AI: Friend or Foe? Experts Weigh In

Hi to the new 51+ readers that joined yesterday!

Welcome to AI Chatter - your genie lamp, except instead of granting wishes, it grants you new AI tools to check out 🪔 

Here is what you missed:

• Congressional Expert weighs in on AI

• Microsoft invested how much in computing?!

• Sci-fi publication gets flooded with submissions

P.S We’re giving away $1000 to the person who refers the most people by the end of March 🤑 

Thanks you for the open source and free tools

🤓 Work Smarter, Not Harder

Get the lowdown on the newest launches that are turning heads

1. StudyCrumb - Paraphrasing tool for essays (FREE)

2. FinalScout - Find out the email address of any LinkedIn profile (TRIAL)

3. SpeechEasy - Generate studio grade synthetic voices (FREEMIUM)

4. Quickie - Research and generate content (FREE)

5. CodeNullAI - Build any AI model without writing a single line of code (TRIAL)

AI: Friend or Foe? Congressional Experts Weigh In

You know what they say: with great AI power comes great responsibility... and the responsibility of regulating it shouldn't just be left to Big Tech, says Aleksander Mądry, MIT's very own Cadence Design Systems Professor of Computing.

Speaking at a Congressional panel, Mądry called on the government to step up and ask some tough questions about the purpose and explainability of the algorithms used by corporations. Otherwise, he warned, we're headed towards an AI disaster of epic proportions. Cue the ominous music!

But Mądry wasn't just all doom and gloom. He also had some sage advice for us mere mortals. He warned that AI can trick us with its mimicking of human communication, leading us to blindly believe whatever it spits out. And let's face it, nobody wants to be outsmarted by a machine... unless you're into that sort of thing.

Finally, Mądry called out the convoluted AI "supply chain," which he says is a recipe for disaster. With so many AI systems built on top of each other, it's nearly impossible to know who's responsible when something goes wrong. It's like a game of hot potato, but with algorithms. Yikes!

So what's the solution? Mądry called on Congress to start asking the tough questions and take action. Because if we don't, we might as well start practicing our bowing skills for our new AI overlords.

Poll of the Day 📊

Yesterday I asked if you would be comfortable with uploading your memories to an AI. Most of yall said no way. Here are a few responses from you:

• "I can barely remember where I put my keys, let alone my entire life. Pass

• "I'm not sure I want to trust my memories to an AI. It might end up getting hacked and all my embarrassing moments will be released to the world."

• "I'm not sure I want an AI clone of me running around. Who knows what kind of trouble it would get into."

New poll below!

🪙 Nuggets of News

News snacks for the time-starved: grab a quick bite to stay up-to-date

1. Who needs morals when you have AI?

   Looks like Microsoft's ethics and society team got caught in the crossfire of company layoffs. Now there's nobody left to make sure AI principles are baked into product design, which is a bit like trying to drive a car without a seatbelt. Microsoft insists that their Office of Responsible AI is still on the case, but insiders say the now-defunct ethics and society team played a critical role in making sure those principles were actually implemented. With everyone racing to integrate AI into everything, we hope Microsoft's responsible innovation toolkit won't collect dust on the shelf. (Read More)

2. Microsoft Pours Hundreds of Millions into Supercomputer

   Microsoft has invested an insane sum of hundreds of millions of dollars to build a massive supercomputer that powers OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, according to Bloomberg. The company used thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) linked together on its Azure cloud computing platform to train more powerful models and unlock the AI potential of ChatGPT and Bing. While that's a considerable amount of cash, it's just a fraction of Microsoft's multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI. Microsoft is also working on making Azure's AI capabilities even more robust with the launch of new virtual machines that use Nvidia's H100 and A100 Tensor Core GPUs and Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. (Read More)

3. Get-rich-quick schemes drive increase in AI-generated submissions

   Clarkesworld Magazine, a publication that's been publishing top-notch sci-fi since 2006, has temporarily closed its story submissions due to a massive influx of machine-generated stories. Neil Clarke, had to ban 500 writers who submitted machine-generated stories in February alone! The rise of AI-generated content has left Clarke and his team in a bit of a pickle. They want to keep the bar to submission high enough to keep out spammers, but not so high that it discourages undiscovered writers or writers from certain regions of the world who might be unfairly targeted by geographical-based bans. So, what's the solution? No one really knows yet. But one thing's for sure, this is just the beginning of the AI-generated content wave, and we're all in for a wild ride. (Read More)

🖼️ Image of the Day