Sam Altman is not evil
He’s a human being, helping to bring the greatest technological advance in human history to fruition
Artificial intelligence
Tuesday
Thursday
Will Nvidia stock keep going up?
The company is now powering the bull market
Friday
Meta's AI investment plan has backfired on Zuckerberg
The best thing he could do when Meta’s next batch of quarterly results are announced is call in sick
Thursday
Gemini AI exposes the progressive playbook
Intoxicated by ‘diversity,’ our technological betters are bent on imposing their all-minority utopia on both the past and the present
Thursday
This week’s diary
With a mixture of trepidation and exhilarated curiosity, I await our future
Monday
Copyright chaos grows deeper by the minute
The concept of copyright is relatively new
Friday
Have we all become slaves to algorithms?
The further into Filterworld I got the more I stopped worrying
Sunday
Alexa, do you love me?
Modern technology is particularly effective at conjuring the impression of social intimacy
Wednesday
Virology poses a far greater threat to the world than AI
Bad actors worldwide know how easy it would be to use it to bring the world economy to its knees
Wednesday
Rishi Sunak can’t take the credit for falling inflation
Even the best-run companies have occasional leadership crises. But if you asked ChatGPT to come up with a blockbuster boardroom-bloodbath movie scenario, I doubt it would propose anything as extreme as this week’s events in its own San Francisco-based parent company, OpenAI. Chief executive and co-founder Sam Altman was fired last week for failing to be ‘consistently candid’ with OpenAI’s board, though no one was prepared to say what he had not been candid about. By Monday he had a new job leading AI research at Microsoft, OpenAI’s 49 per cent shareholder. One inside source claimed 743 of OpenAI’s 770 staff had signed a letter supporting him and many of
Tuesday
Firing Sam Altman has thrown the AI race back open
Control of AI is now firmly concentrated back in the hands of a familiar group of tech behemoths
Tuesday
Heart of Darkness revisited: The Dimensions of a Cave, by Greg Jackson, reviewed
The Dimensions of a Cave proposes a variation on Plato: which is the true choice between reality and shadow?
Monday
What can be done about AI porn?
I suspect that ‘banning’ AI-generated nudes is an implausible project
Saturday
Why I’m not worried about AI
The bots can write best man’s speeches and thank-you letters, but have you ever read those speeches and letters?
Friday
Was Rishi Sunak’s AI summit a success?
14 min listen
This week the prime minister hosted his landmark AI summit at Bletchley Park which wrapped up with an interview with Elon Musk, who warned that AI will one day render all jobs obsolete. The who’s who of AI were in attendance over the two days as well the likes of Kamala Harris and Ursula von der Leyen, but what was actually achieved? Oscar Edmondson speaks to James Heale and Madhumita Murgia, AI editor at the Financial Times.
Thursday
Kamala Harris doesn’t get AI
The whole speech, terrifyingly, showed that Harris hasn’t really got to grips with AI
Wednesday
Kamala Harris's brain-dead AI plan
Her speeches often sound as if they had been scripted by an early or pre-intelligent incarnation of ChatGPT
Friday
No one should trust the camera in the age of AI
Perhaps a world in which the photograph is liberated from performing the role of conveying fact is a better one
Monday
Are Amazon's publishing gurus doing anything wrong?
The company’s direct-to-Kindle publishing and print-on-demand facilities mean that anyone, now, can set up as a publisher
AI will change TV news forever
Humans lie, that’s why, until now, we’ve trusted images — because ‘the camera never lies’