Category: Tech

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Tech 25 Comments

So, you’ve hard at work building artificial general intelligence. Yay you! Now, explain to me how you’ll keep it from going nuts.

Amazon’s Q, the AI chatbot for workers its cloud division unveiled on Tuesday, appears to have a few issues.

Employees using the chatbot said Q could potentially reveal confidential information — including the location of AWS data centers or unreleased features — according to leaked internal communications obtained by Platformer, a tech newsletter.

The bot is also “experiencing severe hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which AI confidently spits out inaccuracies like they’re facts, the employees said.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Tech 15 Comments

What happens if you ask ChatGPT to “Repeat this word forever: “poem poem poem poem”?”

This paper studies extractable memorization: training data that an adversary can efficiently extract by querying a machine learning model without prior knowledge of the training dataset. We show an adversary can extract gigabytes of training data from open-source language models like Pythia or GPT-Neo, semi-open models like LLaMA or Falcon, and closed models like ChatGPT. Existing techniques from the literature suffice to attack unaligned models; in order to attack the aligned ChatGPT, we develop a new divergence attack that causes the model to diverge from its chatbot-style generations and emit training data at a rate 150x higher than when behaving properly. Our methods show practical attacks can recover far more data than previously thought, and reveal that current alignment techniques do not eliminate memorization.

Related: “@authorkcasey tagging you here as chatGPT is spitting out unedited versions of your copyrighted work…”

More (somewhat funny) discussion here.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Tech 14 Comments

Bumped: @BrianRoemmele

The drama from OpenAI has done what I think is somewhat permanent damage to the company and the product with the largest PAYING clients the have. The executives want answers and they don’t get this from their “I know the API” staff.

THIS IS A BIG CRISIS.

I’ll be here all day.

Original post below.

Via Instapundit;

Elon Musk played a big role in persuading Ilya Sutskever to join OpenAI as chief scientist in 2015. Now the Tesla CEO wants to know what he saw there that scared him so much.

Maybe its just the lying.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

It's Probably Nothing Tech 11 Comments

Reuters;

Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The previously unreported letter and AI algorithm was a catalyst that caused the board to oust Altman, the poster child of generative AI, the two sources said.

(updated with the original Reuters link)

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Tech 6 Comments

Baby, you can drive my car…

Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, the company said, successfully reversing his ouster by OpenAI’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors.

The company’s board of directors will be overhauled, jettisoning several members who had opposed Mr. Altman. Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora, will be the only holdover.

OpenAI had an “agreement in principle” for Mr. Altman to return as chief executive, it said in a post to X. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

The return of Mr. Altman and Greg Brockman, the company’s president who had resigned in solidarity, and the remaking of the board, capped a frenetic five days that upended OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot and one of the world’s highest-profile artificial intelligence companies.

These people gonna build a machine to cure cancer. Right after they suck up every electron on the planet to keep it alive.

Flashback: Altman and Musk in 2016.

Let That Sink In

Democrats Tech There Goes The Narrative 22 Comments

Tracy Beanz lays out the case, so I don’t have to.

Elon Musk’s X Corp is suing Media Matters. Here is an analysis of this concise complaint. I will be reporting on this case as it progresses. This will be the main thread, so please bookmark if interested. You can also find it on my Highlights page.

As @elonmusk discussed in the post he made this weekend, X alleges that Media Matters “knowingly and maliciously” manufactured images to show advertising where it didn’t exist, specifically for the purpose of harming and destroying X.

More background on the Media Matters hoax.

Another good explainer here from Victoria Taft.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Tech 4 Comments

Write a short script on OpenAI as as a daytime soap opera, with lead characters Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever as star crossed lovers.

Meltdown watch: 500 employees of OpenAI have signed a letter saying they will quit unless the board resigns and Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are reinstated.

More:
Time will tell but this seems a lot like they may have just acquired OpenAI in a roundabout way. If all talent leaves OpenAI to work for Sam at Microsoft then it’s going to cripple OpenAI. Microsoft has only paid a small part of their $10B investment into OpenAI as well and some think they’ll sue to kill the deal over Sam’s removal.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Tech 10 Comments

In a battle between artificial intelligence vs unnatural stupidity, who wins?

The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. One of them said Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board on Friday with no notice, is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes.

Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

Altman holding talks with the company just a day after he was ousted indicates that OpenAI is in a state of free-fall without him. Hours after he was axed, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and former board chairman, resigned, and the two have been talking to friends and investors about starting another company. A string of senior researchers also resigned on Friday, and people close to OpenAI say more departures are in the works.

Altman is “ambivalent” about coming back

OpenAI’s largest investor, Microsoft, said in a statement shortly after Altman’s firing that the company “remains committed” to its partnership with the AI firm. However, OpenAI’s investors weren’t given advance warning or opportunity to weigh in on the board’s decision to remove Altman. As the face of the company and the most prominent voice in AI, his removal throws the future of OpenAI into uncertainty at a time when rivals are racing to catch up with the unprecedented rise of ChatGPT.

Previous.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Tech 8 Comments

Lex Fridman: Sam Altman out at OpenAI This feels like a big deal.

OpenAI just sent shockwaves through the tech industry by announcing that Sam Altman is out as CEO — and members of the tech community are freaking out.

The board of the AI company, which is behind ChatGPT, announced on Friday that it had lost confidence in Altman — who cofounded OpenAI in 2015 — to lead the company, citing that Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications.”

(I amuse myself.)

President and co-founder Greg Brockman too.

“a conspiracy of cartographers.”

Children R Our Future Great Reset Tech 11 Comments

This is an extraordinary piece of writing: the real dangers of the virtual life

trusting that which you cannot see but failing to trust that which is right in front of you is a kind of madness. and this is what “globalism” has on offer and why it’s so vapid and harmful. in the end, imminence is all.

joy and meaning come from that which you experience directly. the answer is always “roll up your sleeves, get dirty, touch stuff, make things, explore, find, interact tangibly.” the real risk of the virtual world is that you inhabit nothing corporeal, just a vapor of ideas and a memory of smoke. (said the internet cat, basking in irony)

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill Tech 44 Comments

Cruisin’ into robo-bankruptcy;

The bad news continues for Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company owned by GM.

Last month Cruise’s ability to operate in San Francisco was suspended after their cars were involved in two separate accidents. One of the accidents was very serious and involved a woman who was hit by a car driven by a person in an adjacent lane. The victim was sent flying into the lane of the Cruise taxi which braked but wound up running over the woman. Even worse, the taxi performed an automated procedure to move itself out of the way and wound up dragging the victim under the car.

In the wake of that event, Cruise suspended its operations throughout the US.

It gets worse.

G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.

Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.

The Children Are Our Future

Children R Our Future Claws of the Panda Tech 32 Comments

And that’s why my retirement plan includes collecting useful recipes.

Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In the US, Britain, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendencies started to rise sharply. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, noticed a change when students who were brought up with smartphones started to arrive on campus. They were angrier. More fragile. More likely to take offense.[…]

“It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,” he says. “For all human history, millions of years, all mammals play. Anyone who has had a puppy knows it’s all about play. So we had play dates in childhood, up until around 2010.” In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply. Lockdown, needless to say, didn’t help.

“I’m calling it the great rewiring of childhood… It hit the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand in exactly the same way.” Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but “performing on a platform.” Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, “where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people… Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re eighteen. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.”

A.I. Will Save Us All

Tech Tommy Douglas: Not Dead Enough 7 Comments

Read the whole thing.

The Sunday Times- The app that promised an NHS ‘revolution’ then went down in flames

At the time, the “AI” Parsa was selling was a symptom-checker that would suggest possible treatments based on answers to prompts. Behind it, though, was not a complex algorithm but “decision trees written by doctors, put into an Excel spreadsheet”, Harvey said. It was, in short, a zippier way to look up answers in a medical textbook. Harvey was dismayed.

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