Daily Tech News 28 December 2024

• A new Chinese AI called DeepSeek V3 outperforms ChatGPT on standard tests while costing a small fraction of the price to train because - apparently - the developers stole the ChatGPT training data. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The evidence for this is that the model is convinced it is ChatGPT.

  "Obviously, the model is seeing raw responses from ChatGPT at some point, but it's not clear where that is," Mike Cook, a research fellow at King's College London specializing in AI, told TechCrunch. "It could be 'accidental'... but unfortunately, we have seen instances of people directly training their models on the outputs of other models to try and piggyback off their knowledge."

  Cook noted that the practice of training models on outputs from rival AI systems can be "very bad" for model quality, because it can lead to hallucinations and misleading answers like the above. "Like taking a photocopy of a photocopy, we lose more and more information and connection to reality," Cook said.

  Training AIs on AI-generated data leads to insanity in as little as three generations. It can improve results on specific standard tests because it biases the AI very, very heavily towards those tests, throwing everything else out the window. After setting it on fire.

• The Minecraft server has been ported to COBOL. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not feature-complete yet, but it's an impressive achievement that it works in the first place.
  
  Also, the game is now effectively immortal.
  
  
  
• A 9th US phone company has been hacked by Chinese spies. (AP)
  
  No, you're not allowed to know which one.
  
  
  
• There's a 10 to 20% chance AI will wipe out humanity over the next 30 years, says Geoffrey Hinton. (The Guardian)
  
  Nobody has ever answered the simple question of how.
  
  
  
• The MNT Reform Next looks more like it was made in 2005 than 2025, but. (Liliputing)
  
  It's completely open source and user serviceable. Not only can you replace I/O modules as with the Framework laptops, you can replace the CPU itself with any compatible module (like the Raspberry Pi compute modules), and anything else you can find down to the individual cells in the battery pack.
  
  That makes it about 25% larger and heavier - and also a lot slower - than mainstream laptops, but there are plenty of people who just want something that works and keeps working, and is not glued shut and locked down in perpetuity.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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