OpenAI releases GPT-4, Google announces plans to put AI in workspace tools and do the best coders really have potty mouths?
Welcome to Trending Hashtags for Wednesday, March 15
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsday in the US – here’s today’s top tech news.
OpenAI announced the release of GPT-4, the next generation AI engine for ChatGPT.
But the truth is that GPT-4 is actually hiding in plain sight. Microsoft admitted yesterday that its new Bing is in fact running on GPT-4. Other early users include Duolingo, Morgan Stanley, Khan Academy and the Government of Iceland.
GPT-4 has become available to paying users of OpenAI via ChatGPT Plus (with a usage limit), and developers are now able to sign up on a waiting list to access the API.
OpenAI says that GPT-4 “surpasses ChatGPT in its advanced reasoning capabilities.” For example, it says that while ChatGPT can score in the 10th percentile on the bar exam taken by lawyers, GPT-4 can score in the 90th percentile.
GPT-4 can also accept and generate longer entries – up to 25,000 words. And it can generate captions and other information with the image as a starting point.
The big question remains whether GPT-4 will have the unpredictable and sometimes bizarre behavior of its predecessors.
But OpenAI acknowledged that the new engine also has its boundaries, involving social Prejudice and a tendency to “hallucinate” or create convincing but false information.
They say GPT-4 is 82 percent less likely to respond when asked for content that isn’t allowed and 40 percent more likely to respond factually than GPT-3.5 in internal testing.
Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to seek new opportunities to build generative AI into its business productsThat includes Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
What Microsoft hasn’t been able to find is good use of its ethical AI team.
Silicon Valley blog The Platformer reports that Redmond cut it The entire Ethics and Society team as part of its latest round of layoffs which affected 10,000 employees.
In fairness, the Ethics & Society team wasn’t very large, with only seven people remaining after the reorganization in October. Some were transferred to other teams and on March 6, AI’s corporate vice president John Montgomery told the remaining members that they would be terminated. Team members told Platformer they believe they were let go because Microsoft had become more focused on shipping its AI products ahead of the competition, and less concerned with long-term, socially responsible thinking.
Source: axios And techcrunch
Google isn’t giving up the AI market to Microsoft just yet, it just announced a suite of next-generation AI features for its various vertical appsIncluding Google Docs, Gmail, Sheets and Slides.
Some of the features include new ways to generate, summarize and brainstorm text with AI in Google Docs, options to generate full emails in Gmail, and develop bullet points or AI imagery, audio and video for presentations in Slides .
The new features on Docs and Gmail will be made available to trusted testers in the US this month.
Google said other features will be made available to the public later this year.
According to The Verge, of all the new features, the AI writing and brainstorming tools in Docs and Gmail seem the most potentially useful.
Alphabet wants you to think of the new features as a “magic wand” capable of crafting marketing blogs, training plans or other text with just a simple command., It can also modify its tone at the users discretion.
But it has the same risks as Bing’s Sydney – “confusion” or spewing rubbish or hateful material.
In fact, in its press release yesterday, Google offered a standard disclaimer, saying, “Sometimes AI gets it wrong, sometimes it pleases you with something unusual, and other times, it needs guidance.” is required.”
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian didn’t reveal how much the upgraded workspace might cost businesses or consumers in the announcement,
The failed Silicon Valley Bank and subsequent potential banking crisis could be good news for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Since the evening of March 10, there has been a 30 percent jump in the price of bitcoin. When the first news of SVB failure came About $26,000 as of yesterday afternoon.
CoinGeek historian Kurt Wukert Jr. said that “Bitcoin plays into the narrative of a place to store your money in a crisis.”
Some may think that history repeats on one’s own. saw crypto Its largest one-month profit in history in the wake of the Cyprus financial crisis in early 2013, during which the country’s second largest bank issued a levy on bank deposits and took away a portion of uninsured depositors’ assets
However, a recent study published by a New York The economist questioned the connection, saying that bitcoin does not always react to macro events in an orderly or logical manner.
Stephen Rust, CEO of inflation data aggregator TruFlation, argued that “early adoption was driven by remittances and purchases, so much so that people spent 10,000 B T c buy pizza
Source: axios
Ah, those winter evenings when we warm ourselves in the soft glow of the domain controller?
Deep Green, a UK cloud startup, is offering organizations to physically install their edge server hardware to provide free heat, so that it can reduce its own space and cooling costs.
Company deploys a mini datacenter with IT equipment immersed in liquid cooling fluid With a heat exchanger to transfer heat energy to where it is needed.
The feature has already been deployed at Exmouth Leisure Center in South West England, where waste heat from a dozen servers is being used to heat the swimming pool. According to a report in The Register, it The pools are expected to reduce energy requirements by up to 62 percent, saving them more than £20,000 or $24,000 US per year as well as reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
The company installs the kit free of cost, and also bears the cost of electricity and maintenance of the infrastructure.
Deep Green plans to deploy more of this technology in Bristol and Manchester in the near future.
Such plans, but on a larger scale, have already been implemented by Microsoft in Finland last year and by BytesNet, a Netherlands-based datacenter company.
But smaller establishments like Deep Green offer to improve local communities’ energy use. Which come under the radar with their carbon footprint.
But don’t expect that you can use the plan to lower your home electricity bill: Deep Green confirmed to The Register that it’s “business only.”
Source: register
Now here’s a question we really want answered. Do good coders swear a lot? A study for an undergraduate graduate thesis seems to suggest that they do.
According to graduate student Jan Strehmel from Karlsruhe Institute of TechnologyCurse means quality code.
To measure how swear words affect code quality, Strehmel used a program called SoftWipe developed by his supervisor’s lab to measure adherence to coding standards, such as quality checks and a simple code structure. Use.
Stremmel pulled the swear words from GitHub, along with about 3,800 examples of code, along with 7,600 examples of code. Softwipe revealed that on average, code containing swearing scored about half a point higher on a 10 point scale of code quality than code containing no swear words.
Supervisor of Stremel, Bioinformatician Alexandros StamatakisLooks like maybe it’s the curse of the past that helped him become a full professor!
Psychologists have long known that swearing can relieve pain, enhance physical performance, and help people shape their personality. But the link between swearing and code quality has not been examined before, and suggesting there is a connection is “a very exciting, interesting idea,” according to Benjamin Bergen of the University of California San Diego—author of the book, What the F: What swearing tells us about our language, our minds, and ourselves.
Bergen actually makes a point of swearing once during each of the college lectures he teaches to increase engagement.
But programmers may include profanity to please or shock the people who read their code – and they may put extra effort into it if they expect their code to be read.
Software engineer Greg Wilson, however, worries about the effect that profanity can have when it is directed at junior programmers. Offensive language has been cited as a factor that discourages people—especially those from groups that are marginalized in STEM—from continuing to work in software engineering.
But we don’t want abuse, but if it makes for better code, and it encourages you to comment on your code, I care that you can tell me to put it where the subroutine doesn’t shine.
Source: Ars Technica
And finally, we’d like to say goodbye to a familiar face. or interface. Canada’s Kijiji Marketplace — where 20 years ago we found apartments, bought and sold things — for many, that familiar app was a surprising replacement for newspaper buy and sell ads. It wasn’t pretty, but it certainly was functional, easy to understand, and easy to use.
But now it’s time to put that old warrior into retirement. After so many years, there’s a new interface and a new look for this old friend.
But for those of us with a sentimental attachment, Kijiji is offering to sell a limited, print copy Original Kijiji Marketplace for only $1. Even in its well-deserved retirement, it’s still helping us find bargains.
That’s the top tech news for today
Can link to these stories The article was posted at itworldcanada.com/podcasts. You can find more great stories and in-depth coverage at itworldcanada.com or in US at technewsday.com
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I’m your host Jim Love – have a wonderful Wednesday!
