Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/29 – Hit Pause On AI Development?

Starting point is 00:00:04 Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Wednesday, March 29th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Over a thousand big names sign a petition urging a pause on AI development. What analysts think AI could do four or two the global economy? North Korean hackers allegedly have a new trick. And did you know that Bight Dance has an Instagram rival? Well, it looks like they're putting the pedal to the metal on that. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Over 1,000 people, including Elon Musk, have signed an open letter urging. AI Labs to pause training of systems more powerful than GPT4 for at least six months. Quoting the Verge.

Starting point is 00:00:45 The letter published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute notes that AI Labs are currently locked in an out-of-control race, their words, to develop and deploy machine learning systems, quote, that no one, not even their creators, can understand, predict, or reliably control. Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT4. says the letter. This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors. If such a pause could not be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium, end quote. Signatories include author Yuval Noah Harari, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Skype co-founder,

Starting point is 00:01:23 Jan Tallinn, politician Andrew Yang, and a number of well-known AI researchers and CEOs, including Stuart Russell, Yoshua Benjiyo, Gary Marcus, and Ahmad Mostak. The full list of signatories can be found in the piece linked in the show notes, though new names should be treated with caution as there are reports of names being added to the list as a joke. For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, an individual who is partly responsible for the current race dynamic in AI recently saw his name included. The letter is unlikely to have any effect on the current climate in AI research, which has seen tech companies like Google and Microsoft rush to deploy new products, often sideline previously avowed concerns over safety and ethics. But it is a sign of the growing opposition

Starting point is 00:02:06 to this ship it now and fix it later approach, an opposition that could potentially make its way into the political domain for consideration by actual legislators. As noted in the letter, even Open AI itself has expressed the potential need for, quote, independent review of future AI systems to ensure they meet safety standards. The signatories say that this time has now come, quote, AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts, they write. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt, end quote. Along similar lines,

Starting point is 00:02:51 lots of people were chatting overnight about this Goldman Sachs research paper that suggests that generative AI could increase global annual GDP by 7% over a 10-year period, but at the same time could expose 300 million full-time jobs to automation. Quoting the Financial Times. They calculate that roughly two-thirds of jobs in the U.S. and Europe are exposed to some degree of AI automation based on data on the tasks typically performed in thousands of occupations. Most people would see less than half of their workload automated and would probably continue in their jobs with some of their time freed up for more productive activities. In the U.S., this should apply to 63% of the workforce they calculated, a further 30% working

Starting point is 00:03:34 in physical or outdoor jobs would be largely unaffected, although their work might be susceptible to other forms of automation. But about 7% of U.S. workers are in jobs where at least half of their tasks could be done by generative AI and are thus vulnerable to replacement. Goldman said its research pointed to a similar impact in Europe. At a global level, since manual jobs are a bigger share of employment in the developing world, it estimates about a fifth of work could be done by AI or about 300 million full-time jobs across big economies. quote. Researchers say North Korean hackers are likely laundering stolen crypto by renting cloud compute to mine fresh coins, thereby avoiding more scrutinized crypto mixers, quoting wired.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Cybersecurity firm Mandiant published a report on a prolific North Korean state-sponsored hacking group. It is now calling APT-43, sometimes known by the names Kemsuki and Thalium, the group whose activity suggests its members' work in the service of North Korea's reconnaissance General Bureau Spy Agency has been primarily focused on espionage, hacking think tanks, academics, and private industry from the U.S. to Europe, South Korea, and Japan, since at least 2018, mostly with fishing campaigns designed to harvest credentials from victims and plant malware on their machines. Like many North Korean hacker groups, APT-43, also maintains a sideline in profit-focused cybercrime, according to Mandiant, stealing any cryptocurrency that can enrich

Starting point is 00:05:05 the North Korean regime, or even just fund the hackers' own operations. And as Regulators worldwide have tightened their grip on exchanges and laundering services that thieves and hackers use to cash out criminally tainted coins, APT 43 appears to be trying out a new method to cash out the funds it steals while preventing them from being seized or frozen. It pays that stolen cryptocurrency into hashing services that allow anyone to rent time on computers used to mine cryptocurrency, thereby harvesting newly minted coins that have no apparent ties to criminal activity. That minting trick allows APT43 to take advantage of the fact that cryptocurrency, is relatively easy to steal while avoiding the forensic trail of evidence that it leaves on blockchains, which can make it difficult for thieves to cash out. It breaks the chain, says Joe Dobson,

Starting point is 00:05:49 a mandiant threat intelligence analyst. This is like a bank robber stealing silver from a bank vault and then going to a gold miner and paying the miner in stolen silver. Everyone's looking for the silver while the bank robbers walking around with fresh newly minted gold, end quote. In theory, the payouts from those pools should be clean with no ties to APT-43's hackers. That seems, after all, to be the point of the group's laundering exercise. But in some cases of operational sloppiness, Mandate said it found that the funds were nonetheless co-mingled with crypto and wallets it had previously identified from its years-long tracking of APT-43 hacking campaigns, end quote. Google plans to add a perspectives carousel to search, showcasing experts and others under

Starting point is 00:06:36 a new top stories label. Also, an about-this author feature is coming to U.S. English searches, quoting TechCrunch. The new prospectus feature is a carousel that will appear below top stories and showcase insights from a range of journalists, experts, and other relevant voices on the topic you're searching for. The idea behind the feature is to give users a variety of noteworthy voices on a news topic to broaden their understanding of the subject matter. The carousel will launch soon in English in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:07:04 and will be available on desktop and mobile, Google says. Google is also launching a new feature called About This Author that lets users easily learn more about the authors behind the content they're reading. With this new feature, users will be able to find more information about the background of the authors that Google surfaces on search. The feature is launching on search results in English globally and on the perspectives carousel in the U.S. in English. The About This Author feature is an expansion of Google's current About This Result feature, which first rolled out in 2021 in English. The company announced that it's now launching the About This Result feature globally in all languages where search is available in the coming days. Now all users will see three dots next to most results on Google search.

Starting point is 00:07:44 Tapping those three dots gives users details about where the information is coming from and how Google's system determined it would be useful for the query. In addition, Google announced that it's making it easier for pages to access its about this page feature starting today. When you click on the three dots next to a result, you can learn more information about the source and topic of a particular page. The company said in a blog post, now we're making this information even easier to access. Say you're searching for a rainforest protection organization. Starting today, you can type in the URL of the organization in Google Search. and information from about this page will populate at the top of search. You'll be able to quickly see how the website describes itself, what others on the web have said about a site, and any recent

Starting point is 00:08:24 coverage of it. From there, you can evaluate whether you want to visit the website and learn more. This feature is now available globally in English, end quote. Lemon 8, ByteDance's Instagram rival, launched in March 2020, has hit the U.S. App Store's top 10 for the first time ever. According to Data AI, the app, never before even ranked in the top 200 overall charts. I was today years old when I learned that ByteDance even had an Instagram rival, quoting TechCrunch. This is a dramatic move for the little known app and one that points to a paid user acquisition effort powering the surge. The firm confirms that such a fast move from being an unranked app to being number nine among top free apps in the

Starting point is 00:09:13 US, ahead of YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Facebook implies a significant and recent user acquisition push on the app publishers part. Unfortunately, because the app is so new to the app store's top charts, third-party app analytics firms don't have the precise data on Lemonade's U.S. installs or how those installs have recently changed over the past few days. But given the app was launched globally back in March 2020, what is most likely is that it was quietly released on the U.S. App Store, but only for testing purposes. Then sometime over the past few days it was more officially launched, meaning it was accompanied by this clearly sizable spend on paid discovery or app install ads. According to App Intelligence provider Apptopia's data, Lemonate debuted on both iOS and Android in March 2020 and has since gained 16 million global downloads, with Japan as its top market, accounting for 38% of its total installs.

Starting point is 00:10:02 While the firm also doesn't have a figure for its U.S. installs, it was able to estimate the app currently has 4.25 million monthly active users. Apptopia noted it didn't yet see Lemonate having spent on paid search on either the App Store or Google Play, but cautioned it may have paid install campaigns that just haven't populated in its system. them yet or spend that's on networks it doesn't have insight into. However, we believe ByteDance might simply be leveraging one of its own channels to drive app installs TikTok. Over on TikTok, we noticed a number of creators recently began posting about Lemonate, with many new videos appearing in just the past 24 hours. Concerningly, many of their reviews are extremely positive but are not marked as sponsored content, end quote. Finally today, it's back to the AI stuff, because look, people, the way the headlines are coming

Starting point is 00:10:53 fast and furious every day, I could do nothing but AI headlines some days. So I'm going to spare you that by throwing a whole bunch of related headlines into this one segment. All AI and all generally of interest to the devs out there. First up, Sarah Bras has open-sourced seven GPT-based LLMs, ranging from 100 million to 13 billion parameters and trained using its Andromeda supercomputer for AI. Let's release this to GitHub and Hugging Face, quoting Silicon Angle. The new LLMs are notable as they are the first to be trained using CS2 systems in the Cerebrus Andromeda AI Supercluster, which are powered by the Cerebrus WSE2 chip that is specifically designed to run AI software. In other words, they're among the first LLMs to be trained without relying

Starting point is 00:11:43 on graphics processing unit-based systems. So Rebrush says it's sharing not only the models, but also the weights and training recipe that was used via a standard Apache 2.0 license. The Sunnyvale, California-based startup is backed by more than $720 million in venture funding. The company sells a chip called the WSC2 that's specifically designed to run AI software. It's the WSC2 that sits at the heart of the Cerebrus-Andromeda supercomputer, optimized to run AI applications, boasting more than 13.5 million processor cores, end quote. Then, to compete with GitHub co-pilot, Google has partnered with Replet, which used AI to make coding tools and now will rely on Google's LLMs for its Ghostwriter product, quoting Bloomberg. Repplet, which has 20 million users, said its Ghostwriter

Starting point is 00:12:32 app will rely on Google's language generation AI to improve its ability to suggest blocks of code, complete programs, and answer developer questions. Google Cloud Vice President June Yang declined to specify which language AI products Replit will use, noting that it's a customized combination of systems that address different tasks like chat and code generation. Previously, Replis built the product with its own AI. Google has much better technology than most people know, Repplet chief executive officer Amjad Massad said in an interview. The startup will also expand its use of Google's cloud services and hopes the relationship with the tech giant will help it win over larger corporate customers. Right now, Replet's clients are largely individual developers and

Starting point is 00:13:11 startups. Google will also distribute Replet's software as part of the partnership, end quote. And finally, finally, it's not just coding, it's cybersecurity too. Microsoft has launched security co-pilot, a GPT4-powered assistant to help security professionals with incident investigations, event summaries, reporting, and more. Quoting the verge, powered by OpenAI's GPT4, generative AI, and Microsoft's own security specific model. Security co-pilot looks like a simple prompt box like any other chatbot. You can ask, what are all the security incidents in my enterprise, and it will summarize them. But behind the scenes, it's making use of the 65. trillion daily signals Microsoft collects in its threat intelligence gathering and security-specific

Starting point is 00:13:51 skills to let security professionals hunt down threats. Microsoft Security Copilot is designed to assist a security analyst's work rather than replace it and even includes a pinboard section for co-workers to collaborate and share information. Security professionals can use security co-pilot to help with incident investigations or to quickly summarize events and help with reporting. Security Copilot accepts natural language inputs so security professionals could ask for a summary of a particular vulnerability, feed in files, URLs, or code snippets for analysis, or ask for incident and alert information from other security tools. All prompts and responses are saved, so there's a full audit trail for investigators. Results can be pinned and summarized into a shared

Starting point is 00:14:32 workspace so colleagues can all work on the same threat analysis and investigations. This is like having individual workspaces for investigators and a shared notebook with the ability to promote things you're working on, says Chang Kawaguchi, an AI security architect at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge, end quote. I asked this last night on Twitter, but can I play any of the original Guitar Hero games on the PlayStation 5? I can't, right? That's a franchise that they've inexplicably let die. If there is a way to do it, can someone please let me know because I've got a nine-year-old that would be perfect for that game? And if there's not a way to do it, again, I want to play it on the PS5, if possible. Dude, that's a huge mistake. You know how nostalgia cycles run in

Starting point is 00:15:22 roughly 20-year cadences. Well, right about now is exactly the time when a bunch of folks who grew up on that game would want to start playing it with their kids. Anybody listening with access to that guitar hero IP, get on that. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/29 – Hit Pause On AI Development?

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