plaintext - CybAI news

15 Nov

The New Hatred of Technology

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbooks, Computing, philosophy, plaintext, simulations

People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good for them. These everywhere-active tech critics don’t just rely, for their on-trend position-taking, on vague, nostalgist, technophobic feelings anymore. Now they have research papers to back them up. They have bestsellers by the likes of Harari and Haidt. They have—picture their smugness—statistics. The kids, I don’t know if you’ve heard, are killing themselves by the classroomful.None of this bothers me. Well, teen suicide obviously does, it's horrible, but it’s not…

08 Nov

Donald Trump Isn’t the Only Chaos Agent

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, donald trump, elon musk, plaintext, politics

Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed tone-deaf, if not futile. On a plane from New York to San Francisco, I wrote a column to answer that impulse, directed as much to myself and my colleagues as it was to readers. I argued that regardless of the enormity of this event, one thing hadn’t changed; the biggest story of our time was still the technological revolution we were living through.…

01 Nov

AI Will Understand Humans Better Than Humans Do

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsartificial intelligence, chatgpt, cognition, meta, plaintext, social networks

Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited by the consequences of computer systems. His best-known projects involved analyzing the ways in which Facebook (now Meta) gained a shockingly deep understanding of its users from all the times they clicked “like” on the platform. Now he’s shifted to the study of surprising things that AI can do. He’s conducted experiments, for example, that indicate that computers could predict a person’s sexuality by analyzing a digital photo of their…

25 Oct

A High-Profile Geneticist Is Launching a Fusion-Power Moonshot

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsclean energy, climate change, energy, plaintext, silicon valley, startups

Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless accolades include a MacArthur “genius” grant and 14 honorary doctorates. When Joe Biden became president, he tapped Lander to be his science adviser and the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lander lost the job because of charges that he bullied subordinates, but he went on to head a nonprofit organization called Science for America.So what is he doing running a Silicon…

18 Oct

You Can Now See the Code That Helped End Apartheid

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsencryption, hacks, history, plaintext, politics, security

John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for successfully leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize to the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and essentially harassing him to death. So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers…

11 Oct

Social Media Tells You Who You Are. What if It’s Totally Wrong?

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsalgorithms, meta, Pinterest, plaintext, social media

A few years ago I wrote about how, when planning my wedding, I’d signaled to the Pinterest app that I was interested in hairstyles and tablescapes, and I was suddenly flooded with suggestions for more of the same. Which was all well and fine until—whoops—I canceled the wedding and it seemed Pinterest pins would haunt me until the end of days. Pinterest wasn’t the only offender. All of social media wanted to recommend stuff that was no longer relevant, and the stench of this stale buffet of content lingered long after the non-event had ended.So in this new era of…

04 Oct

AI’s Big Gift to Society Is … Pithy Summaries?

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, plaintext, productivity, reading, virtual assistant, work

Companies keep rolling out AI features that boil down various kinds of text. They're making us dumber. Source link lol

27 Sep

No, Sam Altman, AI Won’t Solve All of Humanity’s Problems

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, future, ipod, openai, plaintext

We already knew where OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stands on artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human saga: It will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been nothing but consistent across countless interviews. For some reason, this week he felt it necessary to distill those opinions in a succinct blog post. “The Intelligence Age,” as he calls it, will be a time of abundance. “We can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now,” he writes. “Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs—fixing the climate,…

20 Sep

Want to Get Into Founder Mode? You Should Be So Lucky

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsEntrepreneurs, founders, plaintext, silicon valley, startups, y combinator

It’s also true that when one of those groundbreaking companies matures and faces challenges, a founder has a unique ability to make bold moves and stick to the original vision when others urge a less risky course. There are certainly cases where companies struggled when founders were replaced by managers. Remember Yahoo? And of course there’s Apple, where the founder returned and restored the company to its former glory and beyond.But there are abundant counterexamples as well. Apple isn’t exactly struggling under Tim Cook. And consider Microsoft. Its CEO since 2014, Satya Nadella, had been a company lifer, slogging away…

13 Sep

The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder

stp2y0 CommentsAIai lab, artificial intelligence, plaintext, robotics, startups

According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother of AI”—is betting on the contrary. She’s on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World Labs. While current generative AI is language-based, she sees a frontier where systems construct complete worlds with the physics, logic, and rich detail of our physical reality. It’s an ambitious goal, and despite the dreary nabobs who say progress in AI has hit a grim plateau, World Labs is on…