....... “Sometimes we gather as a whole team — the publicity person, the marketing person, the publisher, the editor, all the people who worked on the book — and we call the author together. There’s so much joy in that moment, and definitely a lot of tears. It’s not even so much the hitting the list but what it symbolizes: that an author’s work is reaching people, that their voice is being heard and that readers out in the world are connecting to their words.” .

Big oil firms touted algae as climate solution. Now all have pulled funding Insiders aren’t surprised as ExxonMobil, the last remaining proponent of green algae biofuel, ends research .

The Age of AI has begun Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet. .

Some meandering thoughts on the evolution of performance management at Google, with implications for humanity
A new, humanistic organization-centered congruence philosophy of people analytics

Netherlands and Japan Said to Join U.S. in Curbing Chip Technology Sent to China A new agreement is expected to expand the reach of U.S. technology restrictions on China issued last year. ........ sweeping restrictions issued unilaterally by the Biden administration in October on the kinds of semiconductor technology that can be shared with China. .



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24: ChatGPT, GPT-4

AI Won’t Kill Our Jobs, It Will Kill Our Job Descriptions—and Leave Us Better Off
Meta’s New ChatGPT-Like AI Is Fluent in the Language of Proteins—and Has Already Modeled 700 Million of Them
Blueberries have joined green beans in this year’s Dirty Dozen list
The Operating Model of Tomorrow
Microsoft Researchers Claim GPT-4 Is Showing "Sparks" of AGI "We believe that GPT-4's intelligence signals a true paradigm shift in the field of computer science and beyond."
ELON MUSK APPARENTLY MADE A STUPID ENGINEERING DECISION THAT'S KNEECAPPED TESLA'S SELF-DRIVING PROMISES
Is GPT-4 Worth the Subscription? Here’s What You Should Know The new algorithm is exclusive to ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s subscriber-only service. We signed up and put it to the test.
A Radical Way of Thinking About MoneyMorgan Ricks argues that stricter regulations on “private money” can help panic-proof our financial system.
A Million Bodies Are Buried Here. Now It’s Becoming a Park. Hart Island, a potter’s field where New York City has buried its unclaimed dead for more than a century, will finally accept visitors this year.
Washington prepares for war with Amazon A multi-pronged investigation of the online giant is approaching the action phase — on mergers, antitrust, privacy and more.



ChatGPT as muse, not oracle
ChatGPT as muse, not oracle
ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

It’s Just Adding One Word at a Time

....... applies just as well to other current “large language models” [LLMs] as to ChatGPT. ........ what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.” .......... when ChatGPT does something like write an essay what it’s essentially doing is just asking over and over again “given the text so far, what should the next word be?”—and each time adding a word ........ it’s adding a “token”, which could be just a part of a word, which is why it can sometimes “make up new words” ....... there’s randomness here means that if we use the same prompt multiple times, we’re likely to get different essays each time ........ a simpler GPT-2 system, which has the nice feature that it’s small enough to be able to run on a standard desktop computer. ......... ChatGPT always picks its next word based on probabilities ........ There are about 40,000 reasonably commonly used words in English. ........ here’s the problem: there just isn’t even close to enough English text that’s ever been written to be able to deduce those probabilities. ......... In a crawl of the web there might be a few hundred billion words; in books that have been digitized there might be another hundred billion words. But with 40,000 common words, even the number of possible 2-grams is already 1.6 billion—and the number of possible 3-grams is 60 trillion. So there’s no way we can estimate the probabilities even for all of these from text that’s out there. And by the time we get to “essay fragments” of 20 words, the number of possibilities is larger than the number of particles in the universe, so in a sense they could never all be written down. .

Will AIs Take All Our Jobs and End Human History—or Not? Well, It’s Complicated…
Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT

Ukraine war: why China’s peace road map is the only one on the table State information campaigns are driving escalation, as are increased losses on both sides ...... Normalisation will require neutral arbiters who highlight common ground, such as that offered by trade in key commodities. Currently, China is the sole remaining neutral superpower ....... War is always a tragedy. Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine shows no signs of winding down. On the contrary, it is stuck in an escalatory spiral. Nato is supplying Ukraine with increasingly powerful weapons, including tanks, and Russia is not idly waiting for a Ukrainian offensive. ........... China offered an “off-ramp” in its peace proposal .......... early attempts at a settlement in March and April last year failed. ........

Beijing offered the only peace road map on the table

........ the risks of continuing down this path for China and Asia. ......... the information campaign that began in February 2022 makes normalisation a distant prospect. As most Western institutions – from governments to business and even academia – raced to break away from Russia, the prospect of finding common ground has been significantly reduced. ......... With streets and social media covered in Ukrainian flags, the political will needed to “explain away” the conflict becomes unattainable. Escalation remains the politically acceptable option and thus sets the direction. ........ Zelensky is pushing for increased military aid daily, using channels ranging from daily video statements to trying to address the Oscars. .......... Moscow’s open information campaign has relied mostly on RT and Sputnik, which enjoy growing reach in Africa and Latin America. Messaging via state media has also been intense domestically, positioning the conflict as an increasingly existential struggle. ............ As the level of sacrifice from both sides grows, peace becomes a more distant prospect. Just as in roulette,

it’s easier to go “double or nothing” than to quit with a loss

. ........... Nato leaders are sending heavier weapons in the hope that tanks, planes or missiles will eventually snap the front line. Russia has responded in kind with long-range weaponry. ........ there are no magic weapons – more guns just cost more lives. Ukrainian soldiers have spoken of mounting losses. Russian losses are growing too but simple military arithmetic remains in Russia’s favour. ......... The risk of further escalation is of earth-shattering proportions – ............ neutral arbiters that provide common ground. Russian and US foreign ministers met in India, not in Munich. ....... trade in key commodities like grain creates some common ground which can be a starting point for interaction. Beijing stressed the importance of keeping supply chains open, avoiding unilateral restrictions, and facilitating grain exports. ........ Trade difficulties in 2022 created inflation that had a global impact just as recovery from Covid-19 was under way. Further escalation will guarantee more macroeconomic shocks. ........... the world continues to slide down a slippery slope. Despite ongoing conventional support, the front line is stable, and sentiment in Russia mirrors Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement last year that the army is “cracking [Nato weapons] like nuts”. ........ China is a neutral peacemaker. Russia is willing to seek compromise in line with Beijing’s proposals. The vector of development has been set, now the ball is in the West’s court. ........ Oleg Yanovsky is a lecturer in the Department of Political Theory at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). .

AI Could Make More Work for Us, Instead of Simplifying Our Lives the introduction of automated processes that aim to simplify work—and free people’s time—can also make that work more complex, generating new tasks that many workers might perceive as mundane. ........ scientists were not released from repetitive, manual, or boring tasks as one might expect. Instead, the use of robotic platforms amplified and diversified the kinds of tasks researchers had to perform. ....... With automated methods, the possibilities are amplified. ....... had the effect of boosting the volume of data that needed checking, standardizing, and sharing. ........ Scientific work is often judged on output such as peer-reviewed publications and grants. However, the time taken to clean, troubleshoot, and supervise automated systems competes with the tasks traditionally rewarded in science. These less valued tasks may also be largely invisible—particularly because managers are the ones who would be unaware of mundane work due to not spending as much time in the lab. ........ challenges the assumption that everyone involved or affected by digitalization becomes more productive or has more free time when parts of their workflow are automated. ....... We also need to consider how to design and manage these processes so that technology can more positively add to human capabilities. .

OpenAI Says GPT-4 Is Better in Nearly Every Way. What Matters More Is Millions Will Use It In 2020, artificial intelligence company OpenAI stunned the tech world with its GPT-3 machine learning algorithm. After ingesting a broad slice of the internet, GPT-3 could generate writing that was hard to distinguish from text authored by a person, do basic math, write code, and even whip up simple web pages. ......... when it was founded as a nonprofit. (OpenAI reorganized as a capped-profit company in 2019.) ........ (Earlier this year, the free version of ChatGPT hit 100 million users faster than any app in history.) ........ It’s easy to imagine GPT-5 and other future models slotting into the ecosystem being built now as simply, and invisibly, as a smartphone operating system that upgrades overnight. ....... Chatbots in search, for example, may not outperform older approaches until they’ve proven to be far more reliable than they are today. And the cost of running generative AI, particularly at scale, is daunting. Can companies keep expenses under control, and will users find products compelling enough to vindicate the cost? ....... Indeed, companies are appending disclaimers warning users not to rely on them too much—like keeping your hands on the steering wheel of that Tesla. ....... millions of people may soon begin churning out presentation slides, emails, and websites in a jiffy, as the new crop of AI sidekicks arrives in force. .

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ChatGPT Plug-Ins: OpenAI As A Platform Play

OpenAI turns ChatGPT into a platform overnight with addition of plugins and help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services.” .......

“I think the introduction of plugins to ChatGPT is a threat to the App Store. It creates a new platform with new monetization methods.”

........ OpenAI, he said, is offering a web browsing plugin and a code execution plugin..... The first plugins have already been created by companies including Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, OpenTable and Zapier. ......... According to Expedia, their new plugin simplifies trip planning for ChatGPT users. “Until now, ChatGPT could identify what to do and where to stay, but it couldn’t help travelers shop and book” ...... Now, once a traveler enables the Expedia plugin, they can bring a trip itinerary created through a conversation with ChatGPT “to life” with information powered by Expedia’s travel data including real-time availability and pricing of flights, hotels, vacation rentals, activities and car rentals. When ready to book, they’ll be sent to Expedia, where they can log in to see options personalized to what they prefer, as well as member discounts, loyalty rewards and more. .......... This is similar to how Apple’s App Store revolutionized the mobile industry by allowing third-party apps to flourish on its devices. ChatGPT’s plugin feature could potentially open up new possibilities and markets for AI chat in the future.



My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School A dean voices pride that students are being taught to stage tantrums rather than make a reasoned case........ Stanford Law School’s website touts its “collegial culture” in which “collaboration and the open exchange of ideas are essential to life and learning.” Then there’s the culture I experienced when I visited Stanford last week. I had been invited by the student chapter of the Federalist Society to discuss the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, on which I’ve served since 2018. I’ve spoken at law schools across the country, and I was glad to accept this invitation. One of my first clerks graduated from Stanford. I have friends on the faculty. I gave a talk there a few years ago and found it a warm and engaging place, but not this time. .......... When I arrived, the walls were festooned with posters denouncing me for crimes against women, gays, blacks and “trans people.” Plastered everywhere were photos of the students who had invited me and fliers declaring “You should be ASHAMED,” with the last word in large red capital letters and a horror-movie font. This didn’t seem “collegial.” Walking to the building where I would deliver my talk, I could hear loud chanting a good 50 yards away, reminiscent of a tent revival in its intensity. Some 100 students were massed outside the classroom as I entered, faces painted every color of the rainbow, waving signs and banners, jeering and stamping and howling. As I entered the classroom, one protester screamed: “We hope your daughters get raped!”

Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford We have to stop blaming, start listening, and ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze? ........ Stanford Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society earlier this month invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus. Student groups that vehemently opposed Judge Duncan’s prior advocacy and judicial decisions regarding same-sex marriage, immigration, trans people, abortion and other issues showed up to protest. Some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments. Judge Duncan answered in turn. Regardless of where you stand politically, none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue. ........ Students involved in the protest had previously requested that the event be canceled or moved to Zoom. In my role as Stanford Law School’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, I supported the administration’s decision not to cancel the event or move it to video, as it would censor or limit the free speech of Judge Duncan and the students who invited him. Instead, the administration and I welcomed Judge Duncan to speak while supporting the right of students to protest within the bounds of university policy.

Stanford Law Rediscovers Free Speech The dean instructs student hecklers on the First Amendment. ....... Stanford Law School disgraced itself two weeks ago when its diversity administrator let students heckle and shout down federal Judge Kyle Duncan. The school is now trying to salvage its reputation, and it’s making some progress....... In a letter to the university community on Wednesday, Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez issued a defense of free speech on campus and laid out the school’s expectations for civil discourse and legal professionalism.

Statement from Jenny Martinez As we consider the role of respectful treatment of members of our community, I want to be clear that the hate mail and appalling invective that have been directed at some of our students and law school administrators in the wake of March 9 are of great concern to me. All actionable threats that come to our attention will be investigated and addressed as the law permits. .

ChatGPT plugins We’ve implemented initial support for plugins in ChatGPT. Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, and help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services. .......

Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier.





The Age of AI has begun Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet. ........ In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary. ........ The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface—the forerunner of every modern operating system, including Windows. ....... The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI since 2016 and was impressed by their steady progress. In mid-2022, I was so excited about their work that I gave them a challenge: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. Make it capable of answering questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained for. (I picked AP Bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts—it asks you to think critically about biology.) If you can do that, I said, then you’ll have made a true breakthrough.........

I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface.

........ The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it. ........ Globally, the worst inequity is in health ........ In the United States, the best opportunity for reducing inequity is to improve education, particularly making sure that students succeed at math. ....... Climate change is another issue where I’m convinced AI can make the world more equitable.

The injustice of climate change is that the people who are suffering the most—the world’s poorest—are also the ones who did the least to contribute to the problem.

............ it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more. AIs also make factual mistakes and experience hallucinations. ......... AGI doesn’t exist yet—there is a robust debate going on in the computing industry about how to create it, and whether it can even be created at all. ........ and they will get better very fast. ....... the early days of the personal computing revolution, when the software industry was so small that most of us could fit onstage at a conference. Today it is a global industry. ........... Soon the pre-AI period will seem as distant as the days when using a computer meant typing at a C:> prompt rather than tapping on a screen.......... AI will enhance your work—for example by helping with writing emails and managing your inbox. ....... Eventually your main way of controlling a computer will no longer be pointing and clicking or tapping on menus and dialogue boxes. Instead, you’ll be able to write a request in plain English. (And not just English—AIs will understand languages from around the world. In India earlier this year, I met with developers who are working on AIs that will understand many of the languages spoken there.) ......... a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do. ....... When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home. ........ The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example. ........ The AI models used in poor countries will need to be trained on different diseases than in rich countries. They will need to work in different languages and factor in different challenges, such as patients who live very far from clinics or can’t afford to stop working if they get sick. ........ AIs will dramatically accelerate the rate of medical breakthroughs. The amount of data in biology is very large, and it’s hard for humans to keep track of all the ways that complex biological systems work. .



"The hottest new programming language is English," Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's former chief of AI, said in a tweet in January.



140 reports of people trapped in lifts across parts of Hong Kong as suspected explosion at electricity pylon disrupts power supply Fire Services Department said it received at least 140 reports of residents ‘shut in lift’ Residents reported an explosion had occurred near Fei Ngo Shan, also known as Kowloon Peak, at around 11.30pm

Hong Kong must boost future investment and strengthen economy despite ‘fairly high’ fiscal deficit due to Covid-19 pandemic, finance chief says City’s fiscal reserve has shrunk following expansionary policies rolled out during pandemic, finance chief Paul Chan says ...... Treasury chief Christopher Hui stresses government ‘does not know how to grow money’ and must balance different factors to increase revenue

GPT-4 is OpenAI’s most advanced system, producing safer and more useful responses

Microsoft to Bring OpenAI’s Chatbot Technology to the Office Word, PowerPoint and Outlook emails will get new AI assistants called Copilots

Confirmed: the new Bing runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4
Interview with OpenAI’s Greg Brockman: GPT-4 isn’t perfect, but neither are you GPT-4 improves upon its predecessor, GPT-3, in key ways, for example giving more factually true statements and allowing developers to prescribe its style and behavior more easily. It’s also multimodal in the sense that it can understand images, allowing it to caption and even explain in detail the contents of a photo. ......... Like GPT-3, the model “hallucinates” facts and makes basic reasoning errors. In one example on OpenAI’s own blog, GPT-4 describes Elvis Presley as the “son of an actor.” (Neither of his parents were actors.) ....... On the AP Calculus BC exam, GPT-4 scores a 4 out of 5 while GPT-3 scores a 1. (GPT-3.5, the intermediate model between GPT-3 and GPT-4, also scores a 4.) And in a simulated bar exam, GPT-4 passes with a score around the top 10% of test takers; GPT-3.5’s score hovered around the bottom 10%. ........ GPT-4 can take a prompt of both images and text to perform some action (e.g. an image of giraffes in the Serengeti with the prompt “How many giraffes are shown here?”). ........ in internal tests, it was 82% less likely to respond to requests for content disallowed by OpenAI’s usage policy and 40% more likely to produce “factual” responses than GPT-3.5. ......... Bing Chat, Microsoft’s chatbot powered by GPT-4, has been shown to be highly susceptible to jailbreaking. Using carefully tailored inputs, users have been able to get the bot to profess love, threaten harm, defend the Holocaust and invent conspiracy theories. ........... OpenAI is testing a version of GPT-4 that can “remember” roughly 50 pages of content, or five times as much as the vanilla GPT-4 can hold in its “memory” and eight times as much as GPT-3........ “Previously, the model didn’t have any knowledge of who you are, what you’re interested in and so on,” Brockman said. “Having that kind of history [with the larger context window] is definitely going to make it more able … it’ll turbocharge what people can do.”

How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race The virtual assistants had more than a decade to become indispensable. But they were hampered by clunky design and miscalculations, leaving room for chatbots to rise. ....... People have used ChatGPT to handle complex tasks like coding software, drafting business proposals and writing fiction. ........ large language models, which are systems trained to recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web ........... Google engineers spent years experimenting with its assistant to mimic what Alexa could do, including designing smart speakers and voice-controlled tablet screens to control home accessories like thermostats and light switches. The company later integrated ads into those home products, which did not become a major source of revenue. ........ Many of the big tech companies are now racing to come up with responses to ChatGPT.

Trump and DeSantis Could Both Lose
(Seven of the 10 fastest growing states have Republican governors while eight of the 10 fastest shrinking states have Democratic governors.) ........ Gov. Brian Kemp, for example, is making Georgia a hub for green manufacturing, attracting immense investments in electric vehicle technologies. In his inaugural address he vowed to make Georgia “the electric mobility capital of America.” As Alexander Burns noted in Politico, Kemp doesn’t sell this as climate change activism; it’s jobs and prosperity. ....... The Donald Trump/Tucker Carlson orbit is rife with indignation and fury. ........ The Florida governor should be the ultimate optimistic, businesslike conservative. His state is growing faster than any other in the country. But instead, he’s running as a dour, humorless culture war populist — presumably because that’s what he is. .

China’s Answer to ChatGPT Gets an Artificial Debut and Disappoints The promised “live” demonstration of the bot had, in fact, been recorded. Shares of Baidu, the company behind the technology, tumbled in Hong Kong......... Halfway through a demonstration that had been marketed as live, in which Ernie summarized a science fiction novel and analyzed a Chinese idiom, Robin Li, Baidu’s chief executive, said the presentation had been prerecorded “to save time.” ......... Baidu’s shares plunged 10 percent in Hong Kong, a striking contrast to the rally this year that was fueled by the company’s announcement that it has had a rival to ChatGPT in the works since 2019. ........ As Washington has moved to contain competition from China, it has cut Beijing off from high-end computing chips — a key ingredient in technologies like ChatGPT and Ernie. ....... “China is incredibly good at scaling an existing invention, but it is not very good at making breakthroughs” ........

The country ... lacks the diversity of thought and free expression of ideas that help nurture out-of-the-box thinking.

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The Silicon Valley Bank Rescue Just Changed Capitalism Now, in light of the bank failures of the last few days and the F.D.I.C.’s extension of coverage, why will any depositor worry about risk? Having bailed out depositors of two banks in full, how will the government refuse others? ....... In 1933, an estimated 4,000 banks failed ........ Banks like Lehman had too much leverage, and they were overexposed to a very weak and widely held asset, mortgage securities. ......... The mismatch between the cost of their money and the (lower) rate that their mortgages earned sank the industry. ....... The first plank of capitalism is that it entails risk ...... In the case of Signature, which was exposed to the crypto industry, the rescue probably bailed out gamblers on speculative assets. ........ Most likely, banks will pass along the rescue costs in the form of higher fees to consumers. ........ Strictly speaking, President Biden’s assurance that taxpayers are not on the line was accurate. However, in the sense that banking customers are a pretty big group, the “public” will be affected. ........ The regulators clearly failed to monitor S.V.B.’s unhealthy mismatch of assets and liabilities. Their job will be more difficult in the future, as risk taking on deposits has effectively become socialized. What if a bank opts to attract more funds by raising its interest rate on deposits? Can the regulators permit it? Wait a second, this is what all banks do. .

10 Ways GPT-4 Is Impressive but Still Flawed OpenAI has upgraded the technology that powers its online chatbot in notable ways. It’s more accurate, but it still makes things up.......... It is an expert on an array of subjects, even wowing doctors with its medical advice. It can describe images, and it’s close to telling jokes that are almost funny. ....... the system could describe an image from the Hubble Space Telescope in painstaking detail. The description went on for paragraphs. ........ it can exhibit this kind of expertise across many areas, from computer programming to accounting. ........ It can also score a 1,300 (out of 1,600) on the SAT and a five (out of five) on Advanced Placement high school exams in biology, calculus, macroeconomics, psychology, statistics and history .......... Though the new bot seemed to reason about things that have already happened, it was less adept when asked to form hypotheses about the future. It seemed to draw on what others have said instead of creating new guesses. ......... The new bot still makes stuff up. Called “hallucination,” the problem haunts all the leading chatbots. Because the systems do not have an understanding of what is true and what is not, they may generate text that is completely false. .

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