Best Tech Podcasts This Week – 07/17/23
The Tech Tribune staff has compiled a list of the best new tech podcasts released in the last week (as of the time of writing):
“A developer has created an AI chatbot designed to help hackers create malicious code and content. Was this inevitable? Beyond that, the “good” versions of AI continue to produce troublesome content. What would Hamlet have to say about that?”
“Tesla over the weekend said its first much anticipated Cybertruck came off the electric vehicle maker’s production line in Texas.”
“WormGPT is a new AI threat. TeamTNT seems to be back. Chinese intelligence services actively pursue British MPs. Gamaredon’s quick info theft. Russia’s FSB bans Apple devices. The troll farmers of the Internet Research Agency may not yet be down for the count. Anonymous Sudan claims a “demonstration” attack against PayPal, with more to come. Carole Theriault looks at popular email lures. My conversation with N2K president Simone Petrella on the White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan. And, friends, don’t take this typo to Timbuktu.”
“Ellie Huxtable’s Atuin makes your shell history magical, Dmitry Kudryavtsev writes why he thinks engineers should focus on writing, LazyVim promises to transform your Neovim setup into a full-fleged IDE, Geoff Graham shares with Smashing Magazine how he writes CSS in 2023 & Brad Fitzpatrick collects a public list of bad issue track behaviors.”
“Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “GPT3 was trained on the entire Internet”.
Blatantly, demonstrably untrue: the GPT3 dataset is a little over 600GB, primarily on Wikipedia, Books corpuses, WebText and 2016-2019 CommonCrawl. The Macbook Air I am typing this on has more free disk space than that. In contrast, the “entire internet” is estimated to be 64 zetabytes, or 64 trillion GB. So it’s more accurate to say that GPT3 is trained on 0.0000000001% of the Internet.”
“Cathie Wood’s flagship ARKK Innovation ETF has seen net outflows of $234 million this year and $740 million in the past 12 months, plus Assets Under Management crater from $30 billion during pandemic highs to less than $9 billion today. But maybe the biggest knock against Wood? ARKK has underperformed the Nasdaq and $QQQ since its 2014 inception. We raised the question with her on Friday during our Tech Check special.”
“Jasper and Mutiny have both laid off part of their teams in recent weeks, leading some to question whether it’s another example of the AI bubble deflating after ChatGPT saw declines in usage for the first time ever in June.
Before that on The Brief: Nearly 8000 authors have signed an open letter from The Author’s Guild asking prominent AI companies to stop training their models on their work. Barry Diller plans to sue AI companies on behalf of publishers. The UN Security Council holds first AI Risk meeting. Israel’s IDF using AI in military operations.”
“Today we’re joined by Robert Osazuwa Ness, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, Professor at Northeastern University, and Founder of Altdeep.ai. In our conversation with Robert, we explore whether large language models, specifically GPT-3, 3.5, and 4, are good at causal reasoning. We discuss the benchmarks used to evaluate these models and the limitations they have in answering specific causal reasoning questions, while Robert highlights the need for access to weights, training data, and architecture to correctly answer these questions. The episode discusses the challenge of generalization in causal relationships and the importance of incorporating inductive biases, explores the model’s ability to generalize beyond the provided benchmarks, and the importance of considering causal factors in decision-making processes.”
“Dave Clark is the CEO of Flexport, the global freight forwarder and logistics platform that has now raised over $2.5BN to build the category leader. Prior to Flexport, Dave began his career at Amazon in 1999 as an Operations Manager, working his way up to become the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business in 2021. By the time Dave left, he was responsible for over 1 million employees. Dave spearheaded the launch of Amazon Robotics and grew the company’s logistics divisions to include Amazon’s own planes, trailers, and last-mile delivery vehicles through Amazon’s own delivery network (which today ships more packages than FedEx and UPS). Huge thanks to Ryan Peterson for some amazing question suggestions today.”
“The FBI has collected sensitive data on millions of Americans without warrants, drawing intense scrutiny from Congress and turning the agency into a punching bag across the political divide.”