In July, software engineer Julian Joseph became the latest victim of the tech industry’s sweeping job cuts. Facing his second layoff in two years, he dreaded spending another couple months hunched over his laptop filling out repetitive job applications and blasting them into the void. Joseph specializes in user interface automation and figured someone must … Read more
“The framework enables a set of binding requirements for federal agencies to put in place safeguards for the use of AI so that we can harness the benefits and enable the public to trust the services the federal government provides,” says Jason Miller, OMB’s deputy director for management. The draft memo highlights certain uses of … Read more
Turing’s diagonalization proof is a version of this game where the questions run through the infinite list of possible algorithms, repeatedly asking, “Can this algorithm solve the problem we’d like to prove uncomputable?” “It’s sort of ‘infinity questions,’” Williams said. To win the game, Turing needed to craft a problem where the answer is no … Read more
In 2019, Instagram’s top executive, Adam Mosseri, went on TV to describe how the Meta-owned social media app was “rethinking the whole experience” to prioritize the “well-being” of users above all else. Today, a bipartisan group of attorneys general representing 42 US states alleged in a series of lawsuits that Mosseri’s remarks were part of … Read more
Nathan Strauss, a spokesperson for Amazon said the company is closely reviewing the index. “Titan Text is still in private preview, and it would be premature to gauge the transparency of a foundation model before it’s ready for general availability,” he says. Meta declined to comment on the Stanford report and OpenAI did not respond … Read more
The way you talk can reveal a lot about you—especially if you’re talking to a chatbot. New research reveals that chatbots like ChatGPT can infer a lot of sensitive information about the people they chat with, even if the conversation is utterly mundane. The phenomenon appears to stem from the way the models’ algorithms are … Read more
It may be difficult for search engines to automatically detect AI-generated text. But Microsoft could have implemented some basic safeguards, perhaps barring text drawn from chatbot transcripts from becoming a featured snippet or adding warnings that certain results or citations consist of text dreamt up by an algorithm. Griffin added a disclaimer to his blog … Read more
Wining and dining, wooing clients with creative offers, and cashing big bonuses provide the glamor to sales work. Drafting answers to hundreds of dull questions posed by a prospective customer’s request for proposals? That’s just drudgery. Mercifully for workers, after months of speculation about ChatGPT-style AI taking over white-collar work, the corporate chore of responding … Read more
In her 2019 master’s thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School, Ana Lalley, police chief of Elgin, Illinois, wrote critically about her department’s experience with the software, which left officers unimpressed. “Officers routinely question the prediction method,” she wrote. “Many believe that the awareness of crime trends and patterns they have gained through training and experience … Read more
Collectively, separately, Netflix’s film nerds mourn. On X/Twitter, and in think pieces, and in private moments, they let out a collective sigh knowing that they’ll never see a red-wrapped DVD in their mailboxes again. For some 25 years, the period after Netflix all but obliterated Blockbuster and most mom-and-pop video rental stores, it was the … Read more