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Category Archives: Search Engines

How to Become an Expert on A.I.

The New York Times. How to Become an Expert on A.I. Part 1 of our weeklong series

  • See also The New York Times – A.I. Is Being Built by People Who Think It Might Destroy Us
  • See also WIRED: AI Loves—and Loathes—Language. “…Deep learning networks may look like brains, but that doesn’t mean they can think like humans. On the ever-expanding meganet, that’s a problem…Deep learning’s insufficiency is more insidious than its errors. Errors we have a chance of noticing, but the structural inadequacies of deep learning produce subtler and more systemic effects whose flaws are often not at all obvious. It is risky to outsource human thought to machines that lack the capacity for such thought. At the meganet scale, deep learning’s analysis is so wide-ranging and complex that in failing to understand language, it skews the entirety of our online experience in unpredictable and often unmeasurable directions. As we turn administration of meganets over to these deep-learning brains, they presort the information we feed into them by distinctions that neither we nor they can even specify. Every time Google provides us with a suggested response to a text message or Amazon proposes the next book we should read, that is deep learning doing the thinking for us. The more we adopt its suggestions, the more we reinforce its tendencies. It is often unclear whether these tendencies are “right” or “wrong,” or even exactly what those tendencies are. And we don’t have the opportunity to question them.”

The Nightmare of AI-Powered Gmail Has Arrived

New York Mag – The Intelligencer: “With the release of tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT, Google — once the presumptive industry leader in artificial-intelligence research — suddenly finds itself playing catch-up. The rise of OpenAI was reportedly a “code red” emergency at the company, which had quietly been working on, but not really releasing, similar… Continue Reading

AI chatbots compared: Bard vs. Bing vs. ChatGPT

The Verge: “The chatbots are out in force, but which is better and for what task? We’ve compared Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT models with a range of questions spanning common requests from holiday tips to gaming advice to mortgage calculations. Naturally, this is far from an exhaustive rundown of these systems’ capabilities… Continue Reading

OpenAI is massively expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities to let it browse the web and more

The Verge: “OpenAI is adding support for plug-ins to ChatGPT — an upgrade that massively expands the chatbot’s capabilities and gives it access for the first time to live data from the web. Up until now, ChatGPT has been limited by the fact it can only pull information from its training data, which ends in… Continue Reading

North Korean hackers using Chrome extensions to steal Gmail emails

Bleeping Computer: “A joint cybersecurity advisory from the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the National Intelligence Service of the Republic of Korea (NIS) warn about Kimsuky’s use of Chrome extensions to steal target’s Gmail emails. Kimsuky (aka Thallium, Velvet Chollima) is a North Korean threat group that uses spear… Continue Reading

Google’s Hot New Bard AI Is Already Spouting Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories

Futurism:  “Google just released its much-anticipated rival to Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Bing AI — and it’s already churning out false information, complete with fake citations of news articles that look plausible, but don’t actually exist. While the system, called Bard and currently on a waitlist for early users, is impressive in similar ways to both Bing… Continue Reading

Google’s Bard lags behind GPT-4 and Claude in head-to-head comparison

TechCrunch: “Google has taken the wraps off Bard, its conversational AI meant to compete with ChatGPT and other large language models. But after its shaky debut, users may understandably be a bit wary of trusting the system — so we compared it on a few example prompts with its AI peers, GPT-4 and Claude. This… Continue Reading

Why You Should Opt Out of Sharing Data With Your Mobile Provider

Krebs on Security: “A new breach involving data from nine million AT&T customers is a fresh reminder that your mobile provider likely collects and shares a great deal of information about where you go and what you do with your mobile device — unless and until you affirmatively opt out of this data collection. Here’s… Continue Reading

Is ChatGPT Closer to a Human Librarian Than It Is to Google?

Gizmodo, Chirag Shah: “A search engine researcher explains the promise and peril of letting ChatGPT and its cousins search the web for you. The prominent model of information access and retrieval before search engines became the norm – librarians and subject or search experts providing relevant information – was interactive, personalized, transparent and authoritative. Search… Continue Reading

Microsoft’s new share button makes it easy to show people what Bing AI is saying

The Verge: “The company also said it’s made the chatbot’s ‘Balanced’ mode faster. Microsoft is trying to make it easier to share your experiences with its GPT-4-powered Bing Chat by adding a button that lets you post the AI’s response to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. People have already been sharing the interesting (and sometimes upsetting)… Continue Reading