weekend ai reads for 2024-01-19

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: PODCASTS

• My conversation with Sam Altman (33:10)   Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates, Gates Notes

  • related, Extended Cut: Listening to Vivaldi | Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates (3:25)   Bill Gates, YouTube

• Matthew Lynley on AI in the enterprise, open source models and the data stack (22:00)   AI Extra, Substack (sorry)

• Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter (1:45:56)   The Ben (Horowitz) & Marc (Andreessen) Show

• Kerry Washington on the Future of Connection, Identity, and AI (57:57)   Possible, Apple Podcasts

  • transcript

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Anthropic’s attorneys (source)

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS & CULTURE

• Is A.I. the Death of I.P.? — Generative A.I. is the latest in a long line of innovations to put pressure on our already dysfunctional copyright system.   The New Yorker

• Welcome To Hell, OpenAI Colin Fraser, Medium

  • related, Meta and OpenAI have spawned a wave of AI sex companions—and some of them are children Fortune

  • related, Open-Source AI Is Uniquely Dangerous — But the regulations that could rein it in would benefit all of AI   IEEE Spectrum

• Fox Corp. launches blockchain platform to negotiate with AI firms Axios

  • tl;dr: Fox Corp. co-developed Verify so media companies can NFT their content and license it to OpenAI and others … or something

  • Fox Corp. has a CEO of a “Blockchain Creative Labs” division who apparently needs something to do now that NFTs of The Masked Singer are sitting idly by

• The (ongoing) fight against workplace AI surveillance — Big brother has another thing coming   The Week

• Can AI Be as Creative as Humans? arXiv

  • what?

  • unrelated, Artisans bring AI tools to the workbench — Forward-thinking designers are willing to embrace the technology — without relinquishing human creativity’s central role   Financial Times

• Davos 2024: 5 business leaders on adopting AI and managing associated risks World Economic Forum

• Congress Is Trying to Stop AI Nudes and Deepfake Scams Because Celebrities Are Mad Vice

🎓 EDUCATION

• OpenAI announces first partnership with a university CNBC

  • arizona state university

• Will Chatbots Teach Your Children? — New A.I. tools could enable a Silicon Valley dream: bots that customize learning for pupils. Prior attempts have not lived up to the hype.   New York Times

  • related, Your Child’s Favorite Teacher May Soon Be a Chatbot — The most popular and effective use of AI in education may be programs that follow the “friendship first” model.   Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion

• Scipub Plus — Your team of ai-powered academic writing assistants

• AI can do your homework. Now what? (17:02)   Vox, YouTube

• AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry Google Deep Mind

  • “trained from scratch on our large-scale synthetic data” (!!)

  • the paper: Solving olympiad geometry without human demonstrations Nature

• Unlocking productivity and personalizing learning with AI Microsoft Education Blog

  • tl;dr: Reading Coach, Microsoft’s AI-powered personalized reading practice tool is available for free if you sign up for (or have) a Microsoft account

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

• AI poisoning could turn open models into destructive “sleeper agents,” says Anthropic Ars Technica

  • the paper: Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training arXiv

• Merge Large Language Models with mergekit Towards Data Science, Medium

• Adversarial Machine Learning — A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations [PDF]   National Institute of Standards and Technology

  • comprehensive taxonomy

• Researchers have developed an AI tool that can closely imitate your handwriting style Business Insider

• OpenVoice: Versatile Instant Voice Cloning My Shell

  • deployed at Hugging Face

🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

• Del Walker on Nicki Minaj’s latest marketing push Del Walker, Twitter (sorry)

• AI Tube

  • YouTube but with only ai-generated videos

  • all terrible, but also the worst ai-generated videos will ever be

• Swarovski’s AI-Powered Binoculars Tell You What You’re Looking At Outside Magazine

• Brief — Your daily briefing, powered by AI

  • we’re biased but human curation matters

  • that said, does what it says on the box reasonably well

• Sam's Club announces it will stop checking receipts and start using AI at exits USA Today

• Impakt — Maximize your fitness efficiency with AI Coach.

• Gravity — the Al that remembers. Your data never leaves your machine. Ask about the past, present, and future.

  • mac only

• How AI is decoding the animal kingdom — Scientists are eavesdropping on animal conversations. Will generative AI enable us to talk back?   Financial Times

  • great visuals

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

• AI for Economists: Prompts & Resources Jesse Lastunen, Google Sites

  • mostly interesting for this Likert

not even close to ai-adjacent but just fascinating

• Why woodpeckers don’t get concussions Physics Today