weekend ai reads for 2024-03-22

Author

That AI Thing
March 22, 2024

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: PUBLIC PERCEPTION & PERIL

“Are you trying to use it to create the world you want to live in? Are you trying to use it to increase value in your life and focus on the things that you really care about? Or are you just trying to, like, make some money for the billionaires, you know?” Scheinert asked the audience.

Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI / Noah Smith, Noahpinion (sorry)

Human wages will drop below subsistence level, and the only way they’ll survive is on welfare, paid by the rich people who own all the AIs that do all the valuable work. But even long before we get to that final dystopia, this line of thinking predicts that human wages will drop quite a lot, since AI will squeeze human workers into a rapidly shrinking set of useful tasks.

AI’s economic peril to democracy / The Brookings Institution

When selecting the top candidate for a job, if candidates from a particular demographic are chosen less than 80% as often as the best-treated group, that gap is considered evidence of discrimination. If a company made hiring decisions solely based on GPT’s rankings, protected groups would be adversely impacted.

 

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

An LLM is a database that speaks English instead of SQL and runs on a GPU instead of a disk.

Greg Diamos (source, sorry)

 

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS & CULTURE

Guiding Principles for the Church’s Use of Artificial Intelligence / The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

  • solid set of principles that are applicable outside of religious environments

In an interview with Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast, Gates acknowledged that AI has its strengths and weaknesses. He noted that technology is not a magical solution to problems that humans struggle with.

  • good refresher

“I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.” Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.

Artists who use AI are more productive but less original — An analysis of work posted on a popular art-sharing website finds that users who adopted generative artificial intelligence tools increased their output, but saw a drop in novelty / New Scientist

 

🎓 EDUCATION

The idea that tutoring consistently raises achievement by two standard deviations is exaggerated and oversimplified. The benefits of tutoring depend on how much individualized instruction and feedback students get, how much they practice the tutored skills, and on the type of test used to measure tutoring’s effects. Tutoring effects, as estimated by rigorous evaluations, have ranged from two full standard deviations down to zero or worse.

A Data-Centered Approach to Education AI — Useful models need better data. Stanford scholars explore a path to ensure domain experts have more fruitful conversation. / Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University

 

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

You could say that this is a more or less indirect form of overfitting: over time, model designers get to know the benchmark datasets better and better. They consciously or unconsciously adjust the training parameters and datasets to maximize scores.

  • short read

This is the old Moravec paradox, from the pioneer of robotics, hence Moravec, who said, how is it that with computers, it seems to be easy to do high-level complex tasks like playing chess and solving integrals and doing things like that, whereas the thing we take for granted that we do every day, like, I don’t know, learning to drive a car or grabbing an object … Why is that? What are we missing? What type of learning or reasoning architecture or whatever are we missing that basically prevent us from having level five sort of in cars and domestic robots?

There is literally millions of downloads of LLaMA 2 and thousands of people who have provided ideas about how to make it better. So this clearly accelerates progress to make the system available to a wide community of people, and there’s literally thousands of businesses who are building applications with it. So Meta’s ability to derive revenue from this technology is not impaired by the distribution of base models in open source.

This is not a domain where government or military organizations are particularly innovative and they’re in fact way behind. And so this is going to come from industry and this kind of information disseminates extremely quickly.

Spreadsheets are all you need.ai – A low-code way to learn AI

 

🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

Eggnog — Create AI videos with consistent characters

Volley — The first ai-enabled training experience modernizing racquet sports

According to the company, Digital Marilyn’s AI capabilities enable her “to engage in natural, fluid dialogue, adapting to your questions and interests in real-time… Mimicking the human nervous system, this technology allows Digital Marilyn to respond with realistic emotions and nuanced expressions, creating a deeply personal and memorable experience.”

 

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

Alliance for the Future — Working to promote and ensure the future of Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of all humanity.

 

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