Previous AI-related recent posts: Jailbreaking ChatGPT on Release Day, Next Level Seinfeld, Escape Velocity From Bullshit Jobs, Movie Review: Megan, On AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities.

Microsoft and OpenAI released the chatbot Sydney as part of the search engine Bing. It seems to sometimes get more than a little bit unhinged. A lot of people are talking about it. A bunch of people who had not previously freaked out are now freaking out.

This is an attempt to be a roundup of Sydney and the AI-related events of the past week. Read More

ChatGPT, the cutting-edge chatbot from OpenAI that was released in November 2022, can solve math equations, write a history term paper, compose a sonnet and almost everything in between. So it’s not surprising that many educators support banning the chatbot in schools to prevent plagiarism, cheating and just plain inaccuracy.

In response to these concerns, some major districts have banned the chatbot in schools. In December, the Los Angeles Unified School District “preemptively” blocked access to ChatGPT while “a risk/benefit assessment is conducted,” a district spokesperson told the Washington Post. And in January, New York City Public Schools banned access to ChatGPT from devices and networks that the school owns, per the Washington Post. A spokesperson for the NYC Department of Education told Chalkbeat that the decision was made “due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”

But not everyone is on board with a complete ban — some in the education world say instead of banning it, teach kids how to use it smartly and fairly, and it could be a beneficial educational tool. Read More

Founding editor says 500 pitches rejected this month and their ‘authors’ banned, as influencers promote ‘get rich quick’ schemes

One of the most prestigious publishers of science fiction short stories has closed itself to submissions after a deluge of AI-generated pitches overwhelmed its editorial team.

… In a typical month, the magazine would normally receive 10 or so such submissions that were deemed to have plagiarised other authors, he wrote in a blogpost. But since the release of ChatGPT last year pushed AI language models into the mainstream, the rate of rejections has rocketed. Read More

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

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

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

OpenAI’s breakout hit was an overnight sensation—but it is built on decades of research.

We’ve reached peak ChatGPT. Released in December as a web app by the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight. According to some estimates, it is the fastest-growing internet service ever, reaching 100 million users in January, just two months after launch. Through OpenAI’s $10 billion deal with Microsoft, the tech is now being built into Office software and the Bing search engine. Stung into action by its newly awakened onetime rival in the battle for search, Google is fast-tracking the rollout of its own chatbot, LaMDA. Even my family WhatsApp is filled with ChatGPT chat.

But OpenAI’s breakout hit did not come out of nowhere. The chatbot is the most polished iteration to date in a line of large language models going back years. This is how we got here. Read More