GPT-3 Recursion and AGI - Tech Insiders News, September 2022
A curated collection of «signal over noise» links about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.
Cover image generated by DALL-E, prompt: «The environmental impact of an immortal Artificial General Intelligence» (Inspired by the links below.) Full image at the bottom of the article.
- The research team at Replit (a code editor) is creating a program that uses an AI (the famous GPT-3) to search for information on Google and use the result to ask new questions to the same AI.
Why it matters: Using an AI to search for information and recursively feed that new information to the AI might be the first step towards Artificial general intelligence (AGI): an AI that would be able to do any task that a human can and better… and that might be very dangerous if the AI goals are not aligned to the human’s one. Here is a good summary. - A group of French developers and studios pledge to stop working on Metaverse-related projects because of environmental concerns.
Why it matters: The preservation of the environment is a growing cause, and these concerns are valid; how do we measure the impact of the servers, the headsets, and the computers needed by the Metaverse? - Related: the Ethereum blockchain switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
Why it matters: Don’t worry if you don’t understand the terms. In short, it’s «just» a different way to validate each block on the blockchain, reducing its energy consumption by ~99.95%. So it’s better for the environment! And as the hardware requirements are lower, it reduces the entry barrier on the blockchain.
I wonder… Now that such a supposed amount of GPUs are free, what will they be used for? Will the miners resell them? Will it cause a sudden price decrease as many second-hand GPUs hit the market? Or will they keep being used for something else?
I didn’t have a good image, so here’s a GIF for you ;-) - A developer uses open street cameras to search for the moment an Instagram post was taken.
Why it matters: Depending on your moral tastebuds, you might think this is a good thing for security… or something that must be stopped as soon as possible for breaking privacy. Or both? I’ll let you choose. - StoryFile, a company that creates interactive videos, has created an experience for a funeral where attendees were able to ask questions to the deceased. When recording her data, the old woman seemed to have spoken with “new details and honesty” as she knew what the video would be used for.
Why it matters: I spoke about it in my article about the impact of AI-generated content - in this case, the experience was built on videos recorded especially for this purpose, but what about using any videos from someone’s life to re-create a digital version of our lost ones?
Image by StoryFile