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📰 AI Dominates Mainstream Media's End of Year Tech Coverage

They found a new industry to bag on

Author

Kyle Scott
December 29, 2022

Hello, humanoids! This is CR's first send. Spray some water on this bad boy before takeoff. 🛫

No, make it a rocket ship.

🚀.

Boom, baby.

Errrrrwego!

AI takes over mainstream end-of-year coverage 📰

Nothing I enjoy more than end-of-year fare-- recaps, predictions, TAX LOSS HARVESTING. It's all so enjoyable and nostalgic.

Anyway, the media needs a tech story to latch onto now that crypto coverage has been moved to the "in memoriam" portion of the broadcast.

AI fills the void as it fits neatly into all the narratives:

✅ massive society disrupting tech

✅ huge investment and the potential for riches

✅ the potential for fraud

✅ impact on workers

✅ it's terrifying and might kill us all

Here's just a sampling of the AI features as we wind down the year:

Brian X. Chen really goes out on a limb and predicts that chatbots will become more advanced and act as research assistants by reading documents and generating summaries (just like I did for this section). He also suggests a more subtle use case that A.I. will be integrated into existing productivity apps like Microsoft Word and Google Sheets. Boring.

A predictably negative slant on AI's impact, focusing on its impact to artists, regulation, and questioning whether the space will receive meaningful investment. INTERESTINGLY, Chatbot thinks the article was fiction:

Chatbot is either wrong... or already self-aware and calling anyone who questions it a liar. Cool cool.

A timeline of the year in AI. I actually enjoyed this.

I'll save you the click-- here's the hook (emphasis MINE ALLLLLL MIIIIIIIIIINE):

But AI skeptics continued to worry. Their long-standing complaints that AI models, trained on human-created data, would imitate the racism and sexism in society were proven true. There were renewed concerns that running AI software is energy intensive and harming the climate. The battle between humans creating the content which feeds AI models and the companies that profit off them became more fierce and entered the courts.

Race. Climate. Corporate greed. Legal battles. Hard to do that all in one graph, but lo, it's been done by Wapo.

#14 is really interesting:

“Coming soon are industry-specific AI model marketplaces that enable businesses to easily consume and integrate AI models in their business without having to create and manage the model lifecycle. Businesses will simply subscribe to an AI model store. Think of the Apple Music store or Spotify for AI models broken down by industry and data they process.”

— Bryan Harris, executive vice president and chief technology officer, SAS

Study says... robots write bad code 🔓

Nothing new here that AI outputs can contain inaccuracies.

  • code-generating AI systems, like Codex developed by OpenAI, can potentially introduce security vulnerabilities into software development

  • developers who used Codex to complete security-related problems across programming languages... were more likely to write incorrect and "insecure" solutions compared to a control group

  • these developers were also more likely to say that their insecure answers were secure compared to the control group

  • code-generating systems may be more reliable for tasks that are not high risk

Most notable here is the false confidence developers have in their AI generated code. Like a strongly held political opinion-- it's probably filled with holes.

Tool of the Day: If Search and Chat Had a Baby 🛠

It would be called Shat.

Anyway, this was inevitable. The minute someone asked "is ChatGPT better than Google?" you knew the home-brews for co-mingling chat bots and search were coming.

2 takes on it:

1) You.com is a privacy-focused search engine built around personalization that launched in 2021.

You probably never heard of it.

But, smartly, they just bolted on an AI chat bot to display alongside search results. It purports to be up to date. Let's see:

She dead.

2) Never scaleable, this little Chrome extension will bolt ChatGPT results alongside your regular search engine.

Sometimes beauty is in simplicity (we have no idea how well it works).

Robots Replacing of the Day 🦾

Who or what are robots replacing today? Silly parenting gimmicks to get your kids to settle TF down for 5 minutes.

Or not...

Pivot! "Son, go argue with ChatGPT for an hour about your favorite Star Wars characters!"

Totally better than video games. Totally.

Podcast of the Day 🎤

Moment of Zen is an admitted All-In ripoff, but with some heavy hitters: Dan Romero (Farcaster), Antonio Garcias Martinez (Spindl), and Erik Torenberg (Village Global/On Deck). Special guest for episode 1 was Marc Andreessen.

The part about AI was particularly good, cued up at 45:10:

Links 👀

That's all for today.