De même qu'on ne s'attend pas à ce que les frigos se réinventent chaque année en terme de fonctionnalités, le smartphone a atteint une certaine maturité et n'évolue plus que de manière anecdotique. Mais les fabricants doivent quand même satisfaire les actionnaires, et donc nous persuader qu'il est important d'un racheter un chaque année.

Brillant texte de Ted Chiang sur les différences fondamentales entre la création artistique telle que pratiquée par un humain et la génération de texte, d'images ou de sons par un LLM (Large Language Model).

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

Le vrai risque des soit-disant "IA" : non pas une révolte des machine qui voudraient soudainement détruire l'humanité, mais l'automatisation de tâches administratives par des systèmes aveugles et inhumains, qui écrasent les individus et contre lesquels il est pratiquement impossible de faire appel. Le tout fondé sur la croyance (absolument fausse) qu'un algorithme est nécessairement neutre et objectif.

Telegram est généralement présentée comme une application de messagerie du même type que WhatsApp et Signal, parce qu'elles se ressemblent au niveau de leurs interfaces d'utilisation ainsi qu'en terme de fonctionnalités. Pourtant sous le capot, Telegram est très différente des deux autres.

Companies may unintentionally hurt their sales by including the words “artificial intelligence” when describing their offerings that use the technology, according to a study led by Washington State University researchers.

Of course, generative AI is an impressive technology, and it provides tremendous opportunities for improving productivity in a number of tasks. But because the hype has gone so far ahead of reality, the setbacks of the technology in 2024 will be more memorable.

Rather than solving the problems raised by employers’ methods, however, the use of automated job-hunting only served to set off an AI arms race that has no obvious conclusion. ZipRecruiter’s quarterly New Hires Survey reported that in Q1 of this year, more than half of all applicants admitted using AI to assist their efforts. Hiring managers, flooded with more applications than ever before, took the next logical step of seeking out AI that can detect submissions forged by AI. Naturally, prospective employees responded by turning to AI that could defeat AI detectors. Employers moved on to AI that can conduct entire interviews. The applicants can cruise past this hurdle by using specialized AI assistants that provide souped-up answers to an interviewer’s questions in real time. Around and around we go, with no end in sight.

One of the world's largest investment banks wonders if generative AI will be worth the huge investment and hype: "will this large spend ever pay off?"

I work in tech. I think a lot of cool stuff is being built and a lot of good work is being done. But tech is a mature industry, and most of what is interesting these days has to do with bringing the things we learned from 2000-2015 about how to use software into places that have not yet modernized. We’re at the tail end of what’s interesting and good and novel. Software technology has very little left to change in a major way. And the entire ethos of a16z and the like has utterly failed to produce breakthroughs in computer hardware, biological sciences, energy, environment or any other major sector. The last decade of innovation has been entirely about reducing friction in commerce. That’s it. And it’s not that profitable and will end up with a very small number of winners.