Daily Tech News 21 June 2023

• A new LLM (large language model, the same sort of AI as ChatGPT) called phi-, with 1.3 billion tokens, scores over 50% on the HumanEval problem set. (Twitter)
  
  GPT-4 scores 67% - but uses 1.7 trillion tokens.
  
  How did they achieve this miracle? They trained phi-1 on textbooks rather than on the internet.
  
  And what does it means? It means you can produce an AI that is smart enough to perform simple tasks and small enough to run on your laptop - and probably your phone.
  
  What else does it mean? It means to score 85% on that test using the same approach as GPT-4 you'd need something like 2 quadrillion tokens, which would cost billions of dollars to train even if you could find that much data. And then years to "align", that is, to get it to stop giving obviously wrong answers because you stuffed it full of nonsense.
  
  Garbage in, garbage out.
  
  phi-1 took four days to train. (Arxiv)
  
  Also, speaking of garbage, don't use textbooks published after 2010 or so.

• Meanwhile over 100,000 ChatGPT accounts have been leaked to the Dark Web. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Probably by ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Speaking of ChatGPT, it apparently knows 25 jokes. (Twitter)
  
  Which admittedly is 23 more than the Babylon Bee. (The Babylon Bee)
  
  If you ask ChatGPT to tell you a new joke, 90% of the time you will get a slightly mangled version of one of those 25. And none of them are funny.
  
  
  
• Just days after saying that it would never remove moderators involved in the protest, Reddit has started removing moderators involved in the protest. (The Verge)
  
  Moderators of r/midlyinteresting marked the subreddit as NSFW - which means children can't access it if they're particularly stupid, and more importantly, Reddit doesn't run ads.
  
  In a carefully-worded statement, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman-Fried said, "God damn you. God damn you all to Hell."
  
  
  
• You can now 3D-print your own Selectric typeballs. (GitHub)
  
  Want to type your new novel directly in Sindarin Elvish? Now you can.
  
  
  
• Razer's new Blade 14 offers a Ryzen 7940HS, RTX 4070 graphics, user-upgradeable memory and storage, and a high-resolution 14" IPS display. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It lacks the Four Essential Keys and costs $2699. And it weighs only two ounces less than the 16" Gigabyte Aero, which includes those keys and a second M.2 slot.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:07 AM

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