A frenzy of activity from tech giants and startups alike is reshaping what people want from search—for better or worse.
It’s a good time to be a search startup. When I spoke to Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com, last week he was buzzing: “Man, what an exciting day—looks like another record for us,” he exclaimed. “Never had this many users. It’s been a whirlwind.” You wouldn’t know that two of the biggest firms in the world had just revealed rival versions of his company’s product.
In back-to-back announcements last week, Microsoft and Google staked out their respective claims to the future of search, showing off chatbots that can respond to queries with fluid sentences rather than lists of links. Microsoft has upgraded its search engine Bing with a version of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot released by San Francisco–based OpenAI last year; Google is working on a ChatGPT rival, called Bard. Read More
Monthly Archives: February 2023
Why *is* Bing so reckless?
And how did some prominent journalists utterly miss this initially?
Anyone who watched the last week unfold will realize that the new Bing has (or had1) a tendency to get really wild, from declaring a love that it didn’t really have to encouraging people to get divorced to blackmailing them to teaching people how to commit crimes, and so on.
A lot of us were left scratching our heads. ChatGPT tended not to do this kind of stuff (unless you used “jailbreaking” techniques to try to trick it), whereas from what I can tell, Bing went off the rails really fast. And the thing is, the two systems are basically close siblings; OpenAI built ChatGPT, and is now presumed to be working very closely with Microsoft, using the same technology. ChatGPT was, I believe, mainly powered by GPT 3.5 plus a module known as RLHF (which combines Reinforcement learning with human feedback, to put some guardrails in place). We all assumed that Bing’s Chatbot was more or less the same thing, but powered instead by a bigger, newer version of 3.5, which I’ll call GPT 3.6. (Or maybe it’s GPT-4; Microsoft has been very coy about this.) Read More
Why Do Companies Focus on Data Structures and Algorithms in Tech Interviews?
Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA), is a skill you must learn if you want to work as a programmer/developer or data scientist, particularly in large tech giants. Although it may not directly relate to coding, having a solid understanding of DSA helps the software development process run well. It assists a programmer in adopting a reasoned strategy for understanding and resolving a problem.
Most businesses use DSA to evaluate a candidate’s skills. The importance of DSA for your coding career is discussed in this blog, along with tips on how to get ready for interviews. Read More
Algorithms Will Make Critical Talent Decisions in the Next Recession—Here’s How To Ensure They’re the Right Ones
Nearly all HR leaders say their department will use software and algorithms to reduce labor costs in a 2023 recession, but only half are completely confident their tech will produce unbiased recommendations.
Entering 2023, the dreaded “R” word—recession—is top of mind for companies around the country. In a Capterra survey of 300 HR leaders in the U.S., 72% say their employer has already started preparing for a possible recession, while 24% plan to start preparing soon.*
As in previous economic downturns, organizations will need to figure out ways to reduce labor costs, including deciding which employees to lay off if it comes to that. Where 2023 differs is that HR is both more strategically involved in these high-level labor decisions and more data-driven than ever before, supported by cutting-edge HR software systems that can aggregate massive amounts of employee information and turn it into actionable insights and recommendations. Read More
Investors and techies gather in San Francisco to bathe in generative A.I. hype sparked by ChatGPT
The tech industry may seem like it’s in a lull, plagued by widespread layoffs at major tech companies and a down economy, but that air of doom wasn’t apparent at a gathering of techies and investors in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Instead, there was an overarching feeling of optimism.
They were there to discuss the latest craze capturing the attention of the tech world: generative artificial intelligence. The technology is known to the larger world through ChatGPT, which has captivated imaginations with its ability to generate creative text via written prompts. Read More
NASA Turns to AI to Design Mission Hardware
Spacecraft and mission hardware designed by an artificial intelligence may resemble bones left by some alien species, but they weigh less, tolerate higher structural loads, and require a fraction of the time parts designed by humans take to develop.
“They look somewhat alien and weird,” Research Engineer Ryan McClelland said, “but once you see them in function, it really makes sense.”
McClelland pioneered the design of specialized, one-off parts using commercially available AI software at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, producing hardware he has dubbed evolved structures. Read More
Defending against AI Lobbyists
When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology.
That happened last month. And because the letter was responding to an essay we wrote, we’re starting to get worried. And while the technology can be regulated, the real solution lies in recognizing that the problem is human actors—and those we can do something about.
Our essay argued that the much heralded launch of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, a system that can generate text realistic enough to appear to be written by a human, poses significant threats to democratic processes. The ability to produce high quality political messaging quickly and at scale, if combined with AI-assisted capabilities to strategically target those messages to policymakers and the public, could become a powerful accelerant of an already sprawling and poorly constrained force in modern democratic life: lobbying. Read More
You.com challenges Google, Microsoft with launch of ‘multimodal conversational AI’ in search
You.com, a pioneering search engine startup based in San Francisco, CA, announced today the launch of YouChat 2.0, a groundbreaking new “multimodal conversational AI” system that promises to take the internet search experience to a whole new level. This update marks a significant step forward in the evolution of web search and offers a glimpse into the future of how we interact with information and the internet.
YouChat 2.0 is the first web search that combines advanced conversational AI with community-built apps, offering a unique and interactive experience with each query. With its blended large language model known as C-A-L (Chat, Apps and Links), YouChat 2.0 is able to serve up charts, images, videos, tables, graphs, text or code embedded in its responses to user queries. That means fewer tabs open and less drifting away from your search engine. Read More
Try It Here
These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney
Bing AI often refers to itself as Sydney, but Microsoft says that was an internal codename for a chat experience it was previously working on.
Microsoft’s new Bing AI keeps telling a lot of people that its name is Sydney. In exchanges posted to Reddit, the chatbot often responds to questions about its origins by saying, “I am Sydney, a generative AI chatbot that powers Bing chat.” It also has a secret set of rules that users have managed to find through prompt exploits (instructions that convince the system to temporarily drop its usual safeguards).
We asked Microsoft about Sydney and these rules, and the company was happy to explain their origins and confirmed that the secret rules are genuine.
“Sydney refers to an internal code name for a chat experience we were exploring previously,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “We are phasing out the name in preview, but it may still occasionally pop up.” Roulston also explained that the rules are “part of an evolving list of controls that we are continuing to adjust as more users interact with our technology.” Read More
Eric Schmidt Is Building the Perfect AI War-Fighting Machine
The former Google CEO is on a mission to rewire the US military with cutting-edge artificial intelligence to take on China. Will it make the world safer?
EXPENSIVE MILITARY HARDWARE LIKE a new tank undergoes rigorous testing before heading to the battlefield. A startup called Istari, backed by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and chair of Alphabet, reckons some of that work can be done more effectively in the metaverse.
Ishtari uses machine learning to virtually assemble and test war machines from computer models of individual components, such as the chassis and engines, that are usually marooned on separate digital drawing boards. It may sound dull, but Schmidt says it can bring a dose of tech industry innovation to US military engineering. “The Istari team is bringing internet-type usability to models and simulations,” he says. “This unlocks the possibility of software-like agility for future physical systems—it is very exciting.” Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 