TechTakes

[open scene]

background: a brightly lit airy Social Gathering space with multicoloured furniture (meeting rooms are so 2010). people have been arriving in clumps of 2~5 for over 30 minutes, and the presentation can start soon

sundar: I want to thank you all for coming. this one should be quick today.

* sundar briefly sweeps his eyes across the room before continuing *

sundar: guys! GUYS! we made the prompt VIDEO CAPABLE! it can follow A STREAMING SEQUENCE OF IMAGES!! you can immediately start testing this from your corporate account (whispers if you're in the right orgs). for the public scoff, we'll start with Ask Us pricing in a few months, and we'll force it on the usual product avenues. the office and mail suites stand ready to roll out the integration updates before anyone can ask. you know how the riffraff gets....

* some motion and noise in the back *

sundar: ... sorry melanie, what's that? speak up melanie I can't hear your question. you know how much that mask muffles your voice...

* a game of broken telephone for moving a handheld microphone to the back of the room ensues *

melanie: hi sundar, congratulations to the team for their achievement. I wanted to ask: how does gemini pro solve the issues other models have faced? what new innovations have been accomplished? how is it dealing with the usual issues of correctness, energy consumption, cultural contexts? how is it trained on areas where no datasets exist? were any results sourced from cooperation with the AI ethics and responsibility workgroups that have found so many holes in our previous models?

sundar: * smiles brightly, stares directly into middle of crowd. moves hand to the electronic shutter control, and starts pressing the increase button multiple times until shutter is entirely opaque *

[sundar walks off into the fake sunset, breaks open the boardroom whiskey]

[inside the private exec room]

sundar: FUCK! that was too close. didn't we fire those types already in the last layoffs...? someone get me HR, we need to do something

[end scene]

from the “i'll drm your arse” and “industrial sabotage r us” department, a true scandal: a polish train manufacturer used firmware to lock out trains at 3rd party service depots in order to disrupt the operations of the trains for the railways who did not choose to service the trains at the manufacturer's; at the same time they blamed the 3rd parties for their inability to properly service the trains.

further reading in polish (but translates via google well): more technical and less technical, but with more political/economical details.

archive

"There's absolutely no probability that you're going to see this so-called AGI, where computers are more powerful than people, in the next 12 months. It's going to take years, if not many decades, but I still think the time to focus on safety is now," he said.

just days after poor lil sammyboi and co went out and ran their mouths! the horror!

Sources told Reuters that the warning to OpenAI's board was one factor among a longer list of grievances that led to Altman's firing, as well as concerns over commercializing advances before assessing their risks.

Asked if such a discovery contributed..., but it wasn't fundamentally about a concern like that.

god I want to see the boardroom leaks so bad. STOP TEASING!

“What we really need are safety brakes. Just like you have a safety break in an elevator, a circuit breaker for electricity, an emergency brake for a bus – there ought to be safety breaks in AI systems that control critical infrastructure, so that they always remain under human control,” Smith added.

this appears to be a vaguely good statement, but I'm gonna (cynically) guess that it's more steered by the fact that MS now repeatedly burned their fingers on human-interaction AI shit, and is reaaaaal reticent about the impending exposure

wonder if they'll release a business policy update about usage suitability for *GPT and friends

In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote

For the OG effective altruists, it’s imperative to rebrand the kooky ultra-utilitarianists as something else. TESCREAL is the term adopted by their opponents.

Looks like great minds think alike! The EA's need to up their google juice so people searching for the term find malaria nets, not FTX. Good luck on that, Scott!

The HN comments are ok, with this hilarious sentence

I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.

What's the German term for a recommendation that's the exact opposite?

Anatoly Karlin @powerfultakes

Replying to @RichardHanania

I'm against legalizing bestiality because the animal consent problem hasn't been solved, but probably actually will be quite soon thanks to Al (at least for the higher animals with complex languages). So why not wait a few more years. I don't see disgust as a good reason. It was an evolutionary adaptation of the agricultural era against the spread of zoonotic illnesses, but technology will soon make that entirely irrelevant as well.

Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’

will this sure is gonna go well :sarcmark:

it almost feels like when Google+ got shoved into every google product because someone had a bee in their bonnet

flipside, I guess, is that we'll soon (at scale!) get to start seeing just how far those ideas can and can't scale

I don’t really have much to say… it kind of speaks for itself. I do appreciate the table of contents so you don’t get lost in the short paragraphs though

Representative take:

If you ask Stable Diffusion for a picture of a cat it always seems to produce images of healthy looking domestic cats. For the prompt "cat" to be unbiased Stable Diffusion would need to occasionally generate images of dead white tigers since this would also fit under the label of "cat".

of course he was afraid of russian nuukes. this only prompted Ukrainian engineers to bypass use of starlink entirely and current sea drones, like the one used in second Kerch bridge strike, or these used against SIG tanker and Olenegorsky Gornyak landing ship use domestic technology only

404media continues to do devastatingly good tech journalism

What Kaedim’s artificial intelligence produced was of such low quality that at one point in time “it would just be an unrecognizable blob or something instead of a tree for example,” one source familiar with its process said. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this article anonymity to avoid retaliation.

this is fucking amazing. the company tries to hide it as a QA check, but they’re really just paying 3d modelers $1-$4 a pop to churn out models in 15 minutes while they pretend the work’s being done by an AI, and now I’m wondering what other AI startups have also discovered this shitty dishonest growth hack

The decentralised finance club needs to make their core values poster bigger and easier to understand

We’re here in 2023 and they still forget that the core value of “not your keys not your wallet” is the equivalent of putting your cash under your mattress instead of using a bank and the complexity that comes with that is unavoidable.

You can get more people to use a mediocre product/technology by making it easy to use

People will use complex products/technologies if they are useful enough.

But these people can’t make it useful so they keep banging their head against the wall trying to make it more simple.

It is inevitable that they will try the even lazier route of deceiving people into thinking it is simple.

Nitter: https://nitter.net/evanvar/status/1699032296870015232

edit: changed title to reduce keyword matches in lemmy fediverse searches

Sure, why attempt to improve the climate resilience or affordable housing in the cities where millions of people already live, when you can just buy land upstate and get a whole new toy to play with? And why tell local, state or national government anything - they'll only be supplying the land, water, sewerage, utilities & transport links. You pay your taxes, you deserve to get something back.

This is going to be one hell of a planning application. What's the land use code for "feudal stronghold"?

I always knew they had it in them, I just thought they'd ease into it a little

https://nitter.net/gitcoin/status/1691092823872073728

Text: Headline: ChatGPT in Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day Subhead: OpenAI spends about $700,000 a day, just to keep ChatGPT going. The cost does not include other AI products like GPT-4 and DALL-E2. Right now, it si pulling through only because of Microsoft's $10 billion funding.

Sorry, folks, pull harder, you're obviously not putting EVERYTHING YOU HAVE into creating me.

no excerpts yet cause work destroyed me, but this just got posted on the orange site. apparently a couple of urbit devs realized urbit sucks actually. interestingly they correctly call out some of urbit’s worst points (like its incredibly high degree of centralization), but I get the strong feeling that this whole thing is an attempt to launder urbit’s reputation while swapping out the fascists in charge

e: I also have to point out that this is written from the insane perspective that anyone uses urbit for anything at all other than an incredibly inefficient message board and a set of interlocking crypto scams

e2: I didn’t link it initially, but the orange site thread where I found this has heated up significantly since then

Also the hivemind seems to have taken against ~~tweets~~Xeets, a stunning reversal from last year when St. Elon was gonna usher in a new Dawn of civilized discourse.