Holiday Links: Nuclear AI, Pocket AI and Fake news Elections
Happy holidays!
It’s been a crazy up-and-to-the-right year for AI, with advances and big announcements coming almost every week. Here are a few more links to close out the year with food for thought:
- AI Power problems? Microsoft is potentially considering nuclear power for its data centers. This sounds like a dozen sci-fi novels coming true at once. Today’s nuclear power potential might be safer (and cleaner than fossil fuels) to tempt big power users to invest in building their own nuclear infrastructure.
- Apple keeps pushing for “smaller” LLM inference in low-memory situations: another indicator that Apple’s long-term strategic push is the opposite of what most other players are taking. They really want to put AI in your pocket, not on their servers.
- AI & Everything else. Benedict Evans has a good high-level overview of where we are on the market/strategic impact of LLMsm going into 2024. It's hard to disagree with anything but also mainly useful if you’ve been too busy to follow detailed news. As always, there are some nice pithy quotes and graphs!
- LLM-powered searches could be a serious liability in election situations. Wired has a detailed post on the conspiracies, hallucinations, and fakes that still occur with Microsoft’s public-facing LLM-powered search. A research study on Swiss and German elections shows hallucinations on key issues. Coming into an election year in the US, it seems borderline irresponsible to leave the system available like this without vetting results on key questions. Like it or not, Google search, Bing search (and the related bots) do represent a form of “authoritative facts” for people. Even without the use of AI, manipulation is already affecting government decisions.
- This year’s BBC Christmas Lectures will be given by Mike Wooldridge and focus on AI: Mike is one of the foremost thinkers on AI and I’m sure will do an amazing job explaining a complex subject to the public. I had the pleasure of working with Mike in R&D projects 20+ years ago, it’s fantastic to see him be the one take on this educator’s challenge!
Wishing you a relaxing holiday break!
