Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.
My old boss Marc Andreessen liked to say that every failed idea from the Dotcom bubble would work now. It just took time – it took years to build out broadband, consumers had to buy PCs, retailers and big companies needed to build e-commerce infrastructure, a whole online ad business had to evolve and grow, and more fundamentally, consumers and businesses had to change their behaviour. The future can take a while – it took more than 20 years for 20% of US retail to move online.
… For consumers, ChatGPT is just a website or an app, and (to begin with) it could ride on all of the infrastructure we’ve built over the last 25 years. So a huge number of people went off to try it last year. The problem is that most of them haven’t been back. — Read More
Monthly Archives: July 2024
Everlasting jobstoppers: How an AI bot-war destroyed the online job market
AI isn’t coming for your current job. It’s coming for your next one — and has already wrecked it
… According to a wide variety of institutions and publications, the past two years have featured the strongest labor environment in decades. The Commerce Department announced in February of 2023 that “Unemployment is at its lowest level in 54 years.” When this April’s official numbers showed that the U.S. recorded its 27th straight month of sub-4% unemployment, tying the second-longest streak since World War II, the Center for Economic and Policy Research was but one of a multitude of sources celebrating: “This matches the streak from November 1967 to January 1970, often viewed as one of the most prosperous stretches in US history.” In June, Investopedia practically gushed that “U.S. workers are in the midst of one of the best job markets in history. They haven’t had this much job security since the 1960s, and haven’t seen a longer stretch of low unemployment since the early 1950s.”
Arguments about statistical methodology aside, there’s nothing to suggest that those headline numbers were incorrect to any significant extent. But raw unemployment is considered a lagging economic indicator, and there is quite a bit of evidence supporting the premise that, below the surface, the biggest drivers of new employment — online job listings — have become elaborate façades destined to cause more problems than they solve for those seeking work. — Read More
New AI algorithm flags deepfakes with 98% accuracy — better than any other tool out there right now
With the release of artificial intelligence (AI) video generation products like Sora and Luma, we’re on the verge of a flood of AI-generated video content, and policymakers, public figures and software engineers are already warning about a deluge of deepfakes. Now it seems that AI itself might be our best defense against AI fakery after an algorithm has identified telltale markers of AI videos with over 98% accuracy.
The irony of AI protecting us against AI-generated content is hard to miss, but as project lead Matthew Stamm, associate professor of engineering at Drexel University, said in a statement: “It’s more than a bit unnerving that [AI-generated video] could be released before there is a good system for detecting fakes created by bad actors.”
… The breakthrough, outlined in a study published April 24 to the pre-print server arXiv, is an algorithm that represents an important new milestone in detecting fake images and video content. That’s because many of the “digital breadcrumbs” existing systems look for in regular digitally edited media aren’t present in entirely AI-generated media. — Read More
The Olympics of 100 years ago | Paris 1924 recoloured by Alibaba AI cloud technology
Researchers develop state-of-the-art device to make artificial intelligence more energy efficient
Engineering researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have demonstrated a state-of-the-art hardware device that could reduce energy consumption for artificial intelligent (AI) computing applications by a factor of at least 1,000.
The research is published in npj Unconventional Computing, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Nature.
… The CRAM architecture enables the true computation in and by memory and breaks down the wall between the computation and memory as the bottleneck in traditional von Neumann architecture, a theoretical design for a stored program computer that serves as the basis for almost all modern computers.
— Read More
The Paper
DeepMind hits milestone in solving maths problems — AI’s next grand challenge
After beating humans at everything from the game of Go to strategy board games, Google DeepMind now says it is on the verge of besting the world’s top students at solving mathematics problems.
The London-based machine-learning company announced on 25 July that its artificial intelligence (AI) systems had solved four of the six problems that were given to school students at the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in Bath, UK, this month. The AI produced rigorous, step-by-step proofs that were marked by two top mathematicians and earned a score of 28/42 — just one point shy of the gold-medal range.
… DeepMind and other companies are in a race to eventually have machines give proofs that would solve substantial research questions in maths. Problems set at the IMO — the world’s premier competition for young mathematicians — have become a benchmark for progress towards that goal, and have come to be seen as a “grand challenge” for machine learning, the company says. — Read More
Meta releases the biggest and best open-source AI model yet
Back in April, Meta teased that it was working on a first for the AI industry: an open-source model with performance that matched the best private models from companies like OpenAI.
Today, that model has arrived. Meta is releasing Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source AI model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It’s also making the Llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages while adding a feature that can generate images based on someone’s specific likeness. CEO Mark Zuckerberg now predicts that Meta AI will be the most widely used assistant by the end of this year, surpassing ChatGPT. — Read More
AI arms race escalates: OpenAI offers free GPT-4o Mini fine-tuning to counter Meta’s Llama 3.1 release
OpenAI has intensified the AI arms race by announcing free fine-tuning for its GPT-4o Mini model, just hours after Meta launched its open-source Llama 3.1 model.
While OpenAI had teased the imminent arrival of customization features in last week’s GPT-4o Mini announcement, the timing of this release couldn’t have been more perfect—or more pointed. Just hours after Meta released its Llama 3.1 model, OpenAI fired back with its own offering. Coincidence? Perhaps. But in the high-stakes competition for AI dominance, such precise moves rarely happen by chance. — Read More
Artificial intelligence isn’t a good argument for basic income
We’re flooded by guaranteed income pilot experiments that offer some promising results, but don’t seem to be moving us any closer to actual federal policy. Yet findings published today from the largest randomized basic income experiment in the US to date, backed by Sam Altman and OpenAI, should get your notice.
The study, held from November 2020 through October 2023, gave 1,000 recipients $1,000 per month, no strings attached. It’s one of the biggest and longest trials ever run on direct cash giving. Many other basic income pilots have given people $500 or less, and rarely for more than a year or two. — Read More
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