The One with Outage, Calling AI, and Dashcams #6
Hey, 👋
What a week, huh.
As I'm writing these lines, Bing search, Copilot, the part of ChatGPT responsible for internet browsing, and all services that use it (e.g., DuckDuckGo) have been down for several hours. Microsoft spent the entire Build conference spearking about AI, and now this happens the very next day. What a rollercoaster.
# general
As expected, Google will start showing ads in their new AI overviews on top of the search results. Those overviews are available in the US only so far, but this is not a great experience. The AI is hallucinating, and its choice of sources is questionable, to put it mildly. For example, it suggested adding glue to pizza:
Apparently, it used a joke comment made by a user named "fucksmith" on Reddit 11 years ago. You can read the rest of the suggested answers here: "Glue-Topped Pizza and Zombie Presidents: The Worst Google AI Answers So Far". Thankfully, you can opt out and choose the new feature called "web search". As the common Russian saying goes - "the new is the well-forgotten old."
By the way, if you want to see that search by default without extra clicks, you can always use this website: https://udm14.com/
In the meantime, The Browser Company of New York, the makers of the Arc Browser, have an idea of calling it, and OpenAI is having a beef with Scarlett Johansson, whose voice they allegedly stole for their voice assistant named Sky. It turns out they didn't, but their reputation has taken a hit. Remember that "Universal Basic Compute" dud? I guess more and more people think that the Board was right when they ousted Sam Altman last year.
I'm not sure if I want to call anyone, let alone my browser. As for the OpenAI, I shared this post on Threads. I still think it's a banger even if it got only two likes:
Big Tech wants us to embrace AI and trust it even when the answers it provides are completely wrong. That's the issue with the current state of Artificial Intelligence; it's not truly intelligent.
# privacy
If you missed a smear campaign against Signal that I mentioned last week, read the whole story here. It's long and complicated, but that's a trait of all conspiracy theories out there.
Apple fixed a bug that caused photos that have been deleted to reappear. If you think that sounds bad, then you're right. It is. What a privacy nightmare of a bug.
Here is another interesting story from 404media: "Nonconsensual AI Porn Maker Accidentally Leaks His Customers' Emails". Privacy violations work both ways.
# links-of-note
This week, it's a long read from Anthropic - “Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model”. If you are interested in the inner workings of AI models, then this one is for you.
# water-cooler
Fun fact: As far as I understand, there is no legislation explicitly prohibiting dashcams in Cyprus, but they are generally considered illegal here, so nobody uses them. No accidental meteorite footage can happen here!
---
Until next week,🖖
Greg