Lifeboat Foundation

When U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss decided to deliver a speech on a bill that would create a U.S.-Israel artificial intelligence center, he opted to let the AI do the talking.

The brief two-paragraph speech read by the Massachusetts Democrat on the floor of the U.S. House on Wednesday was generated by the online AI chatbot ChatGPT. His staff said they believe it’s the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress.

Auchincloss said he prompted the system in part to “write 100 words to deliver on the floor of the House of Representatives” about the legislation. Auchincloss said he had to refine the prompt several times to produce the text he ultimately read.

ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence tool that has been used in everything from high school essays to a speech on the floor of Congress, has added another accomplishment to its résumé: passing exams from law and business schools.

The AI tool was presented with several tests from both the University of Minnesota’s law school and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, passing them all.

That said, the AI didn’t necessarily ace the exams with flying colors. The chatbot answered 95 multiple choice questions and 12 essay prompts across 4 of UM’s law school tests, averaging about a C+ performance overall. The tech did better in Wharton’s business management course exam, scoring between a B to B-.

In the meetings, Altman told policymakers that OpenAI is on the path to creating “artificial general intelligence,” a term used to describe an artificial intelligence that can think and understand on the level of the human brain.

The OpenAI CEO is talking to members of Congress about the uses and limits of the artificial intelligence tool that’s all the rage.

Welcome to the exponential upward curve phase of the Technological Singularity, folks.

Three months before ChatGPT debuted in November, Facebook’s parent company Meta released a similar chatbot. But unlike the phenomenon that ChatGPT instantly became, with more than a million users in its first five days, Meta’s Blenderbot was boring, said Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun.

“The reason it was boring was because it was made safe,” LeCun said last week at a forum hosted by AI consulting company Collective[i]. He blamed the tepid public response on Meta being “overly careful about content moderation,” like directing the chatbot to change the subject if a user asked about religion. ChatGPT, on the other hand, will converse about the concept of falsehoods in the Quran, write a prayer for a rabbi to deliver to Congress and compare God to a flyswatter.

Continue reading “Big Tech was moving cautiously on AI. Then came ChatGPT” »

Boeing has come up with a new advanced airlifter concept with stealth features to meet the growing need for more durable cargo and tanker planes.

Boeing has shown an idea for a tactical, stealth-capable cargo plane with a blended wing body, or BWB. It comes almost two weeks after Frank Kendall, the secretary of the U.S. Air Force, said that having more airlifters and aerial refueling tankers that can survive will be important in future high-end conflicts against near-peer adversaries, especially China.

Continue reading “Boeing unveils stealth cargo plane concept for high-end conflicts” »

A congressman wants it approved by Congress.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif, hopes to get a nod from Congress to support regulating artificial intelligence by using an AI tool to write a resolution calling for the same. He will introduce a nonbinding measure that would direct the House to consider artificial intelligence, a bill fully written by ChatGPT, an online AI chatbot.

With a basic prompt, Congressman Ted Lieu generated a standard congressional resolution supporting Congress’s focus on AI without specifying that it was written using AI.

Continue reading “Online AI chatbot ChatGTP wrote a bill to regulate AI” »

After years of delay under government pressure, Apple said Wednesday that it will offer fully encrypted backups of photos, chat histories and most other sensitive user data in its cloud storage system worldwide, putting them out of reach of most hackers, spies and law enforcement.

Maybe a New iPhone is a good idea for a second phone.

The one service Apple offered that could not be encrypted was iCloud. Now that will change.

Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast to discuss AI safety, the fragility of the world, slowing down AI development, regulating AI, and the optimal funding model for AI safety research. Learn more about Connor’s work at https://conjecture.dev.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction.
00:47 What is the best way to understand AI safety?
09:50 Why is the world relatively stable?
15:18 Is the main worry human misuse of AI?
22:47 Can humanity solve AI safety?
30:06 Can we slow down AI development?
37:13 How should governments regulate AI?
41:09 How do we avoid misallocating AI safety government grants?
51:02 Should AI safety research be done by for-profit companies?

Continue reading “Connor Leahy on AI Safety and Why the World is Fragile” »

Tech giants from Google to Amazon and Alibaba —not to mention nation-states vying for technological supremacy—are racing to dominate this space. The global quantum-computing industry is projected to grow from $412 million in 2020 to $8.6 billion in 2027, according to an International Data Corp. analysis.

Whereas traditional computers rely on binary “bits”—switches either on or off, denoted as 1s and 0s—to process information, the “qubits” that underpin quantum computing are tiny subatomic particles that can exist in some percentage of both states simultaneously, rather like a coin spinning in midair. This leap from dual to multivariate processing exponentially boosts computing power. Complex problems that currently take the most powerful supercomputer several years could potentially be solved in seconds. Future quantum computers could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science, helping to solve existential challenges like climate change and food security. A flurry of recent breakthroughs and government investment means we now sit on the cusp of a quantum revolution. “I believe we will do more in the next five years in quantum innovation than we did in the last 30,” says Gambetta.

But any disrupter comes with risks, and quantum has become a national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defenses. “People describe quantum as a new space race,” says Dan O’Shea, operations manager for Inside Quantum Technology, an industry publication. In October, U.S. President Joe Biden toured IBM’s quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., calling quantum “vital to our economy and equally important to our national security.” In this new era of great-power competition, China and the U.S. are particularly hell-bent on conquering the technology lest they lose vital ground. “This technology is going to be the next industrial revolution,” says Tony Uttley, president and COO for Quantinuum, a Colorado-based firm that offers commercial quantum applications. “It’s like the beginning of the internet, or the beginning of classical computing.”