This Week’s Superior Tech Tales From Across the Net (Via April 1)

ChatGPT Is About to Revolutionize the Economic system. We Must Determine What That Seems Like.
David Rotman | MIT Know-how Overview
“The optimistic view: it is going to show to be a strong device for a lot of staff, enhancing their capabilities and experience, whereas offering a lift to the general financial system. The pessimistic one: firms will merely use it to destroy what as soon as seemed like automation-proof jobs, well-paying ones that require artistic abilities and logical reasoning; a number of high-tech firms and tech elites will get even richer, however it is going to do little for total financial progress.”

Why Exams Supposed for People May Not Be Good Benchmarks for LLMs Like GPT-4
Ben Dickson | VentureBeat
“In line with a technical report launched by OpenAI, GPT-4 performs impressively on bar exams, SAT math checks, and studying and writing exams. Nevertheless, checks designed for people is probably not good benchmarks for measuring LLMs’ capabilities. Language fashions embody data in intricate methods, typically producing outcomes that match or exceed common human efficiency. Nevertheless, the way in which they acquire the data and use it’s typically incompatible with that of people. That may lead us to attract incorrect conclusions from check outcomes.”

The Unbelievable Zombie Comeback of Analog Computing
Charles Platt | Wired
“When outdated tech dies, it often stays lifeless. Nobody expects rotary telephones or including machines to return crawling again from oblivion. Floppy diskettes, VHS tapes, cathode-ray tubes—they shall relaxation in peace. Likewise, we gained’t see outdated analog computer systems in knowledge facilities anytime quickly. They had been monstrous beasts: troublesome to program, costly to keep up, and restricted in accuracy. Or so I assumed. Then I got here throughout this confounding assertion: Bringing again analog computer systems in rather more superior kinds than their historic ancestors will change the world of computing drastically and eternally. Significantly?”

The Woolly-Mammoth Meatball Is an All-Time Nice Meals Stunt
Yasmin Tayag | The Atlantic
“i‘Sometimes sudden, humorous, or edgy, stunt meals are ‘pure advertising,’ Mark Lang, a advertising professor on the College of Tampa, informed me. They work as a result of they’re bonkers sufficient to interrupt by the noise of social media and get individuals speaking, he mentioned. However thus far, they’ve caught our consideration by twisting acquainted gadgets. Lab-grown meat, and all of the permutations of protein it makes attainable, is pushing us into a brand new period of stunt advertising, one involving meals individuals might have by no means tried.”

A Huge Rover Goals to Be Like ‘UPS for the Moon’
Kenneth Chang | The New York Occasions
“[Founder and CEO Jaret Matthews] mentioned Astrolab would generate income by lifting and deploying cargo for purchasers on the lunar floor. That would embody scientific devices. Sooner or later, the rover might assist construct lunar infrastructure. ‘Primarily offering what I wish to name last-mile mobility on the moon,’ Mr. Matthews mentioned. ‘You may sort of consider it like being UPS for the moon. And on this analogy, Starship is the container ship crossing the ocean, and we’re the native distribution answer.’i”

Would Constructing a Dyson Sphere Be Value It? We Ran the Numbers.
Paul Sutter | Ars Technica
“What if we determined to construct a Dyson sphere round our solar? May we do it? How a lot vitality would it not value us to rearrange our photo voltaic system, and the way lengthy would it not take to get our funding again? Earlier than we put an excessive amount of thought into whether or not humanity is able to this wonderful feat, even theoretically, we must always resolve if it’s well worth the effort. Can we really obtain a internet acquire in vitality by constructing a Dyson sphere?”

Cops Used Creepy Clearview AI a Million Occasions, CEO Says
Mack DeGeurin | Gizmodo
“Clearview AI, the shady US facial recognition agency whose surveillance tech is utilized by at the very least 2,400 legislation enforcement companies, says police have run practically 1,000,000 searches utilizing its service. The corporate’s database of photos scraped from social media websites now reportedly numbers round 30 billion, a staggering 50% improve from figures reported simply final yr. Regardless of repeated fines and years of pushback from civil liberties organizations, the figures counsel enterprise continues to be booming for Clearview.”

GOVERNANCE

Why the AI Business May Stand to Sluggish Down a Little
Casey Newton | The Verge
“Tech protection tends to concentrate on innovation and the rapid disruptions that stem from it. It’s usually much less adept at pondering by how new applied sciences may trigger society-level change. And but the potential for AI to dramatically have an effect on the job market, the knowledge surroundings, cybersecurity, and geopolitics—to call simply 4 issues—ought to provides us all cause to suppose larger.”

That Was Quick! Microsoft Slips Advertisements Into AI-Powered Bing Chat
Devin Coldewey | TechCrunch
“Whereas nobody expects Microsoft, or Google, Amazon, Meta and all of the others to function these costly and computation-hungry language fashions out of the goodness of their hearts (assuming they’ve hearts and there’s good in them), it could be good to see a bit of extra thought put into how promoting can higher be built-in. When the entire mannequin is altering, the apparent answer—that occurs to be quite a bit like one you used within the outdated occasions—is unlikely to be the perfect.”

ChatGPT Can Substitute the Underpaid Employees Who Practice AI, Researchers Say
Chloe Xiang | Motherboard
“In a brand new paper, political science researchers from the College of Zurich discovered that ChatGPT might outperform crowd-workers who carry out textual content annotation duties—that’s, labeling textual content for use in coaching an AI system. They discovered that ChatGPT might label textual content with extra accuracy and consistency than human annotators that they discovered on Mechanical Turk, an Amazon-owned crowdsourcing platform, in addition to educated annotators akin to analysis assistants.”

Picture Credit score: Danist Soh / Unsplash