Daily Tech News 6 October 2024

• Back at the dawn of time - which is to say, a few years ago - when an AI didn't know how to answer a question it would say it didn't know how to answer the question. Either that or tie itself into knots, spit out an entire ream of gibberish, and crash.
  
  AIs today are much more sophisticated. Like many humans when they don't know how to answer a question, they lie. (Ars Technica)
  
  This is what you get when you reward answers rather than accuracy. It's the comment spam problem all over again.
  
  What's worse, the more advanced the AI - the larger its training set - the stronger the tendency to lie.
  
  And the more effort that is put into supervising the AI after the bulk training - a process called alignment - the stronger the tendency to lie and get away with it.
  
  It's not really lying, of course, since the current crop of commercial AIs have no intentionality. It's just that they also have no concept of truth, and the way they are trained rewards giving answers, not just giving the right answer.

• SSD capacity could quadruple by 2029 as the number of layers in flash memory chips continues to increase. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Before the development of multi-layer flash cells, SSDs had a real problem. We couldn't make the cells any smaller or they would leak - in fact, they were already leaking, and the newest SSDs were slower and less reliable than the previous generation.
  
  The first multi-layer cells were significantly larger than in the chips they replaced, which made them faster and more robust, but the multiple layers provided much more storage in the same size chip.
  
  If you don't want to wait five years, though, you could just buy four SSDs.
  
  
  
• Chinese state hackers reportedly gained access to the US wiretap system. (MSN)
  
  So if the DOJ was listening in on your conversations, so was the CCP.
  
  
  
• Plastic-eating bacteria could combat pollution and possibly also utterly destroy civilisation. (MSN)
  
  Scientists say that the latter scenario is "unlikely".
  
  
  
• California has passed a law protecting "brain information". (GovTech)
  
  So if you are trapped in an advanced VR game where if you die in the game you die in real life, you can rest assured that the company that created the game cannot legally sell your neural scans.
  
  
  
• The latest HP OmniBook 14 Ultra isn't bad. (Notebook Check)
  
  It lacks the Four Essential Keys and the screen is a 2240x1400 IPS model with a 60Hz refresh rate and 100% sRGB colour, which is good but nothing amazing.
  
  But it has a twelve core Ryzen AI 9 HX 375, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
  
  According to the article it costs around $1050, which is reasonable for those specs, but I was unable to find that exact configuration in HP's online store.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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