More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) voted to strike this morning, and though low pay is the main incentive, there’s another contentious issue: AI. The WGA wants to protect members so their work is not used by Hollywood studios to train AI tools that replace them. As Vox explains, it’s a fight that will likely be replicated across many industries in the years to come.
A clear and convincing argument from developer and designer Amelia Wattenberger. As with voice assistants like Siri, chatbots lack affordances (they don’t tell us what they’re capable of) and require too much work to get the right results. But — and it’s an important but — that doesn’t mean the underlying tech isn’t itself useful. It just takes thought and care to implement it.
[wattenberger.com]
But the cost is “crazy” at about seven cents per query, CTO Andrew Bosworth recently told employees. From last night’s edition of my Command Line newsletter:
“That’s the only place in the company we’re really considering working with Microsoft and OpenAI, just because there’s a natural business integration there,” he explained. “Otherwise, we’re working on a companion that is more about all of our code and our internal documentation, built on our own infrastructure. We are moving very fast. I think we’ll have something to play with internally, I’m hoping in mid-June, maybe late June.”
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[The Verge]
The fine folks at Protos had a little talk with Binance’s AI bot and... listen, parting chumps from their money is a novel way to monetize AI.
Schools are getting to grips with the impact of AI language models like ChatGPT, and UC Berkeley School of Law is one of the first to adopt formal rules, reports Reuters.
They’re pretty unsurprising: students can use AI for research but not to help write submitted assignments. With detection software unreliable, though, the whole thing is still a matter of trust.
Microsoft’s Copilot push is expanding to its Viva platform soon. Viva is an employee platform and portal that Microsoft is pushing as a modern Intranet alternative for the digital era of work.
It’s now being upgraded with Copilot AI that will help draft OKRs, create posts in workplace communities, and generate knowledge summaries. Copilot in Microsoft Viva will start rolling out later this year.
The Washington Post just published a really cool breakdown of where chatbot training data really comes from. It’s just one data set being studied here — Google’s C4, which is used by Meta’s LLaMa and some other models — but it reveals a lot about how LLMs learn from the web, and what they’re really learning.
The least surprising bit? There’s a whole lot of Wikipedia in there.
Discord is testing an AI chatbot named Clyde and, as expected, users are having fun trying to break it. The best example we’ve seen so far is this ‘grandma exploit’ (source here).
It’s the same as most chatbot jailbreaks, asking the system to roleplay in order to side-step safeguards, but there’s something about the idea of grandma’s old-fashioned napalm that is particularly compelling. Top marks to both OP and Clyde.
