LW - AI #48: The Talk of Davos by Zvi

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI #48: The Talk of Davos, published by Zvi on January 26, 2024 on LessWrong.
While I was in San Francisco, the big head honchos headed for Davos, where AI was the talk of the town. As well it should be, given what will be coming soon. It did not seem like anyone involved much noticed or cared about the existential concerns. That is consistent with the spirit of Davos, which has been not noticing or caring about things that don't directly impact your business or vibe since (checks notes by which I mean an LLM) 1971. It is what it is.
Otherwise we got a relatively quiet week. For once the scheduling worked out and I avoided the Matt Levine curse. I'm happy for the lull to continue so I can pay down more debt and focus on long term projects and oh yeah also keep us all farther away from potential imminent death.
Table of Contents
Introduction.
Table of Contents.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Might not come cheap.
Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility. The ancient art of walking.
Copyright Confrontation. It knows things, but it still cannot drink.
Fun With Image Generation. Poisoning portraits in the park.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Use if and only if lonely.
They Took Our Jobs. The one saying it won't happen interrupted by one doing it.
Get Involved. New jobs, potential unconference.
In Other AI News. Various people are doing it, for various values of it.
Quiet Speculations. How fast is efficiency improving?
Intelligence Squared. Why so much denial that importantly smarter is possible?
The Quest for Sane Regulation. New polls, new bad bills, EU AI Act full text.
Open Model Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This. More chips, then.
The Week in Audio. Nadella, Altman and more.
Rhetorical Innovation. Are you for or against the existence of humanity?
Malaria Accelerationism. All technology is good, you see, well, except this one.
Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Diversification needed.
Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Anton and Tyler.
The Lighter Side. No spoilers.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
Say you can help people respond to texts on dating apps via a wrapper, charge them $28/month, claim you are making millions, then try to sell the business for $3.5 million. Why so much? Classic black market situation. The readily available services won't make it easy on you, no one reputable wants to be seen doing it, so it falls on people like this one.
There is a strange response that 'profits are razor thin.' That cannot possibly be true of the engineering costs. It can only be true of the marketing costs. If you are getting customers via running mobile ads or other similar methods, it makes sense that the effective margins could be trouble. And of course, when marginal cost of production is close to zero, if there are many entrants then price will plunge. But a lot of customers won't know about the competition, or they will know your works and be willing to pay, so a few gouged customers could be the way to go.
OpenAI announces partnership with Premiere Party School Arizona State University. Everyone gets full ChatGPT access. Students get personalized AI tutors, AI avatars, AIs for various topics especially STEM. Presumably this helps them learn and also gives them more time for the parties.
Chrome feature to automatically organize tab groups. Also they'll let you create a theme via generative AI, I guess.
GitLab's code assistant is using Claude. No idea if it is any good.
Ethan Mollick: Having just taught initial AI stuff to 250+ undergrads & grad students in multiple classes today:
AI use approached 100%. Many used it as a tutor. The vast majority used AI on assignments at least once
Knowledge about AI was mostly based on rumors
Prompting knowledge was low
Prompting knowledge seems very low a...