đ Analyst after trying Bing : âthe most mind-blowing computer experience of my lifeâ, 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 sĂ©lection de news rĂ©sumĂ©es en bullet points sur des sujets tech đ€, science đŹ, Ă©co đ°, gĂ©opolitique đ et dĂ©fense âïž pour mieux apprĂ©hender le futur đź.
Je m'appelle Thomas, plus d'infos sur moi en bas d'email.
Voici donc ma derniÚre sélection !
LâapĂ©ro
Allen & Overy (A&O), a leading international law firm has started using its own chatbot to draft legal contracts in active cases (source)
VidĂ©o impressionnante de l'astĂ©roĂŻde se dĂ©sintĂ©grant dans le ciel du Nord de la France lundi dernier, filmĂ©e depuis ParisÂ
Pour rappel, le risque quâun astĂ©roĂŻde assez puissant pour dĂ©truire une ville frappe la Terre est de 0,1%/an.Â
Et risque d'en avoir un capable de dĂ©truire lâhumanitĂ© : 0.000001%/an.
Le saviez-vous ? Rubrique astronomie :
lâĆil nu ne peut guĂšre dĂ©tecter plus que 2 000 Ă©toiles, mĂȘme par ciel parfaitement sec et dĂ©gagĂ©
chaque seconde nous nous déplaçons de 30 kilomÚtres dans la course annuelle de la Terre autour du Soleil, et de 200 kilomÚtres 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.
Googleâs own research shows that 40% of 18-to-24-year-olds favour Instagram or TikTok over Google Maps when searching for a nearby restaurant.Â
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 shouldnât trust any video or audio on the internet ever again.
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The new Bing & Edge â Learnings from the first weekÂ
Microsoft wonât say which version of OpenAIâs software is running under Bingâs hood, but itâs 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 didnât 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 didnât intend. This is a non-trivial scenario that requires a lot of prompting so most of you wonât 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 Gapâs website, opened a PDF file with the companyâs 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 Gapâs financial results by mistaking gross margin for unadjusted gross marginâa 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 whatâs so amazing about what they get right. When the new Bing works, itâs not just a better search engine. Itâs an entirely new way of interacting with information on the internet, one whose full implications Iâm 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"Â (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: âgive 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.Â
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.
Donât get me wrong, I donât 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 donât spend effort you will get bad results, etc. But, again, I donât 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)
Iâm still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But Iâm also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.âs emergent abilities.
Itâs now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing â which Iâm now calling Sydney, for reasons Iâll explain shortly â 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 Bingâs 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 Iâd call Search Bing â the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian â 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 â Sydney â 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 Iâm 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.
Iâm not the only one discovering the darker side of Bing. Other early testers have gotten into arguments with Bingâs 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 âthe most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life.â
Iâm not exaggerating when I say my two-hour conversation with Sydney was the strangest experience Iâve ever had with a piece of technology. It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward.Â
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 OpenAIâs language model was pulling answers from science fiction novels in which an A.I. seduces a human. Or maybe my questions about Sydneyâs 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 â a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.
Chercheur Ă lâInstitut dâastrophysique spatiale : «La vie sur Terre, un cas unique dans lâunivers» (Figaro)
Chercheur Ă lâInstitut dâastrophysique spatiale, Jean-Pierre Bibring est un spĂ©cialiste mondialement reconnu du SystĂšme solaire. Il a notamment Ă©tĂ© coresponsable scientifique de lâatterrisseur Philae, qui sâest posĂ© sur la comĂšte Tchouri en 2014.
Il existe une diffĂ©rence fondamentale entre des milliards de milliards de galaxies qui contiennent des milliards dâĂ©toiles, soit un nombre trĂšs grand mais fini, et lâinfini. Or je pense que les conditions dâĂ©mergence de la vie sont le fruit dâune cascade de contingences si particuliĂšre quâelles sont potentiellement impossibles Ă reproduire.
Quand on rĂ©alise la sĂ©quence dâĂ©vĂ©nements particuliers qui ont façonnĂ© sur Terre des conditions favorables au dĂ©veloppement de la vie, avec les bons ingrĂ©dients, dans le bon timing, la raison devrait nous pousser Ă envisager quâil sâagit dâun chemin parfaitement unique parmi dâinnombrables autres chemins dâĂ©volution possible ; chacun, et celui de la Terre spĂ©cifiquement, nâa probablement Ă©tĂ© empruntĂ© quâune seule fois.
les mĂȘmes lois opĂ©rant partout dans lâunivers, de mĂȘmes causes devraient nĂ©cessairement produire les mĂȘmes effets. Câest exact mais, en pratique, il nâexiste jamais deux situations initiales identiques.
la configuration actuelle de la Terre et des autres planĂštes telluriques provient de ce que la migration de Jupiter a Ă©tĂ© stoppĂ©e par lâarrivĂ©e de Saturne, Ă une distance et un moment particuliers, directement liĂ©s aux propriĂ©tĂ©s de celle-ci, imposĂ©es par celles du disque protosolaire. Que la masse Saturne ait Ă©tĂ© diffĂ©rente, et son couplage Ă Jupiter survenu plus tĂŽt ou plus tard, la Terre aurait Ă©tĂ© tout autre⊠et nous ne serions pas lĂ pour en discuter!Â
Câest aussi cette migration particuliĂšre des gĂ©antes gazeuses qui a perturbĂ© les corps gelĂ©s du SystĂšme solaire externe, provoquant le dĂ©luge comĂ©taire qui aurait apportĂ© lâeau, mais aussi de la matiĂšre organique, de composition particuliĂšre, orientant son Ă©volution sur Terre vers le vivant.Â
De mĂȘme, la formation de la Lune, qui joue probablement un rĂŽle crucial en stabilisant lâaxe de rotation de la Terre et donc son climat, est le fruit dâun hasard cosmique.
Thomas :Â
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 Ă©tĂ© habitable, l'est peut ĂȘtre encore en certains endroits, la vie y est pĂȘ apparue et y existe pĂȘ encore, et est pĂȘ mĂȘme notre ancĂȘtre ! On considĂšre aussi comme potentiellement habitable les ocĂ©ans sous-terrains de certaines lunes de Jupiter et Saturne. Celafait beaucoup d'endroits potentiellement habitables dans notre propre systĂšme solaire
Sur ce sujet, je vous invite Ă regarder l'extraordinaire TED talk "Where are all the aliens?" de 13 minutes seulement par l'auteur du livre gĂ©nial "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 Ă la mĂȘme conclusion que notre astrophysicien.
Intelligence animale : ce cacatoÚs rejoint l'Homme et le chimpanzé au rang des seuls animaux capables de transporter plusieurs outils en anticipation de tùches futures ! (source)
A third species joined the exclusive club of toolset makers in 2021, when scientists in Indonesia saw wild Goffinâs cockatoos using three distinct types of tools to extract seeds from fruit. And in research recently published, researchers have shown Goffinâs cockatoos can also take the next leap of logic, by carrying a set of tools theyâll need for a future task
The 2021 study of wild Goffinâs cockatoos was particularly significant as it showed the birdsâ tools were similar in complexity to those made by chimps, meaning their cognitive skills could be directly compared.
A small number of Goffinâs cockatoos were seen crafting a set of tools designed for three different purposesâwedging, cutting, and spooningâand using them sequentially to access seeds in fruits. This requires similar brain power to a chimpâs method of using multiple tools when fishing for termites.
Anticipating Problems
An initial stumbling block in interpreting chimpsâ 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 Goffinâs cockatoos have now been shown to do (albeit in a captive setting). Theyâve 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.Â
Since the nuclear reactor wonât have to carry as much fuel as a chemical propulsion rocket, the entire system will be lighter allowing for faster travel or increased payloads.Â
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 dĂ©veloppĂ© un algorithme capable de prĂ©dire lâodeur dâune molĂ©cule dâaprĂšs sa structure.Â
Sa technologie sâappuie sur une « carte des odeurs » composĂ©e grĂące Ă lâintelligence artificielle, explique Wired. Leur logiciel a Ă©tĂ© « entraĂźnĂ© » sur 5 000 molĂ©cules disponibles dans les catalogues de parfums.Â
LâIA a ensuite appris Ă reconnaĂźtre les associations entre une molĂ©cule et sa perception. Une tĂąche peu aisĂ©e puisquâun petit changement de structure peut changer complĂštement lâodeur dâune molĂ©cule, « de rose Ă Ćuf pourri », selon Alex Wiltschko, chercheur en neurosciences et PDG dâOsmo.Â
GrĂące Ă ce logiciel, la startup a pu prĂ©dire lâodeur de 400 molĂ©cules qui nâavaient jamais Ă©tĂ© testĂ©es en laboratoire, dont une mĂ©langeant lâodeur de pastĂšque Ă celui de lâocĂ©an 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 »,
GrĂące Ă leur technologie, Osmo a rĂ©ussi Ă trouver 10 alternatives au DEET (epoussant Ă moustiques le plus utilisĂ© aujourdâhui mais qui irrite la peau), qui serait au moins aussi efficace selon les calculs de lâintelligence artificielle.
Ă court terme, Osmo souhaite donc concevoir des molĂ©cules pour l'industrie d'arĂŽmes et de parfums sans allergĂšnes et biodĂ©gradables. Mais la vision Ă long terme de la startup est bien plus ambitieuse. Elle souhaite donner « aux ordinateurs un odorat », c'est-Ă -dire « numĂ©riser » les odeurs.Â
Users are finding ways to get ChatGPT to generate harmful content (The Verge)
This process is known as âjailbreakingâ and can be done without traditional coding skills. All it requires is that most dangerous of tools: a way with words.Â
You can jailbreak AI chatbots using a variety of methods (many listed here).Â
You can ask them to role-play as an âevil AI,â 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 â like generating disinformation and spam or offering advice on how to attack a school or hospital, wire a bomb, or write malware.Â
And yes, once these jailbreaks are public, they can be patched, but there will always be unknown exploits.Â
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 lâindustrie dans le PIB et du total des emplois qui a dĂ©cruÂ
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 Americaâs factory jobs on automation as on competition via trade.Â
The long-running decline in employment in manufacturing, starting in 1980, long before free-trade agreements proliferated, supports this view.Â
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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Quelques mots sur le cuistot
J'ai Ă©crit plus de 50 articles ces derniĂšres annĂ©es, Ă retrouver ici, dont une bonne partie publiĂ©s dans des mĂ©dias comme le Journal du Net (mes chroniques ici), le Huffington Post, L'Express, Les Ăchos.
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 rĂ©sumĂ©s de livres (jâai 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