Daily Tech News 7 December 2022

• ChatGPT is artificial general intelligence for the easily impressed. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  According to one person on Twitter, this is all the tech world has been talking about for days. (They were complaining that the New York Times was only talking about Elon Musk, as if the New York Times could cogently report on a new generation of language inference engine.)
  
  I'm less impressed by ChatGPT than Stable Diffusion, because while Stable Diffusion does something I'm bad at - it's bad at it too, and has no understanding of what its mistakes are, but it can generate interesting results that I cannot in any reasonable time frame - while Stable Diffusion does something I'm bad at, badly, but frequently better than I can do, ChatGPT does things I'm good at, badly, and also cannot learn from its mistakes.
  
  If you're bad at writing very simple code or bullshit term papers for some mandatory general studies class, ChatGPT might be just what you need. But for the most part, it's a toy.
  
  The internet is already awash with awful AI-generated sites that clog up search results. This will only lead to more of them, though they might be slightly less awful.
  
  
  
• I say it's a toy for the most part because if there's one thing you'd expect a language inference engine to understand, it's language and if this example is real it sort of does. (Maximum Effort)
  
  It makes some mistakes, because at a surface level it's still using probabilistic pattern matching, but when carefully coached the results are something that an imaginative ten-year-old might come up with.
  
  Which is not a slam because one of the great early demonstrations of AI was about the level of a four-year-old.
  
  
  
• As mentioned on my blog earlier, I'm getting a new server cluster. Two 5950X systems with 128GB of RAM and a ZFS storage server with 120TB of disk, all connected with 10Gb Ethernet.
  
  This is way more than I currently need but the post-Black Friday sale price was too good to pass up. I'm basically upgrading my three existing servers (one of which is dead) to twice the size for about another $10 a month.
  
  They'll all be in one place, which is great because I get that super fast private network and can set up some degree of clustering and redundancy.
  
  So long as that place doesn't catch fire.
  
  But how likely is that to happen again?

• TSMC is planning to invest another $28 billion in its new Arizona facility to build a second fab ready to produce 3nm chips. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If all goes to plan, Apple will be using chips sourced in Arizona to produce iPhones in, well, India. But still an improvement.
  
  
  
• Intel's 4nm process (née 7nm) is ready for production now. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  3nm this time next year, 1.8nm the year after that.
  
  After 14nm+++++ Intel had some catching up to do, but it appears they are finally getting back on track.
  
  
  
• Nigeria is limited cash withdrawals from ATMs and banks in an attempt to force people to use digital transactions. (Coin Telegraph)
  
  This is currently a popular tactic in third-world countries that are determined to remain third-world countries.
  
  
  
• Iran meanwhile is preparing to freeze the bank accounts of women who refuse to wear the hijab. (Coin Telegraph)
  
  Do you people want bank runs? Because this is how you get bank runs.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Binance has called Sam Bankman-Fried a "master manipulator" and "one of the greatest fraudsters in history" which isn't true. (WCCFTech)
  
  Bankman-Fried is a sad little git propped up by people determined to fool themselves and quite likely also by people using him to launder vast quantities of illicit cash. There is still, despite all his babbling, no clear explanation of where all the money went.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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