Daily Tech News 6 October 2023

• I'm not a programmer and I just used AI to write my first bot. (Replit)
  
  Congratulations!
  
  You're still not a programmer, that's not an AI, and... Well, that's technically a bot in the Slack sense of the term, and your peers are idiots.
  
  
  
• Chatbot hallucinations are poisoning web search. (Wired)
  
  Back in July a researcher published a paper in which he showed that commonly used generative AI tools will happily answer questions about books that don't exist.
  
  Microsoft Bing picked up that paper and happily ingested this new and entirely imaginary knowledge.
  
  Thankfully someone at Microsoft still cares about the truth - or at least about their share price if they are sufficiently embarrassed in the marketplace - and the fictional results have been removed.
  
  But seeing the rate at which Google results have gone downhill in recent years, I don't expect that state of affairs to last long.

• You don't need to use a large, expensive Large Language model to generate nonsensical garbage anymore. A small, cheap, Tiny Language Model can do the job just as well. (Quanta)
  
  There is actually a point to this. While GPT-4 was very expensive to create and does a lot of things, all of them badly, a model that is a thousand times smaller can potentially do one thing tolerably well - and everything else not at all.
  
  
  
• Amazon is offering a one million dollar prize for the best evidence of alien visitors in the October edition of Oceania's Funniest Telescreen Recordings. (Vice)
  
  Yeah, nah.
  
  
  
• HP's Envy Move is not the worst device the company has ever sold but certainly involved the least engineering effort. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  1. Glue a plastic pocket to the back of a monitor.
  2. Put keyboard in pocket.
  
  
  
• The worst device? The company's multi-function printers which refuse to scan when they are low on ink. (ABC News)
  
  If you think such arrant nonsense would invite a class-action lawsuit, well, it did.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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