Tag: generative AI
Things Get Strange When AI Starts Training Itself
Updated at 11:52 a.m. ET on February 16, 2024
ChatGPT exploded into the world in the fall of 2022, sparking a race toward ever more advanced artificial intelligence: GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and so many others. Just yesterday, OpenAI unveiled a model called Sora, the latest to instantly generate short videos from written prompts. But for all the dazzling tech demos and promises, development of the fundamental technology has slowed.
The most advanced and attention-grabbing AI programs, especially language
The Despots of Silicon Valley
If you had to capture Silicon Valley’s dominant ideology in a single anecdote, you might look first to Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in the blue glow of his computer some 20 years ago, chatting with a friend about how his new website, TheFacebook, had given him access to reams of personal information about his fellow students:
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask.
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
Friend:
The father of Nvidia’s controversial AI gaming tool talks ethics
Earlier this month, I witnessed a digital miracle. In a press briefing ahead of CES, Nvidia showed off a demo for its Ace microservice, an AI suite capable of generating fully voiced AI characters. I watched in awe as a demoist spoke to an in-game NPC through a microphone, only to have the digital character respond in real time. It was a true sci-fi feat, but there was one question: How did it learn to do that?
Nvidia gave
Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI
One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It’s being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions, systems such as ChatGPT process huge quantities of written material. But few people outside of companies such as Meta and OpenAI know the full extent of the texts these programs have been trained on.
Some training text comes from Wikipedia and other online writing, but high-quality generative AI requires higher-quality input than is usually found on the internet—that
Here Comes the Second Year of AI College
When ChatGPT entered the world last fall, the faculty at SUNY Buffalo freaked out. Kelly Ahuna, the university’s director of academic integrity, was inundated by panicked emails. “It has me thinking about retiring,” one English professor confessed. He had typed a prompt into ChatGPT and watched in horror as an essay unfurled on-screen. There were errors, sure: incorrect citations, weird transitions. But he would have given it a B-minus. He anticipated an onslaught of undetectable AI plagiarism. Ahuna found
Washington Can Stop the AI Free-for-All
In April, lawyers for the airline Avianca noticed something strange. A passenger, Robert Mata, had sued the airline, alleging that a serving cart on a flight had struck and severely injured his left knee, but several cases cited in Mata’s lawsuit didn’t appear to exist. The judge couldn’t verify them, either. It turned out that ChatGPT had made them all up, fabricating names and decisions. One of Mata’s lawyers, Steven A. Schwartz, had used the chatbot as an assistant—his first
ChatGPT app arrives for Android, but there’s a catch
OpenAI’s ChatGPT app is now available for Android, but not everyone can get it right away.
At launch, those in the U.S., India, Brazil, and Bangladesh can download the app from the Google Play Store, with “additional countries” being added “over the next week,” OpenAI said.
The rollout mirrors the one for the iPhone two months ago, which launched first in the U.S. first before being made available more widely a few days later.
Up until now, Android users could
Talking to AI might be the most important skill of this century
A product race is under way in the world of artificial intelligence. Just this week, Google announced plans to release Bard, a search chatbot based on its proprietary large language model; yesterday, Microsoft held an event unveiling a next-generation web browser with a supercharged Bing interface powered by ChatGPT. Though most big tech companies have been quietly developing their own generative-AI tools for years, these giants are scrambling to demonstrate their chops after the public release and runaway adoption of