Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’

Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’

Artificial intelligence is arguably the most rapidly advancing technology humans have ever developed. A year ago you wouldn’t often hear AI come up in a regular conversation, but today it seems there’s constant talk about how generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E will affect the future of work, the spread of information, and more….

Good News! China and the US Are Talking About AI Dangers

Good News! China and the US Are Talking About AI Dangers

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently said that China should play a key role in shaping the guardrails that are placed around the technology. “China has some of the best AI talent in the world,” Altman said during a talk at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) last week. “Solving alignment for advanced AI systems requires some…

Hyperdimensional Computing Reimagines Artificial Intelligence

Hyperdimensional Computing Reimagines Artificial Intelligence

Despite the wild success of ChatGPT and other large language models, the artificial neural networks (ANNs) that underpin these systems might be on the wrong track. For one, ANNs are “super power-hungry,” said Cornelia Fermüller, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland. “And the other issue is [their] lack of transparency.” Such systems are…

Marc Andreessen Is (Mostly) Wrong This Time

Marc Andreessen Is (Mostly) Wrong This Time

I’d be surprised if Andreessen’s highly educated audience actually believes the lump of labor fallacy, but he goes ahead and dismantles it anyway, introducing—as if it were new to his readers—the concept of productivity growth. He argues that when technology makes companies more productive, they pass the savings on to their customers in the form…

The Strangely Believable Tale of a Mythical Rogue Drone

The Strangely Believable Tale of a Mythical Rogue Drone

Did you hear about the Air Force AI drone that went rogue and attacked its operators inside a simulation?  The cautionary tale was told by Colonel Tucker Hamilton, chief of AI test and operations at the US Air Force, during a speech at an aerospace and defense event in London late last month. It apparently involved taking…

Deepmind’s AI Is Learning About the Art of Coding

Deepmind’s AI Is Learning About the Art of Coding

In the field of computer science, there is perhaps no more fundamental task than to sort. Bubble, heap, merge—take your pick. The methods for reordering data inside a computer have been theorized to death, served as practice exercises for millions of novices, and been optimized for decades by expert developers. Type a sort() function in…

Don’t Want Students to Rely on ChatGPT? Have Them Use It

Don’t Want Students to Rely on ChatGPT? Have Them Use It

When I first caught students attempting to use ChatGPT to write their essays, it felt like an inevitability. My initial reaction was frustration and irritation—not to mention gloom and doom about the slow collapse of higher education—and I suspect most educators feel the same way. But as I thought about how to respond, I realized…

Chegg Embraced AI. ChatGPT Ate Its Lunch Anyway

Chegg Embraced AI. ChatGPT Ate Its Lunch Anyway

In subjects such as engineering, chemistry, and statistics, which drive significant traffic to Chegg but often involve diagrams, there was a sense that relying too heavily on AI to parse visual information was unreasonable, the former employees say. So the ethics of unleashing an imperfect product gave Chegg pause. “We knew generative was coming down…