Daily Tech News 1 May 2023

• We interviewed the quote engineer unquote Google fired for saying its AI had come to life. (Futurism)
  
  Blake Lemoine, the "engineer" in question, was fired for violating NDA.
  
  Being a gibbering imbecile is just icing on the cake.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on shepherding her own gibbering imbecile. (Security Week)
  
  I think the people who really stand to lose their jobs here are the ones who write about AI, who could all be replace by a TRS-80 Model 1 Level 1.

  We're far from the point of having a safe, reliable, aligned AGI system. Our path to getting there has a couple of important vectors. From a research standpoint, we're trying to build systems that have a robust understanding of the world similarly to how we do as humans. Systems like GPT-3 initially were trained only on text data, but our world is not only made of text, so we have images as well and then we started introducing other modalities. The other angle has been scaling these systems to increase their generality. With GPT-4, we're dealing with a much more capable system, specifically from the angle of reasoning about things. This capability is key. If the model is smart enough to understand an ambiguous direction or a high-level direction, then you can figure out how to make it follow this direction. But if it doesn't even understand that high-level goal or high-level direction, it's much harder to align it. It's not enough to build this technology in a vacuum in a lab. We really need this contact with reality, with the real world, to see where are the weaknesses, where are the breakage points, and try to do so in a way that's controlled and low risk and get as much feedback as possible.

  The vapidity is astonishing.

• A quick look inside the Asus Flashstor 6. (Serve the Home)
  
  You can install the drives without even a screwdriver, and it looks like the CPU is just fast enough to handle 10Gb Ethernet rates from a RAID-5 array. This model doesn't have 10GbE so it maxes out at about 50% CPU load.
  
  
  
• A quick look at the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023). (Notebook Check)
  
  The is a great laptop except of course it lacks the Four Essential Keys. I was looking at the model with 4060 graphics before settling for a much cheaper HP that had those keys. The version reviewed here, though, has an RTX 4090 which some might consider overkill for a 14" laptop.
  
  
  
• Maybe you should store passwords in plaintext. (Qword)
  
  I mean, no, you shouldn't, and if anyone seriously suggests that you should set them on fire, but what this article is actually discussing is the nature of incentives for technology workers, and why all large organisations suck.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:25 AM

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