Wednesday, August 02, 2023

The End Of This Kali Yuga Is Near

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Tuesday, July 25, 2023

X



Elon Musk's X experiment What's next for Twitter, or rather for X? Elon Musk has said it will be "the everything app": Twitter, YouTube, PayPal, TikTok and Amazon all rolled into one.......... Musk believes X can "easily" be a $1 trillion company, according to Isaacson — and he's been mulling some form of the idea for close to 25 years. ......... "Elon Musk has essentially wiped out 15 years of brand value from Twitter and is now essentially starting from scratch."



From Twitter to X: Elon Musk Begins Erasing an Iconic Internet Brand The tech billionaire started removing the bird logo that has been part of Twitter’s identity since 2006....... He has said he hopes to turn Twitter into an “everything app” called X, which would encompass not only social networking but also banking and shopping. .......... When brands become verbs, it’s the “holy grail,” said Mike Proulx, a vice president and research director at Forrester, because it means they have become part of popular culture. ............ Unlike the blue bird, which he described as warm and cuddly but perhaps a bit dated and weighed down by bad press, the new logo is “very harsh” ........... Mr. Musk has long been interested in the X name. In 1999, he helped found X.com, an online bank. The company changed its name after it merged with another start-up to form what would become PayPal. ........... In 2017, Mr. Musk said he had repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal. “No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me,” he tweeted at the time. ........ Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric automaker, also has a sport utility vehicle called the Model X. One of Mr. Musk’s sons, X Æ A-12 Musk, is often called X for short. The holding companies created to close the acquisition of Twitter were named X Holdings. Mr. Musk also leads an artificial intelligence company called xAI.......... At one point, he changed the name of a crowdsourced fact-checking feature to “Community Notes” from “Birdwatch.” He recently also had someone cover the w in Twitter’s name at its San Francisco headquarters. .

ChatGPT Is Replacing Humans in Studies on Human Behavior—and It Works Surprisingly Well

The Digital Future May Rely on Optical Switches a Million Times Faster Than Today’s Transistors



Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century The system of ocean currents that regulates the climate for a swath of the planet could collapse sooner than expected, a new analysis found.

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Sunday, July 23, 2023

23: Ethan Mollick



In A.I. Race, Microsoft and Google Choose Speed Over Caution Technology companies were once leery of what some artificial intelligence could do. Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. ........... They wrote in several documents that the A.I. technology behind a planned chatbot could flood Facebook groups with disinformation, degrade critical thinking and erode the factual foundation of modern society. ............ Dr. El Mhamdi, a part-time employee and university professor, used mathematical theorems to warn that the biggest A.I. models are more vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks and present unusual privacy risks because they’ve probably had access to private data stored in various locations around the internet. .......... He resigned from Google this year, citing in part “research censorship.” He said modern A.I.’s risks “highly exceeded” the benefits. “It’s premature deployment,” he added. ......... concerns with chatbots: They could produce false information, hurt users who become emotionally attached to them and enable “tech-facilitated violence” through mass harassment online. .......... Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, made a bet on generative A.I. in 2019 when Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI. After deciding the technology was ready over the summer, Mr. Nadella pushed every Microsoft product team to adopt A.I. ........... Microsoft has released new products every week, a frantic pace to fulfill plans that Mr. Nadella set in motion in the summer when he previewed OpenAI’s newest model. He asked the chatbot to translate the Persian poet Rumi into Urdu, and then write it out in English characters. “It worked like a charm,” he said in a February interview. “Then I said, ‘God, this thing.’”

On holding back the strange AI tide There is no way to stop the disruption. We need to channel it instead ......... Most people didn’t ask for an AI that can do many tasks previously reserved for humans. But it arrived, almost completely unexpectedly, eight months ago with ChatGPT, and has been accelerating ever since............ the substantial benefits of AI are going to be greatly reduced by trying to pretend it is just like previous waves of technology. ........... Large Language Models are here, now. In their current form, they show tremendous ability to impact many areas of work and life. ........ the AIs we have today are going to bring a lot of change........ In conversations with educational institutions and companies, I have seen leaders try desperately to ensure that AI doesn’t change anything. .......... Many organizational leaders don’t yet understand AI, but those who do see an opportunity are eager to embrace it… as long as it doesn’t make anything too weird. .......... AI, as currently implemented, is not really built for centralization ......... GPT-4, the most advanced AI available, is free for everyone in 169 countries through Bing, or for a small charge from OpenAI ........... By trying to make AI like all other technologies, companies are ignoring how transformative it is. One person can do a tremendous amount of work (see how much marketing I could get done with a 30 minute time limit), but it is also different work: tedious tasks are outsourced, interesting tasks are multiplied. The nature of work with AI shifts in way that uncomfortable, risky, and potentially powerful. ............. Jussi Kemppainen of Dinosaurs Are Better, who is developing an entire adventure game, alone. To do that, he is using AI help for every aspect of game design, from character design to coding to dialog to graphics3. He is inventing his own workflows to make this happen, and is able to do that because he is not limited to corporate work systems. .......... There is no way for companies to harness this kind of power and creativity without, in some way, democratizing control over AI. Only innovation driven by workers can actually radically transform work, because only workers can experiment enough on their own tasks to learn how to use AI in transformative ways. And empowering workers is not going to be possible with a top-down solution alone. .......... Nobody really knows anything about the best ways to use AI, and they certainly don’t know the best ways to use it in your company. Only by diving in, responsibly, can you hope to figure out the best use cases..........

Almost every assignment, at every level, can be done, at least in part, by AI.

........ AI can do high-quality work. It can do math. It makes far fewer obvious mistakes. And it is capable of working with vast amounts of data. .......... I pasted in my entire last book into Claude 2 ....... Given this challenge, many teachers want to turn back the clock: blue book exams. Handwritten essays. Oral exams. .......... We are very close to the long-term dream of tutoring at scale, and many other advances promise to make the lives of teachers easier, while improving outcomes for students and parents. .......... we need to articulate a vision for what radically changed education could look like .......... we need to start with the presumption that we are facing genuine, and widespread, disruption across many fields ........... The scientists and engineers designing AI, as capable as they are, have no particular expertise on how AI can best be used, or even how and when it should be used. We get to make those decisions. But we have to recognize that the AI tide is rising, and that the time to decide what that means is now........... 8% Americans own crypto. 2% of Americans have bought an NFT. VR numbers are a bit sketchy, but maybe 20% of Americans have tried it. 19% of Americans in a survey had tried ChatGPT by April. .........



Rookie leaders are stressful: Poll



How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023 ......... Claude 2, likely the second most capable AI system available to the public. The week before, Open AI released Code Interpreter, the most sophisticated mode of AI yet available. .......... When we talk about AI right now, we are usually talking about Large Language Models, or LLMs. Most AI applications are powered by LLMs, of which there are just a few Foundation Models, created by a handful of organizations. Each company gives direct access to their models via a Chatbot: OpenAI makes GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which power ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing (access it on an Edge browser). Google has a variety of models under the label of Bard. And Anthropic makes Claude and Claude 2. .......... Code Interpreter as is an extremely powerful version of ChatGPT that can run Python programs. If you have never paid for OpenAI, you have only used 3.5. .......... Microsoft’s Bing uses a mix of 4 and 3.5, and is usually the first model in the GPT-4 family to roll out new features. For example, it can both create and view images, and it can read documents in the web browser. It is connected to the internet. Bing is a bit weird to use, but powerful. ........... Claude is most notable for having a very large context window - essentially the memory of the LLM. Claude can hold almost an entire book, or many PDFs, in memory. ............ For right now, GPT-4 is still the most capable AI tool for writing, which you can access at Bing (select“creative mode”) for free or by purchasing a $20/month subscription to ChatGPT. Claude, however, is a close second, and has a limited free option available. ......... Microsoft Office will include a copilot powered by GPT and Google Docs will integrate suggestions from Bard. The implications of what these new innovations mean for writing are pretty profound. ......... Use it like an intern to write emails, create sales templates, give you next steps in a business plan, and a lot more. .........

It can generate entirely false content that is utterly convincing.

.............. Particularly dangerous is asking it for references, quotes, citations, and information for the internet ......... Midjourney, which is the best system in mid-2023. It has the lowest learning-curve of any system: just type in "thing-you-want-to-see --v 5.2" (the --v 5.2 at the end is important, it uses the latest model) and you get a great result. Midjourney requires Discord. Here is a guide to using Discord

Power and Weirdness: How to Use Bing AI Bing AI is a huge leap over ChatGPT, but you have to learn its quirks ......... Overall, Bing is immensely more powerful than ChatGPT, but also a lot weirder to use.

Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button We used to consider writing an indication of time and effort spent on a task. That isn't true anymore. ...... there are a million implications to outsourcing our first drafts to AI. ......... We may not learn how to write as well. We may be flooded with low-quality content. .......... Take, for example, the letter of recommendation. Professors are asked to write letters for students all the time, and a good letter takes a long time to write. ........ you may actually be hurting people by not writing a letter of recommendation by AI, especially if you are not a particularly strong writer. ......... With everyone pushing The Button for most emails, documents, and even (soon!) spreadsheets and presentations, what documents mean is going to change fundamentally, and that is going to spill over to our work. ........... People who use AI enjoy work more, and feel that they are better able to use their talents and abilities. ........ We start to create documents mostly with AI that get sent to AI-powered inboxes where the recipients respond mostly with AI. Even worse, we still create the reports by hand, but realize that no human is actually reading them. This kind of meaningless task, what organizational theorists have called mere ceremony, has always been with us. ............. Stripping away meaningless work removes a huge burden from workers, while reducing inefficiencies and broken processes. This is an amazing opportunity, but only if we are forward-thinking about the future of a world where most work starts by pressing The Button.

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