Jonathan Clements: ““Want to enjoy life more? Put down the remote, back slowly away from the television, and do something where you’re a participant, not an observer.”
The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time. “A magazine is nothing without its cover.”
NYTimes: “Because A.I.s have been trained on vast repositories of human cultural and scientific data, they can, in theory, respond to almost any prompt — but public-facing A.I.s like ChatGPT have filters in place to prevent pursuing certain types of malicious requests. Ask an A.I. for an image of a corgi running through a field, and you will get it. Ask an A.I. for an image of a terrorist blowing up a school bus, and the filter will typically intervene. These filters are usually developed via a method called “reinforcement learning with human feedback.” They are designed in conjunction with human censors and act almost like a conscience for the language model. Dr. Bengio thinks this approach is flawed. “If you have a battle between two A.I.s, and if one of them is way superior — especially the one you’re trying to control — then this is a recipe for accidents,” he said. The practice of subverting the A.I. filters with malicious commands is known as “jailbreaking.””
FT: “Anyone anxious about what might lay ahead will need to be sitting down to read Giuliano da Empoli’s impassioned, dazzling slim volume about the state of the world, The Hour of the Predator. Da Empoli, author of the hugely successful novel The Wizard of the Kremlin, seeks to capture the “dying breath of one world as it sinks into the abyss and the icy grip of another which will take its place.” He sees today’s leaders as Aztecs at the arrival of those who followed Columbus across the Atlantic — praying to useless gods for miracles while handing the keys to the kingdom to new conquerors because of infighting, petty rivalries and the inability to grasp the severity of the situation. For da Empoli, the new colonisers are not Spanish conquistadors, but billionaires, tech bros and autocrats, almost all of whom are men, pumped up on testosterone and with high regard for their own brilliance.”
WSJ: “As a CEO in the old Silicon Valley mold—an engineer who intimately knows the technology she’s selling—[Lisa] Su is deftly navigating challenges that have tripped up other tech-industry leaders. While rivals like Intel got bogged down in costly manufacturing investments, Su focused squarely on what she believes AMD does best: designing ever more powerful semiconductors. She has transformed AMD into the most serious competitor to Huang and Nvidia, the 800-pound gorilla of the AI chips industry. Since taking the helm in 2014, she’s pulled AMD back from the verge of bankruptcy and built the company’s market value from less than $3 billion to an astounding $348 billion.”
