ai_ethics

Our 156th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

Email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai and/or hello@gladstone.ai

Timestamps + links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:02:16) OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model
  • (00:13:24) Gemini 1.5 is Google’s next-gen AI model — and it’s already almost ready
  • (00:24:00) Groq AI model goes viral and rivals ChatGPT, challenges Elon Musk’s Grok
  • (00:29:26) Introducing IP Adapters: Create Consistent Game Assets in Seconds
  • (00:31:36) Report: OpenAI working on web search product
  • (00:33:20) Adobe Acrobat adds generative AI to ‘easily chat with documents’
• Applications & Business
  • (00:34:17) Sam Altman owns OpenAI's venture capital fund
  • (00:38:17) Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO
  • (00:41:15) Nvidia reveals its Eos supercomputer for AI processing sporting 4,608 H100 GPUs
  • (00:44:41) Google quietly launches internal AI model named 'Goose' to help employees write code faster, leaked documents show
  • (00:46:24) Chinese start-up Moonshot AI raises US$1 billion in funding round led by Alibaba and VC HongShan amid strong interest for OpenAI-type firms
  • (00:50:06)  AI Computing Firm Lambda Raises $320 Million in Fresh Funding
  • (00:51:01) Exclusive: Ex-Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Googler Clay Bavor raised $110 million to bring AI ‘agents’ to business
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:51:41) BioMistral: A Collection of Open-Source Pretrained Large Language Models for Medical Domains
  • (00:54:33) Nomic AI Releases the First Fully Open-Source Long Context Text Embedding Model that Surpasses OpenAI Ada-002 Performance on Various Benchmarks
• Research & Advancements
  • (00:57:33) Meta unveils V-JEPA AI model that improves training by learning from video
  • (01:04:51) Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Without Prompting
  • (01:09:45) OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement
  • (01:11:40) World Model on Million-Length Video And Language With RingAttention
  • (01:15:00) Amazon AGI Team Say Their AI Is Showing "Emergent Abilities"
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:17:15) Hackers for China, Russia and Others Used OpenAI Systems, Report Says
  • (01:21:15) House leaders launch bipartisan artificial intelligence task force
  • (01:25:08) Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen — Chinese and US researchers show new side channel can reproduce fingerprints to enable attacks
  • (01:27:05) States are introducing 50 AI-related bills per week
  • (01:28:12) Air Canada found liable for chatbot's bad advice on plane tickets
  • (01:30:26) The FTC warned about ‘quiet’ TOS changes for AI training. Here’s why it might not be enough
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (01:32:13) Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against OpenAI partially dismissed
• Fun & Miscellaneous
  • (01:36:14) A Visual Guide to Mamba and State Space Models
  • (01:38:00) Scientific Journal Publishes AI-Generated Rat with Gigantic Penis In Worrying Incident
  • (01:40:50) Helen Mirren Rips Up AI-Generated Speech at American Cinematheque Awards
  • (01:41:40) Microsoft's game-changing Super Bowl ad

Last week, we interviewed Sam Altman. Since then, well, everything has changed. The board of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, fired Altman as chief executive on Friday. Over the weekend, it looked as if he might return. On Sunday night, Microsoft hired Altman to lead a new A.I. venture. Who knows what will happen next.

Today, an update on a crazy weekend in tech, and our interview with Sam Altman.

Today’s Guest:

• Sam Altman is the former chief executive of OpenAI.

Additional Reading:

• On Sunday, Microsoft hired Sam Altman after OpenAI had fired him.
• Kevin breaks down the winners and losers from the OpenAI rift.

Part one. Roasting take about AI and UFOs. 

Part two. Measured and reasoned mental health chat about developing self-acceptance 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For years, I’ve kept a list of dream guests for this show. And as long as that list has existed, Ted Chiang has been atop it.

Chiang is a science fiction writer. But that undersells him. He has released two short story collections over 20 years — 2002’s “Stories of Your Life and Others” and 2019’s “Exhalation.” Those stories have won more awards than I can list, and one of them was turned into the film “Arrival.” They are remarkable pieces of work: Each is built around a profound scientific, philosophical or religious idea, and then the story or the story structure is shaped to represent that idea. They are wonders of precision and craft. But unlike a lot of science fiction, they are never cold. Chiang’s work is deeply, irrepressibly humane.

I’ve always wondered about the mind that would create Chiang’s stories. And in this conversation I got to watch it in action. Chiang doesn’t like to talk about himself. But he does like to talk about ideas. And so we do: We discuss the difference between magic and technology, why superheroes fight crime but ignore injustice, what it would do to the human psyche if we knew the future is fixed, whether free will exists, whether we’d want to know the exact date of our deaths, why Chiang fears what humans will do to artificial intelligence more than what A.I. will do to humans, the way capitalism turns people against technology, and much more.

The ideas Chiang offered in this conversation are still ringing in my head, and changing the way I see the world. It’s worth taking your time with this one.

Recommendations: 

"Creation" by Steve Grand

"On the Measure of Intelligence" by Francois Chollet

"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" by George Saunders

"A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan

"Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise" (movie)

"On Fragile Waves" by Lily Yu

"Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard

Control (video game)

Return of the Obra Dinn (video game)

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.