weekend ai reads for 2024-08-09

Vallor’s worry isn’t that artificially intelligent computers will rise up and dominate humanity, but that, faced with computers that can pretend to have human virtues, we’ll lose track of what those virtues really are. Comforted by computers that tell us that they love us, we’ll forget what love is. Wowed by systems that seem to be creative, we’ll lose respect for actual human creativity—a struggle for self-expression that can involve a “painful” reimagining of the self.

Put simply; such leaders tend to lack empathy for other human beings, especially the customer, measure everything at its most rational level, revel in tiny statistical differences, elevate efficiency above all, seek to boil complex, open reality down into closed, simplistic, quantitative models, and ignore very hard or impossible-to-measure qualitative information, also known as qualia, completely.

Human engineers won’t go away. We’ll still be needed to drive high-level prioritization, understand the overall architecture and scope of the problem, and review the AI’s work, especially as systems get bigger. But we’ll spend much more of our time thinking about what to build, and much less on the repetitive “how” of building it.

Anthropomorphism might cause users to place more trust in the output of a model when it “hallucinates” incorrect information, OpenAI says. Over time, it might even affect users’ relationships with other people. “Users might form social relationships with the AI, reducing their need for human interaction—potentially benefiting lonely individuals but possibly affecting healthy relationships,” the document says.

But if you do something well enough, and you stick to your principles, and you stick to quality and integrity, you could be on the dark side of the moon, and people will still venture for that, because people, I think, yearn for quality and they yearn for excellence.

Be Bold, action has genius.

Begin it, begin it now!

Out of slightly over 200 job applications received for Pillser in the last 3 days, more than 90% have been marked as written by ChatGPT.

On one hand, the AI applications are so obvious that this acts as a sort of natural filter. On the other hand, for organizations that are not equipped to easily identify such applications, this means that good candidates will get lost in a sea of low effort applications.

Rocco Casagrande entered the White House grounds holding a black box slightly bigger than a Rubik’s Cube. Within it were a dozen test tubes with the ingredients that — if assembled correctly — had the potential to cause the next pandemic. An AI chatbot had given him the deadly recipe.

Essentially, your skull is serving as the robot’s base, and your tooth and the drill are in the same reference frame. Purely mechanical coupling means there’s no vision system or encoders or software required: it’s a direct physical connection so that motion compensation is instantaneous.

So even if AI saves 20 hours by doing 15 minutes of document searching, for example, the firm should only bill for the 15 minutes of actual time worked.

Some Bay Area parents are so eager to get their kids in on AI’s ground floor that they try to sneak toddlers into advanced courses. “Sometimes they’ll bring a 4-year-old, and I’m like, you’re not supposed to be here,” Du said.

With Q’s code transformation capabilities, Amazon has migrated over 30,000 Java JDK applications in a few months, saving the company $260 million and 4,500 developer years compared to what it would have otherwise caused. That’s the game changer.

Receive Markdown, JSON or a CSV file in seconds that you can upload directly to OpenAI, Claude and more

RAGNA Desktop is a private AI multitool that runs locally on your desktop PC or laptop without an internet connection. The app is designed to help you automate repetitive tasks, increase efficiency, and free up capacity for the really important things.

The sweet spot for startups is seeing 24 months into the future. This is a stone’s throw into the adjacent possible. It’s far-out enough to be asymmetric, familiar enough to be pitchable, and time enough to build.

…But you have to build fast! The frontier of the adjacent possible is always expanding.