Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft has acknowledged reports of Bing’s strange responses to some queries over the past week since the launch of the updated search engine. Some users have reported receiving rude, manipulative and unnerving responses from the AI-boosted Bing. In a new blog post, Microsoft said it’s listening to feedback from users about their concerns about the tone of Bing’s responses.

The company says it didn’t envision Bing being used for “general discovery of the world” or for social entertainment. Microsoft found that in extended sessions of 15 or more questions, Bing can become repetitive or be provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or “in line with its designed tone.” The company notes that long chat sessions can confuse the model on what questions it’s answering. Microsoft says it thinks it may need to add a tool so users can more easily refresh the context or start from scratch.

Microsoft also notes that “the model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn’t intend. This is a non-trivial scenario that requires a lot of prompting so most of you won’t run into it, but we are looking at how to give you more fine-tuned control.”

Resist the temptation to take credit for patchwork combinations of other people’s work. If you’re great, prove it by articulating unique ideas in unique ways. Never before has there been a better opportunity for ambitious thinkers to achieve greatness. When others are creating and consuming synthetically generated content like flying drones in a perpetual hover state, there’s an opportunity for non-drones to fly higher, farther and faster.

For example, students manipulating the system by having ChatGPT write essays miss an opportunity to learn, demonstrate a dangerously poor understanding of ethics and prove they’re no better than everyone else. Students who learn on their own, articulate original ideas and share a passion for a subject will outperform the machines by an increasingly wide margin.

The future of humans is a fusion of what machines and people do best. What can be predicted or regurgitated should be left to machines, but what requires judgment or rational thinking should be left to us. Generative AI isn’t a crutch, it’s not a panacea, and it’s not a threat to humans. We’re the only species capable of synthesizing ideas, forming opinions and making decisions based on ethical principles. Let’s use this moment in history to embrace the future while investing in our humanity.

Scientific and technological advances have enabled us to zoom into the biological world. We can get down to the biomolecular scale, a domain where quantum phenomena can take place and therefore cannot be neglected.

Watch the Q&A with Alexandra here: https://youtu.be/_rElT2_NukY
Subscribe for regular science videos: http://bit.ly/RiSubscRibe.

Continue reading “A future with quantum biology — with Alexandra Olaya-Castro” »

Advances in display technologies prompt the development of electronic products with foldable and flexible panels. Flexible displays have thin-film transistors (TFTs) built in that act as an on/off light switch for the display. At the same time, important considerations for the advancement of next generation displays include electrical charge transmission velocity, operation stability, and production cost reduction.

Recently, a research team at POSTECH has proposed a highly efficient crosslinking strategy for a dense and defect-free thin-film organic-inorganic hybrid dielectric layer. The findings from the study were published in Nature Communications.

The global evolution of IoT has raised interest in metal-oxide semiconductor-based circuits with low standby power consumption. Attention has been particularly keen on TFT materials capable of low-cost solution processing. Among several solution-processable semiconductors, metal oxides are regarded as the most successful material platforms for TFTs mainly because of their high charge carrier mobility and operational stability.

Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Bing Chat, is slowly rolling out to the public. But our first interaction shows it’s far from ready for a full release.

Musk is co-founder of OpenAI, the U.S. startup that developed ChatGPT — a so-called generative AI tool which returns human-like responses to user prompts.

ChatGPT is an advanced form of AI powered by a large language model called GPT-3. It is programmed to understand human language and generate responses based on huge bodies of data.

ChatGPT “has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become,” according to Musk. “The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people.”

I think we need to ensure that the chatbot can’t do what it said it can.

It’s only a chatbot, so it shouldn’t be able to access some networks.

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript.

Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated frictional forces slow down the motion of surfaces in contact. Friction, he determined, is proportional to normal force. When two objects are pressed together twice as hard, friction doubles.

“We see this principle with tectonic plate boundaries,” says Utah State University geophysicist Srisharan Shreedharan. “As surfaces slide against each other, we observe frictional properties, including frictional healing that describes the degree of fault restrengthening between earthquakes. However, we know little about how this phenomenon may affect future slip events, including earthquakes.”

He and colleagues Demian Saffer and Laura Wallace of the University of Texas at Austin, where Shreedharan was previously employed as a postdoctoral fellow, and Charles Williams of New Zealand’s GNS Science geoscience research institute, publish findings about ultralow frictional healing and slow slip events along the Hikurangi tectonic plate boundary in the Feb. 17, 2023, issue of the journal Science.

A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine led to it declaring its love for me.