Lifeboat Foundation

Harvey is one of the newest hires at Allen & Overy, the U.K.’s second-largest law firm, and he’s one heck of a workhorse.

Since November, he has been churning out drafts of merger and acquisition agreements as well as memos to clients. He never leaves the office and never takes a coffee break. He’s also not human.

Harvey is the name of the artificial intelligence chatbot the international legal giant has been testing for the past several months, without informing its clients, the Financial Times reported. The tool is available to any of the company’s attorneys.

Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger, joins David to discuss Big Tech, censorship, science fiction, and much more.
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Continue reading “ChatGPT, AI, and the Future of Big Tech (Cory Doctorow Interview)” »

This was originally published as a Stratechery Update

Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn’t really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today.

One of the Bing issues I didn’t talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing’s insistence that it was 2022 and “Avatar: The Way of the Water” had not yet come out. The notable point of that exchange, at least in the framing of yesterday’s Update, was that Bing got another fact wrong (Simon Willison has a good overview of the weird responses here).

Research Engineer Ryan McClelland pioneered the design of one-off spacecraft and mission elements for NASA using commercially available AI software.

Potentially huge. Effecting blood plasma via a pill. This is of course a mice experiment and they are working to see if the process happens in humans too.

Some wealthy elites prefer young blood plasma transfusions for anti-aging purposes. There are suggestions that the body’s organs are rejuvenated by young blood. However, a recent study from Columbia University in New York suggests that anti-inflammatory drugs can rejuvenate the body and possibly extend the human lifespan by decades, negating the need for blood transfusions to turn back the body’s clock.

According to Emmanuelle Passegué, Ph.D., director of the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative, who has been researching how blood changes with age, “an aging blood system, because it’s a vector for a lot of proteins, cytokines, and cells, has a lot of bad consequences for the organism,”

ABB is today launching an innovative all-in-one Electric Vehicle (EV) charger, which provides the fastest charging experience on the market.

ABB’s new Terra 360 is a modular charger which can simultaneously charge up to four vehicles with dynamic power distribution. This means that drivers will not have to wait if somebody else is already charging ahead of them. They simply pull up to another plug. The new charger has a maximum output of 360 kW and is capable of fully charging any electric car in 15 minutes or less, meeting the needs of a variety of EV users, whether they need a fast charge or to top their battery up while grocery shopping.

“With governments around the world writing public policy that favors electric vehicles and charging networks to combat climate change, the demand for EV charging infrastructure, especially charging stations that are fast, convenient and easy to operate is higher than ever,” said Frank Muehlon, President of ABB’s E-mobility Division. “The Terra 360, with charging options that fit a variety of needs, is the key to fulfilling that demand and accelerating e-mobility adoption globally.”

Last week, Twitter said it is shutting down free access to its APIs starting February 9. Now, days before the deadline, Elon Musk said that after getting feedback from developers, Twitter will provide a write-only API for “bots providing good content that is free.”

This decision is as opaque as some of the other policy decisions under Musk’s management. There is no information on what constitutes “good content” and who will decide that. However, if Twitter ends up implementing this rule, some bots will get a new lifeline on the social network.

Previously, Twitter shuttered API access to third-party clients saying they broke a “long-standing rule” without any specification. Then the company silently updated its developer terms to reflect that app can’t “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.”

Antibiotic resistance is a global threat to public health and associated with the overuse of antibiotics. Although non-antibiotic drugs occupy 95% of the drug market, their impact on the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance remains unclear. Here we demonstrate that antidepressants, one of the most frequently prescribed drugs, can induce antibiotic resistance and persistence. Such effects are associated with increased reactive oxygen species, enhanced stress signature responses, and stimulation of efflux pump expression. Mathematical modeling also supported a role for antidepressants in the occurrence of antibiotic-resistant mutants and persister cells. Considering the high consumption of antidepressants (16,850 kg annually in the United States alone), our findings highlight the need to re-evaluate the antibiotic-like side effects of antidepressants.

Google, Microsoft and other blue-chip big tech companies are racing to integrate AI language tools like the popular ChatGPT into their search engines.