Law
EU warns Meta over blocking rival AI chatbots on WhatsApp
Valve's Steam Machine: Everything we know MetaAI is essentially the only AI assistant now available on WhatsApp. The EU could take interim measures against WhatsApp as it investigates AI providers' access to the app. On Monday, the EU's regulatory arm announced its preliminary view that Meta, WhatsApp's parent company, violated antitrust laws by blocking third-party AI assistants from operating on WhatsApp. The European Commission's is concerned that Meta's actions will limit competitors from entering the AI assistant market. We must protect effective competition in this vibrant field, which means we cannot allow dominant tech companies to illegally leverage their dominance to give themselves an unfair advantage, Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition said in a statement. Ribera continued: AI markets are developing at rapid pace, so we also need to be swift in our action.
What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn't Know, Either
Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system's mind--examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch. It has become increasingly clear that Claude's selfhood, much like our own, is a matter of both neurons and narratives. A large language model is nothing more than a monumental pile of small numbers. It converts words into numbers, runs those numbers through a numerical pinball game, and turns the resulting numbers back into words. Similar piles are part of the furniture of everyday life. Meteorologists use them to predict the weather. Epidemiologists use them to predict the paths of diseases. Among regular people, they do not usually inspire intense feelings. But when these A.I. systems began to predict the path of a sentence--that is, to talk--the reaction was widespread delirium. As a cognitive scientist wrote recently, "For hurricanes or pandemics, this is as rigorous as science gets; for sequences of words, everyone seems to lose their mind." It's hard to blame them. Language is, or rather was, our special thing. We weren't prepared for the arrival of talking machines. Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist at Brown, has drawn up a taxonomy of our most common responses. There are the "fanboys," who man the hype wires. They believe that large language models are intelligent, maybe even conscious, and prophesy that, before long, they will become superintelligent. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has described A.I. as "our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone--we are literally making sand think." The fanboys' deflationary counterparts are the "curmudgeons," who claim that there's no there, and that only a blockhead would mistake a parlor trick for the soul of the new machine. In the recent book " The AI Con," the linguist Emily Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna belittle L.L.M.s as "mathy maths," "stochastic parrots," and "a racist pile of linear algebra." But, Pavlick writes, "there is another way to react." It is O.K., she offers, "to not know." What Pavlick means, on the most basic level, is that large language models are black boxes. We don't really understand how they work. We don't know if it makes sense to call them intelligent, or if it will ever make sense to call them conscious. The existence of talking machines--entities that can do many of the things that only we have ever been able to do--throws a lot of other things into question. We refer to our own minds as if they weren't also black boxes.
Listening to "The Joe Rogan Experience"
How a gift for shooting the shit turned into an online empire--and a political force. Trust in American mass media has plummeted; more than three thousand newspapers have disappeared in the past two decades, and many people get their news from social platforms. In this chaotic media multiverse, Rogan has emerged as a figure of singular influence. For a long time, I stayed up through the night listening to tall-tale tellers, U.F.O. I could not get enough of it. I was a fairly ordinary kid, Jersey-born, but the house I lived in was shadowed by illness. My mother had been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease when she was in her early thirties. Every year, she got worse. During the day, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother, do well in school, lighten her load. At night, I wanted only to climb into the shelter of my bed and turn on the radio. I was hungry for elsewhere, for other lives--for what was being said down the street, over the bridge, beyond the horizon. On clear nights, the signal was strong. You could hear the country expressing itself incessantly: everyone was phoning in, suggesting three-way trades, bitching about the mayor, speaking in tongues, raging, joking, climbing out on a ledge and threatening to jump. When I wanted a few hours of sleep before school, I tuned in to a ballgame on the West Coast. The staticky murmur of the crowd in Anaheim or Chavez Ravine was a sure slide to oblivion. Mostly, though, I wanted nothing to do with sleep. Mostly, I was tuned in, midnight to five-thirty, to "The Long John Nebel Show."