AI: tech, society, politics

Finally, Sam Altman of OpenAI says that having thoroughly reviewed the mental health risks of ChatGPT, it’s now going to let adults do what they want, and also start offering erotica for verified adults. From ‘AGI will save humanity’ to ‘erotica for verified adults’. That didn’t take long.

If companies put public chatbots on top of their corporate databases, it won’t be for radical transparency, or because they haven’t had the technology to “crunch digital data” without it. Instead, they’ll do it because that chatbot will be told that it should use the right optimistic adjectives, that it should keep to the company line about the... See more

But AI is surely becoming a new invisible hand pulling the levers in our minds. It is some inscrutable new force that’s writing the first draft of history. It’s interpreting our data; it’s creating our websites; it might soon summarize our emails and brainstorm our ideas and suggest our dinners and mediate our relationships. The shift isn’t from... See more

Public AI providers can do both. If nudging Facebook users towards more positive or negative content can change their emotions, imagine the effect of public AI providers turning up the temperature on their core models. That single parameter could control how polite or rude we are to each other in billions of emails and text messages. Other... See more

As it is with both announcers and human analysts, it’s not that LLMs will lie about the numbers; it’s that they’ll tell you what they see, before you have a chance to see it for yourself. If data is a company’s senses, then whatever sits between a quantitative question and its annotated answer is the creative director of a company’s reality. That... See more

A datapoint, and a brief description—or subtle nudge, like the word “just”—tells us what it means. Ask yourself though: Would you come to the same conclusion with the data alone? As often as not, we wouldn’t—not because the conclusion is wrong, but because, when presented with data on some domain we don’t deeply understand, we have no choice but to... See more

As I said ten years ago on benn.company.substack.com, “even though analysis is built on data, words—not tables and charts—are what make it effective.”

Company bosses will blanch at the idea of radical financial transparency. After all, it amounts to handing over some control of how corporate facts are presented. Real-time reporting would also reduce the value of financial window-dressing — arranging cash flows to make the quarterly snapshot more attractive — to zero. Still, some nerves could be... See more

Google’s earnings power is holding up well, even as the internet giant spends record sums on artificial intelligence in the midst of global economic turbulence.

Parent company reported operating income of $30.6 billion for the first quarter on Thursday—solidly beating Wall Street’s forecast of $28.7 billion.

—

Holding up? Holding up well ? Solidly

... See more