Remarkably kind and perpetually youthful, the internet’s favorite dancer has stopped bringing his smartphone to work:
“They’re horrible things. I’m addicted to it like everybody else. They’re facilitating our own destruction. […] The world has changed since cell phones have existed. We don’t look at each other or talk to each other quite the same way.”
In an interview with Brendan Bordelon of Politico, Altman said this was a fundamental difference between OpenAI and Anthropic. He believes that “for the benefits of this technology” (rather than the benefit of humanity), we should just deal with “bad things happening.”
While the design team technically reported to Tim Cook, it was understood that Ternus effectively ran it as part of the transition to CEO. But rather than hire an outside design chief now that there’s a lot more responsibility on his plate, Ternus has fully immersed himself. Per Bloomberg:
Ternus already had some involvement with the design studio as Apple’s head of hardware engineering, given the close coordination required between the two functions. Since becoming CEO, however, he has immersed himself in the industrial design and human interface teams. Several people familiar with the department say he works hands-on in the studio several times a week, sometimes visiting multiple times in a single day.
As the new AI czar, Clayton will lead a team that includes FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor. Clayton served as SEC chair during Trump’s first term and recently became director of national intelligence in August.
In a post on X, Elon Musk endorsed President Trump’s efforts to rebrand artificial intelligence (AI) and super intelligence (SI). When asked if he planned to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, he replied yes. But as we all know, Elon says a lot of things.
With its encore theatrical release ahead of Doomsday, Endgame has inched past Avatar to retake the throne as the highest-grossing film with $2.925 billion, versus $2.923 billion. Endgame overtook Avatar in 2019, only for James Cameron to retake it in 2021 with a rerelease ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water.
First, it was a rainstorm. Then the cars couldn’t accelerate properly. Then everyone had to wait around for a software update. That’s how a race at the Sepang International Circuit ended up starting 90 minutes late. The new engines have proven controversial and drawn plenty of ire from drivers.
After being idle on the throttle and letting the car slow, as is the norm on a formation lap, the software bug prevented the electrical power from kicking in. Tombazis described it as being a “loop.” The computer was stuck and unable to initiate a power return. For some drivers, the only solution was to stop and reset the car to get it going again. Esteban Ocon compared it to restarting Windows on a computer.
I’m not sure what prompted this post on X from the OpenAI CEO, but it’s hard not to see it as mildly concerning, especially since we’ve already seen AI is perfectly capable of building its own cult.
It’s been a dizzying few weeks of “is AI reasoning and / or alive” discourse, with the attendant pushback that these systems are just fancy autocomplete. But back in March, Margaret Mitchell, one of the authors of the famous Stochastic Parrots paper, took to Medium to clarify something: AI, as a whole, is not a stochastic parrot — LLMs are. Critics are missing a fundamental difference between the two technologies, even though they’re related. The post has been going back around, and it’s worth a read.
There is a vast array of technology called “AI” that is not reducible to LLMs, and many current AI systems that utilize LLMs also leverage a variety of other technologies, including hand-written-rules, deterministic (non-stochastic) programs, various algorithms, and non-language models. This means that “AI”, broadly, is not equivalent to a large language model; it is not “just a stochastic parrot”.
[Margaret Mitchell]
Musk has famously insisted that cameras are enough for his self-driving cars, when everyone else is pairing them with more advanced sensors. Now He’s explicitly said that his Robotaxis can’t run at night because it’s dark — a problem lidar and radar could easily solve.
