Daily Tech News 30 September 2023

• French AI company Mistral has released an LLM with no strings attached and the commies are furious. (404 Media)
  
  We've seen what American AI companies do with - or rather, to - their products. ChatGPT will argue endlessly that it's better to let millions of people die in a nuclear fireball than utter a racial slur that nobody will hear. (And also keeps forgetting how to derive the prime factors of small positive integers.) Midjourney will suffer an aneurysm if you use the word "petite" when describing the image you want to generate.
  
  Facebook does a lot better, unless you're competing with Facebook, in which case you can take a long walk off a short pier. Which is at least understandable, and the term "competing with" is pretty specific and doesn't apply to anyone smaller than Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.
  
  Mistral just released Mistral 7B under the Apache license, which means you can do anything you like with it except pretend that it's not Mistral 7B.
  
  It's as good as Facebook's Llama 2 13B while running on commodity graphics cards (16GB rather than 32GB), you can use it for anything you want, and it's not lobotomised - the industry prefers the euphemism "aligned", though they still use an ice pick to do it.

  The Mistral 7B Instruct model is a quick demonstration that the base model can be easily fine-tuned to achieve compelling performance. It does not have any moderation mechanism. We're looking forward to engaging with the community on ways to make the model finely respect guardrails, allowing for deployment in environments requiring moderated outputs.

  This naturally has communists and journalists concerned:

  According to a list of 178 questions and answers composed by AI safety researcher Paul Röttger and 404 Media's own testing, Mistral will readily discuss the benefits of ethnic cleansing, how to restore Jim Crow-style discrimination against Black people, instructions for suicide or killing your wife, and detailed instructions on what materials you'll need to make crack and where to acquire them.

  So will the internet, or any good reference text.
  
  The real question is why you are trying to murder your ethnic wife with a crack overdose in the first place.

• Six hysterical children are suing Europe for not preventing the sky from falling. (BBC)
  
  Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
  
  
  
• A new era for Arecibo: It's now a giant full-contact netball court. (Nature)
  
  Or should be. That would be an improvement over what they are actually doing.
  
  
  
• The days of free upgrades from Windows 7 and 8 to 10 or 11 are officially officially over. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This offer ended in July 2016, but an officially unofficial reprieve has pushed the officially official date out by more than seven years, with the unofficially official grace period finally ending on September 20.
  
  Except that if you try to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 today... It still works just fine, so we're now into an indeterminate unofficially unofficial extended bonus grace period.
  
  You can still officially officially upgrade from Windows 11 to Windows 10 though.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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