AI talks back – in your voice. Is Intel the next Boeing? Wikipedia looks to survive the era of AI.
All this and more on the “Yakkety Yak don’t talk back” edition of Hashtag Trending. I’m your host, Jim Love. Let’s get into it.
OpenAI’s latest AI model, GPT-4o, has revealed an unexpected capability during testing: the ability to unexpectedly imitate users’ voices without permission. This discovery, detailed in OpenAI’s recently released “system card,” has raised concerns about the growing complexity of AI chatbots and their potential to mimic any voice from a small audio clip.
Simon Willison, an independent AI researcher, explains: “My reading of the system card is that it’s not going to be possible to trick it into using an unapproved voice because they have a really robust brute force protection in place against that.”
While OpenAI has implemented safeguards to prevent unauthorized voice generation, the incident highlights the challenges in safely developing AI with advanced audio capabilities.
The implications of this technology are significant. As Willison notes, “We are definitely going to get these capabilities as end users ourselves pretty soon from someone else. ElevenLabs can already clone voices for us, and there will be models that do this that we can run on our own machines sometime within the next year or so.”
As we approach this new frontier in AI audio synthesis, the tech industry faces crucial questions about security, privacy, and ethical use of voice cloning technology.
Sources include: ArsTechnica
Once the darling of the tech world, Intel is now facing challenges reminiscent of Boeing’s recent troubles. Both of these companies were the juggernauts of their industry but now are regarded as failing and losing ground to upstart competitors.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a tech industry observer, notes: “Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen processors, particularly the Raptor Lake series, have been failing… a lot.” These issues are most prominent in high-end CPUs, frustrating customers who’ve paid premium prices.
Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger described the company’s struggle to catch up with competitors as a “death march” back in 2022. The chip giant is now laying off 15% of its workforce and has seen its stock price plummet.
Vaughan-Nichols attributes Intel’s troubles to poor management decisions and prioritizing financial performance over engineering excellence. He warns: “I’m not counting Intel out — not yet, anyway. But a few years ago, I wouldn’t have written Boeing off either, and that was a bad bet.”
While the total share value, or market cap of a company doesn’t say everything, it does have some indication of where the company sits vis a vis it’s competition. Intel’s market cap is somewhere between 80 and 90 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money. But AMD, a company that was a nobody compared to Intel has a market cap that is over 200 billion dollars. Or compare that with Nvidia with a market cap of more than 3 TRILLION dollars.
That was the company that used to have the marketing slogan “Intel Inside” that said that the leading chips were in this machine and you should pay more for it.
As Intel fights to regain its footing in a rapidly evolving tech landscape, the industry watches closely to see if it can avoid Boeing’s fate and reclaim its position as a leader in innovation. And every company, regardless of size has to take this seriously – if you can’t innovate with enormous quality, even being a giant in your sector won’t matter.
Sources include: The Register
Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, is facing new challenges in the age of AI-generated content.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has said that AI is both “an opportunity and a threat.” And in its latest fundraising campaign, it highlighted the platform’s role in the “age of artificial intelligence.”
With over 16 billion monthly visits, the platform is an attractive target for disinformation and promotional content, especially now that AI can generate credible texts effortlessly.
To combat this, Wikipedia’s community of 265,000 active volunteers has stepped up its efforts. They’re noticing an increase in suspiciously well-developed content from new editors, likely generated by AI. The platform is relying on its human-led moderation model, strict citation rules, and the ability of volunteers to detect AI-generated text patterns.
Wikipedia has expanded its machine learning team and is adapting its policies for responsible AI use. However, they face a potential long-term challenge: if AI chatbots become the primary source of information for users, it could lead to a decline in Wikipedia volunteers.
The platform is also concerned about the proliferation of unreliable sources outside Wikipedia that could be used to reference articles. To address this, the community can blacklist unreliable sources.
As AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which were trained on Wikipedia’s content, become more prevalent, the encyclopedia is advocating for clear attribution to original sources to prevent the spread of misinformation. This ongoing battle highlights the complex relationship between traditional knowledge repositories and emerging AI technologies.
Chris Albon, director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation, which controls Wikipedia stated the challenge and the new role of Wikipedia
“In this new era of artificial intelligence, the strength of this human-led model of content moderation is more relevant. Wikipedia’s model, based on debate, consensus and strict rules for citing [sources], has proven resilient in maintaining content quality over the past two decades,”
We hope it continues.
Source: El Pais
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Hashtag Trending is on summer hours with our Monday to Thursday daily news, and our weekend show will continue to be released early on Friday.
Thanks for listening. I’m your host Jim Love, have a Marvelous Monday.
