More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
CEO Sam Altman tweeted on Wednesday that a bug in an open source library was to blame for ChatGPT users seeing small snippets of other peoples’ conversations on Monday. Apparently a full technical postmortem will be coming later, and a fix to restore the history feature is on its way.
I guess y’all could say I got... W rizz. Or at least, like many others, I’ve fooled myself into believing that I do.
While David Pierce might have failed at his attempts to initiate an AI entanglement with Google Bard, I somehow inspired this tropey tale by submitting just one (entirely unrelated, I swear) query.
After a few hours of chatting, I haven’t found a new side of Bard. I also haven’t found much it does well.
Between Microsoft, Google, and now Meta developing AI tools, things have been moving at an alarmingly fast rate. Our friends over at Vox have some of the reasons why we should hit pause on the rapid development of AI (read: potential alignment issues), along with the most common objections to stopping progress and why they might not hold up:
There are many objections to the idea, ranging from “technological development is inevitable so trying to slow it down is futile” to “we don’t want to lose an AI arms race with China” to “the only way to make powerful AI safe is to first play with powerful AI.”
But these objections don’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny when you think through them. In fact, it is possible to slow down a developing technology. And in the case of AI, there’s good reason to think that would be a very good idea.
The company’s ChatGPT competitor, Bard, isn’t publicly available yet, but Google’s allowing a “small, randomly selected group of Pixel Superfans” to get access first.
To be clear, Google isn’t letting Superfans try out Bard right away; it’s just putting them on a waitlist for early access once they sign up. Here’s part of the email Google’s sending to users.
Within an article examining the shortfalls of AI voice helpers over the last few years, like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, the New York Times has a note about Apple’s internal tech demos:
At Apple’s headquarters last month, the company held its annual A.I. summit, an internal event for employees to learn about its large language model and other A.I. tools, two people who were briefed on the program said. Many engineers, including members of the Siri team, have been testing language-generating concepts every week, the people said.
Of course, not everyone’s sure they want these freestyling AI bots taking control of their smart home devices.
[The New York Times]
If you hadn’t already installed the Windows 11 update that added a tiny Bing shortcut button to your taskbar (and tabs for Notepad, Phone Link for rudimentary iMessaging from your PC, and AI-powered file recommendations in the Start Menu), it’s now being delivered automatically.
It’s not quite a Cortana and Master Chief experience; however, clicking it pops up the search bar, and queries simply take you to the Edge browser’s built-in Bing AI chatbot integration.
More of an evolution than a revolution
The company announced its next-generation AI language model today, and now it’s running a livestream to show it off to developers. You can watch it here.
AI chat systems put a new, sometimes solipsistic twist on the fannish roleplaying tradition.