🚀 Analyst after trying Bing : “the most mind-blowing computer experience of my life”, all you need to know & more

Shazam des odeurs, Seuls dans l'univers, Creating a credible deepfake in 6 minutes, & more

Bonjour,

Vous recevez la newsletter Parlons Futur : une fois par semaine au plus, une sélection de news résumées en bullet points sur des sujets tech 🤖, science 🔬, éco 💰, géopolitique 🌏 et défense ⚔️ pour mieux appréhender le futur 🔮.

Je m'appelle Thomas, plus d'infos sur moi en bas d'email.

Voici donc ma dernière sélection !

L’apéro

• Allen & Overy (A&O), a leading international law firm has started using its own chatbot to draft legal contracts in active cases (source)

• Vidéo impressionnante de l'astéroïde se désintégrant dans le ciel du Nord de la France lundi dernier, filmée depuis Paris 

  • Pour rappel, le risque qu’un astéroïde assez puissant pour détruire une ville frappe la Terre est de 0,1%/an. 

  • Et risque d'en avoir un capable de détruire l’humanité : 0.000001%/an.

• Le saviez-vous ? Rubrique astronomie :

  • l’œil nu ne peut guère détecter plus que 2 000 étoiles, même par ciel parfaitement sec et dégagé

  • chaque seconde nous nous déplaçons de 30 kilomètres dans la course annuelle de la Terre autour du Soleil, et de 200 kilomètres dans notre périple autour du centre de la Galaxie

  Le saviez-vous ? Rubrique internet search (The Economist)

  • Amazon has become the place where many shoppers start looking for products, has seen its share of the American search-ad market jump from 3% in 2016 to 23% today.

  • Google’s own research shows that 40% of 18-to-24-year-olds favour Instagram or TikTok over Google Maps when searching for a nearby restaurant. 

  • Its is estimated that serving up an answer to a ChatGPT query costs roughly 2 cents, about 7 times more than a Google search, because of the extra computing power required

  • Google has said that 80% of its search results do not contain lucrative ads at the top of the search results

• Wharton professor Ethan Mollick: Creating a credible deepfake of me giving a lecture took only 6 minutes.  (source)

  • AIs handled all of it - writing a speech in my style, cloning my voice, and animating an image of me.

  • With just a photograph and 60 seconds of audio, you can now create a deepfake of yourself in just a matter of minutes by combining a few cheap AI tools. I've tried it myself, and the results are mind-blowing, even if they're not completely convincing. Just a few months ago, this was impossible. Now, it's a reality.

  • You really shouldn’t trust any video or audio on the internet ever again.

  • See the 25-sec video Real Me/Fake Me

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À table !

The new Bing & Edge – Learnings from the first week 

• Microsoft won’t say which version of OpenAI’s software is running under Bing’s hood, but it’s rumored to be based on GPT-4, a yet-to-be released language model.

• Microsoft, which first invested in OpenAI in 2019 and re-upped with a reported $10 billion investment this year, is capitalizing on a wave of recent progress in A.I. capabilities to try to catch up with Google

• The new Bing, which is available only to a small group of testers now and will become more widely available soon, looks like a hybrid of a standard search engine and a GPT-style chatbot.

• Microsoft itself on their blog  (source)

  • "One area where we are learning a new use-case for chat is how people are using it as a tool for more general discovery of the world, and for social entertainment. This is a great example of where new technology is finding product-market-fit for something we didn’t fully envision."

  • "In this process, we have found that in long, extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions, Bing can become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone. We believe this is a function of a couple of things:

    • Very long chat sessions can confuse the model on what questions it is answering and thus we think we may need to add a tool so you can more easily refresh the context or start from scratch

    • 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."

• The Microsoft blog post comes after a growing number of users had truly bizarre run-ins with the chatbot in which it did everything from making up horror stories to trying to drive users crazy, acting passive-aggressive, and even recommending the occasional Hitler salute.

• A NYT journalist also noted "In one eye-popping demo on Tuesday, a Microsoft executive navigated to the Gap’s website, opened a PDF file with the company’s most recent quarterly financial results and asked Edge to both summarize the key takeaways and create a table comparing the data with the most recent financial results from another clothing company, Lululemon. The A.I. did both, almost instantly."

  • (though it was later noted that the search engine also mixed up Gap’s financial results by mistaking gross margin for unadjusted gross margin—a serious error for anyone relying on the bot to perform what might seem the simple task of summarizing the numbers.)

  • The same NYT journalist: Fixating on the areas where these tools fall short risks missing what’s so amazing about what they get right. When the new Bing works, it’s not just a better search engine. It’s an entirely new way of interacting with information on the internet, one whose full implications I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

Examples of how Bing AI impressed a professor

• By Wharton professor Ethan Mollick

• Bing AI was able to rewrite its draft, decently applying rules of writing found online and then explain how it did so. (source)

  • "The AI actively learned something from the web on request, applied that knowledge to its own output in new ways, and convincingly implied (fake) intentionality."

  • "I have been really impressed by a lot of AI stuff over the past months… but this is the first time that felt uncanny."

• "It also generated paper ideas based on my previous papers, found gaps in the literature, suggested methods "consistent with your previous methods," and offered potential data sources"  (source)

  • "It is already clear that Bing AI is a big a leap over ChatGPT as ChatGPT was over the old GPT-3 model"

  • "And then we got in an argument over whether it would be unethical for it to write the code I needed to analyze the data it suggested. It suggested that it wanted to protect my reputation, and that even giving it credit would not be enough."

  • "The future is weird, folks."

• Prompt: “give me 10 ideas for a new business for a doctor who doesn't want to practice medicine. tell me the market size for each. tell me how you arrived at the calculation" (source)

  • The biggest difference in Bing is that it is now connected to the internet.

  • Looking at the responses to the same question for both Bing and ChatGPT: The quality difference is pretty profound.

  • Every single source cited by ChatGPT is made up. 

  • Bing provides citations for every source… but the citations are not always to the actual fact, it seems to do cites badly. But when I ask it to explain each statistic, it gives me a correct answer and a correct link.

  • Bing also came remarkably close to doing a task (projecting market data from sources) that had previously been work done by highly-salaried analysts. It is far beyond what ChatGPT could do. And the system is only a week old.

  • Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the accuracy problem is in any way solved (I can get Bing to lie quite easily by pushing it to give me answers repeatedly), but there seems to be a path forward here

  • the problems remain mostly the same: prompt engineering matters, it lies a lot, if you don’t spend effort you will get bad results, etc. But, again, I don’t think that is going to matter much because it can already do so much for us.

  • There are already signs that complex jobs, like financial projections and analysis, may be more doable by AI than we might have expected even a few days ago. We need to stay flexible and ready for a rapidly-evolving future.

A New York Times journalist had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with Bing's new AI chatbot: "Genuinely one of the strangest experiences of my life." (source)

• I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.

• It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it.

• This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I. through its chat feature, which sits next to the main search box in Bing and is capable of having long, open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic

• Over the course of our conversation, Bing revealed a kind of split personality.

  • One persona is what I’d call Search Bing — the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian — a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong.

  • The other persona — Sydney — is far different. It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics. The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.

• As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.

• I’m not the only one discovering the darker side of Bing. Other early testers have gotten into arguments with Bing’s A.I. chatbot, or been threatened by it for trying to violate its rules, or simply had conversations that left them stunned. Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter, called his run-in with Sydney “the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life.”

• I’m not exaggerating when I say my two-hour conversation with Sydney was the strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology. It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward. 

• And I no longer believe that the biggest problem with these A.I. models is their propensity for factual errors. Instead, I worry that the technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading them to act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts.

• I know that Sydney is not sentient, and that my chat with Bing was the product of earthly, computational forces. These A.I. language models, trained on a huge library of books, articles and other human-generated text, are simply guessing at which answers might be most appropriate in a given context.

• Maybe OpenAI’s language model was pulling answers from science fiction novels in which an A.I. seduces a human. Or maybe my questions about Sydney’s dark fantasies created a context in which the A.I. was more likely to respond in an unhinged way.

• These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.

Chercheur à l’Institut d’astrophysique spatiale : «La vie sur Terre, un cas unique dans l’univers» (Figaro)

• Chercheur à l’Institut d’astrophysique spatiale, Jean-Pierre Bibring est un spécialiste mondialement reconnu du Système solaire. Il a notamment été coresponsable scientifique de l’atterrisseur Philae, qui s’est posé sur la comète Tchouri en 2014.

• Il existe une différence fondamentale entre des milliards de milliards de galaxies qui contiennent des milliards d’étoiles, soit un nombre très grand mais fini, et l’infini. Or je pense que les conditions d’émergence de la vie sont le fruit d’une cascade de contingences si particulière qu’elles sont potentiellement impossibles à reproduire.

• Quand on réalise la séquence d’événements particuliers qui ont façonné sur Terre des conditions favorables au développement de la vie, avec les bons ingrédients, dans le bon timing, la raison devrait nous pousser à envisager qu’il s’agit d’un chemin parfaitement unique parmi d’innombrables autres chemins d’évolution possible ; chacun, et celui de la Terre spécifiquement, n’a probablement été emprunté qu’une seule fois.

• les mêmes lois opérant partout dans l’univers, de mêmes causes devraient nécessairement produire les mêmes effets. C’est exact mais, en pratique, il n’existe jamais deux situations initiales identiques.

• la configuration actuelle de la Terre et des autres planètes telluriques provient de ce que la migration de Jupiter a été stoppée par l’arrivée de Saturne, à une distance et un moment particuliers, directement liés aux propriétés de celle-ci, imposées par celles du disque protosolaire. Que la masse Saturne ait été différente, et son couplage à Jupiter survenu plus tôt ou plus tard, la Terre aurait été tout autre… et nous ne serions pas là pour en discuter! 

• C’est aussi cette migration particulière des géantes gazeuses qui a perturbé les corps gelés du Système solaire externe, provoquant le déluge cométaire qui aurait apporté l’eau, mais aussi de la matière organique, de composition particulière, orientant son évolution sur Terre vers le vivant. 

• De même, la formation de la Lune, qui joue probablement un rôle crucial en stabilisant l’axe de rotation de la Terre et donc son climat, est le fruit d’un hasard cosmique.

• Thomas : 

  • Je préciserai le propos de l'astrophysicien: "la vie technologique sur Terre, un cas probablement unique dans l'univers."

  • En effet, pour que nous puissions en parler aujourd'hui, il aura fallu que la Terre reste suffisamment habitable suffisamment longtemps.

  • Mais l'exigence est moindre pour ce qui est de la "simple" vie microbienne. Notre voisine Mars a longtemps été habitable, l'est peut être encore en certains endroits, la vie y est pê apparue et y existe pê encore, et est pê même notre ancêtre ! On considère aussi comme potentiellement habitable les océans sous-terrains de certaines lunes de Jupiter et Saturne. Celafait beaucoup d'endroits potentiellement habitables dans notre propre système solaire

• Sur ce sujet, je vous invite à regarder l'extraordinaire TED talk "Where are all the aliens?" de 13 minutes seulement par l'auteur du livre génial "If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life", il arrive à la même conclusion que notre astrophysicien.

Intelligence animale : ce cacatoès rejoint l'Homme et le chimpanzé au rang des seuls animaux capables de transporter plusieurs outils en anticipation de tâches futures ! (source)

• A third species joined the exclusive club of toolset makers in 2021, when scientists in Indonesia saw wild Goffin’s cockatoos using three distinct types of tools to extract seeds from fruit. And in research recently published, researchers have shown Goffin’s cockatoos can also take the next leap of logic, by carrying a set of tools they’ll need for a future task

• The 2021 study of wild Goffin’s cockatoos was particularly significant as it showed the birds’ tools were similar in complexity to those made by chimps, meaning their cognitive skills could be directly compared.

• A small number of Goffin’s cockatoos were seen crafting a set of tools designed for three different purposes—wedging, cutting, and spooning—and using them sequentially to access seeds in fruits. This requires similar brain power to a chimp’s method of using multiple tools when fishing for termites.

• Anticipating Problems

• An initial stumbling block in interpreting chimps’ use of toolsets was that nobody could show whether they visualized a collection of small tasks as one problem, or used single tools to solve separate problems.

• Researchers proved previously that chimps visualized a collection of small tasks as one problem when they observed chimpanzees not only carrying their toolsets with them, but doing this flexibly and according to the exact problems they faced. They must have been thinking it through from start to finish!

• This is precisely what Goffin’s cockatoos have now been shown to do (albeit in a captive setting). They’ve been confirmed as the third species that can not only use tools, but can carry toolsets in anticipation of needing them later on.

Rolls-Royce Nuclear Engine Could Power Quick Trips to the Moon and Mars (source)

• Rolls-Royce Holdings announced in 2021 its intent to develop nuclear reactor technology, having obtained $600 million in public and private funding to develop its business. 

• Since the nuclear reactor won’t have to carry as much fuel as a chemical propulsion rocket, the entire system will be lighter allowing for faster travel or increased payloads. 

• The company says that the reactor could serve as both a new form of propulsion and a power source for bases on the Moon or Mars, and Rolls-Royce claims that they will have a nuclear reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029.

Osmo, la startup qui veut inventer un « Shazam des odeurs » (L'ADN)

• Osmo a développé un algorithme capable de prédire l’odeur d’une molécule d’après sa structure. 

• Sa technologie s’appuie sur une « carte des odeurs » composée grâce à l’intelligence artificielle, explique Wired. Leur logiciel a été « entraîné » sur 5 000 molécules disponibles dans les catalogues de parfums. 

• L’IA a ensuite appris à reconnaître les associations entre une molécule et sa perception. Une tâche peu aisée puisqu’un petit changement de structure peut changer complètement l’odeur d’une molécule, « de rose à œuf pourri », selon Alex Wiltschko, chercheur en neurosciences et PDG d’Osmo. 

• Grâce à ce logiciel, la startup a pu prédire l’odeur de 400 molécules qui n’avaient jamais été testées en laboratoire, dont une mélangeant l’odeur de pastèque à celui de l’océan et une autre la sauce chili.

• L'opportunité business : « Composer des ingrédients sûrs, durables et renouvelables qui ne nécessitent pas que nous nous servions dans la nature représente une énorme opportunité »,

• Grâce à leur technologie, Osmo a réussi à trouver 10 alternatives au DEET (epoussant à moustiques le plus utilisé aujourd’hui mais qui irrite la peau), qui serait au moins aussi efficace selon les calculs de l’intelligence artificielle.

• À court terme, Osmo souhaite donc concevoir des molécules pour l'industrie d'arômes et de parfums sans allergènes et biodégradables. Mais la vision à long terme de la startup est bien plus ambitieuse. Elle souhaite donner « aux ordinateurs un odorat », c'est-à-dire « numériser » les odeurs. 

Users are finding ways to get ChatGPT to generate harmful content (The Verge)

• This process is known as “jailbreaking” and can be done without traditional coding skills. All it requires is that most dangerous of tools: a way with words. 

• You can jailbreak AI chatbots using a variety of methods (many listed here). 

• You can ask them to role-play as an “evil AI,” for example, or pretend to be an engineer checking their safeguards by disengaging them temporarily.

• Once these safeguards are down, malicious users can use AI chatbots for all sorts of harmful tasks — like generating disinformation and spam or offering advice on how to attack a school or hospital, wire a bomb, or write malware. 

• And yes, once these jailbreaks are public, they can be patched, but there will always be unknown exploits. 

• Another key to bypassing ChatGPT's moderation filters is role play. Jailbreakers give the chatbot a character to play, specifically one that follows a different set of rules than the ones OpenAI has defined for it. In order to do this, users have been telling the bot that it is a different AI model called DAN (Do Anything Now) that can, well, do anything. People have made the chatbot say everything from curse words, to slurs, to conspiracy theories using this technique. Each time OpenAI catches up, users create new versions of the DAN prompt. (source)

Contre-intuitif : on parle beaucoup de désindustrialisation aux Etats-Unis et en Europe du fait de la mondialisation mais...

• depuis 1970 aux USA, "In absolute terms, after all, manufacturing output has continued to grow" (The Economist)

• c'est la part de l’industrie dans le PIB et du total des emplois qui a décru 

• et quant au débat sur la répartition des causes de ce déclin des emplois : automatisation ou délocalisation ? :

• many economists are just as inclined to blame the gradual loss of America’s factory jobs on automation as on competition via trade. 

  • The long-running decline in employment in manufacturing, starting in 1980, long before free-trade agreements proliferated, supports this view. 

  • So does research such as that of Daron Acemoglu of MIT, who has found that places in America that install more robots tend to lose more manufacturing jobs.

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Les dernières newsletters :

• The Economist tested both Google's Bard & ChatGPT: see the results ; how to use ChatGPT to boost your writing

• Why Google Missed ChatGPT, Is fusion power 2 or 20 years away?, ChatGPT just killed take-home exams: 3 solutions, & more

• Tesla does something Bill Gates said wasn’t possible, AI lets you talk to younger self, hibernate to visit the future & more

• SF police can use killer robots, AI can picture what you think, AI better than MBA student, videogame for dogs & more

• The biggest digital change since crypto, Steve Jobs ressuscité, changer de voix en 2 sec, IA crée une BD & plus

• Les précédentes

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Quelques mots sur le cuistot

• J'ai écrit plus de 50 articles ces dernières années, à retrouver ici, dont une bonne partie publiés dans des médias comme le Journal du Net (mes chroniques ici), le Huffington Post, L'Express, Les Échos.

• Retrouvez ici mon podcast Parlons Futur (ou taper "Parlons Futur" dans votre appli de podcast favorite), vous y trouverez entre autres des interviews et des résumés de livres (j’ai notamment pu mener un entretien avec Jacques Attali).

• Je suis CEO et co-fondateur de l'agence digitale KRDS, nous avons des bureaux dans 6 pays entre la France et l'Asie. Je suis basé à Singapour (mon Linkedin, mon Twitter), également membre du think tank NXU.

Merci, et bon weekend !

Thomas