Artificial Intelligence

Jessica Grose writes in the NYT about educators struggling with students using AI in the classroom. One major worry expressed is that relying on it for brainstorming and writing could make students less likely to power through tough assignments on their own.

It’s almost as if the speed of available technology is making them assume that their human brains should have all the answers.

Right now, teachers have to deal with this issue on their own; some policymakers “appear to have drunk the Kool-Aid on artificial intelligence.”

Opting out of Google’s generative AI overviews means you become invisible in search — a no-go for most publishers. But keeping content in search means it can be scraped for AI Overviews. As one publisher puts it:

You drop out and you die immediately, or you partner with them and you probably just die slowly, because eventually they’re not going to need you either.”

It’s seemingly easy to make the chatbot’s new image generator spit out the few things it supposedly can’t generate — including gore and even “child pornography if given the proper prompts,” says X user Christian Montessori.

While all AI models have loopholes, Elon Musk seems unfazed by the abuse, calling it a “step for people to have some fun.”

Here’s what Eric Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO from 2004 to 2011 and then chairman until 2015, had to say recently during a talk at Stanford:

Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the reason startups work is because people work like hell.

Update, August 14th: It appears that Schmidt didn’t intend for his comments to make headlines! Stanford has taken the video of his talk down, so here’s a clip that is still online:

For more of the backstory and ambition behind Worldcoin, the eyeball-scanning-for-cryptocurrency startup that Sam Altman thinks could one day save us all from an AI-controlled world, check out this piece from Bloomberg’s Ashley Vance:

Blania and Altman, who formally outlined their Worldcoin master plan a year ago, have since received feedback that might be generously described as mixed. On one hand, they’ve already persuaded more than 6 million people to go before an Orb and sign up for a World ID, and the sign-up rate has been surging this year. The total value of the digital currency (WLD) is more than $550 million. At a factory in Germany, Orbs are heading toward mass production and will soon be dispersed around the globe in a bid to push these numbers even higher.

The redesigned iOS app features the same Aria AI chatbot that debuted on the Opera One desktop browser last year, and places the search bar at the bottom of the screen for easier one-handed navigation.

The app also includes an immersive, color-adaptive UI, a clutter-free start page carousel, and “revamped search functionality” that provides smart suggestions and predictive keywords.

The startup has appointed Zico Kolter, a professor and the director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, to its board of directors. Kolter will also join the Board’s Safety and Security Committee alongside a group of other board members and CEO Sam Altman.

Kolter has a background in developing safety methods for large language models and formerly worked as the Chief Data Scientist at C3.ai.