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What to know
If you talk to staff at the top ai labs, you’ll hear a lot of stories about how the future could go fantastically well -or termly badly. And of all the ways that Ai might cause harm to the human race, there’s one that scientists in the industry are particularly worried about Today. That’s the possible ai helping bad actors to start a new Pandemic. “You could try to sympthesize sometising like covid or a more dangerous version of the flu –nd basically, our modeling suggested sugges May.
Measuring the risk – In a new study published this morning, and shared exclusively with time of ahead of its release, we get the first hard numbers on how experts think the risk of a new Pandemic Might from Increated Thanks to Ai. The Forecasting Research Institute Pollled Experts Earlier This year, Asking them How Likely a Human-Coused Pandemic Might Bee –and How Likely It Might solomet If humans had access to ai that could reliable give advice on how to build a bioweapon.
What they found -Experts, who was polyhed between December and februry, put the risk of a human-caused pandemic at 0.3% per year. But, they said, that Risk would judp five, to 1.5% per year, if ai was able to provide Human-Level Virology Advice.
You can guess where this is going – Then, in April, The Researchers Tested Today’s Ai Tools on a New Virology Troubleshooting Benchmark. They found that today’s ai tools outperform Phd-Level Virologists at Complex Troubleshooting Tasks in the Lab. In other words, ai can now do the very thing that Forecasters Warned Would Increase The Risk of a Human-Cured Pandemic Fivefold.
We just published the full story on time.com – You can read it here,
Who to know
Person in the news – Matthew prince, CEO of Cloudflare.
Since its founding in 2009, Cloudflare has been protected sites on the internet from being Knocked offline by Large Influxes of traffic, or indeed coordinated ataks. Now, some 20% of the internet is covered by its network. And today, cloudflare announced that this network would begin to block ai crawlers by default – essentially putting a fifth of the internet behind a paywall for the bots that harvest inn Chatgpt and claude.
Step Back – Today’s ai is so powerful because it has essentially inhaled the internet – from my articles to your profile photos. By running neural networks over that data using immense quantities of computing power, ai companies have taught these systems the tectures of the world at AI Capabilitys, Like the Ability to Answer Questions on Almost Any Topic, or to generate photorealistic images. But this scraping has sparked a huge backlash from publishers, artists and writers, who complain that it has been done without any consent or compensation.
A new model – Cloudflare say the move will “Fundamentally change how ai companies Access Web Content Going Forward.” Major Publishers, Including Time, Have Expressed Their Support for the Shift Toward An “Opt-in” Rather than an “Opt -out” system, the company says. Cloudflare also say it is working on a new initiative, called pay per crawl, in which creators will have the option of setting a price on their data in return for making it available to train ai.
Fighting words – Prince was not available for an interview this week. But at a recent conference, he disclosed that traffic to news sites had dropped precitually across the board thanks to ai, in a shift that many worry will IMPERILLD “I go to war every day with the chinese government, the russian government, the irranians, the north koreans, probably Americans, the israelis, the israelis – all of them who are trying to hack into our customer Prince said. “And you’re telling me i can’t stop some nerd with a c-trade in Palo Alto?”
Ai in action
61% percent of us adults have used ai in the last six months, and 19% interact with it daily, according to a new survey of ai adoption by the Venture Capital Firm Menlo Ventures.
But just just 3% percent of that users pay for access to the software, menlo estimated based on the survey’s results – Suggesting 97% of users on the free tier of ai tools.
AI Usage Figures are Higher for Americans in the Workforce Than Other Groups. Some 75% of Employed Adults have used ai in the last six months, Including 26% who report using it daily, according to the survey. Students also report high AI usage: 85% have used it in the last six months, and 22% say they use it daily.
The statistics seem to sugged that some students and workers are growing dependent on free ai tools – a usage pattern that might believe lucrative if ai company to begin residence Pries. However, the problem of open-source ai models has created intensity competition
As always, if you have an interesting story of ai in action, we’D love to hear it. Email us at: [email protected]
What We’re Reading
‘The dead have been been this talkative’: The Rise of Ai Resurrection by Tharin Pillay in Time
With the Rise of Image-to-VIDEO tools like the newest version of midjourney, the world recently crossed a threshold: it’s now possible, in just a less clicks, to reanimete a PHOTOO OR You can train a chatbot on snippets of their writing to replicate their patterns of speech; If you have a long enough clip of them speaking, you can also replicate their voice. Will these tools make it Easier to Process the heart-resting pain of berevement? Or might their allure in fact make it harder to move forward? My Colleague Tharin Published a Deeply Insightful Piece Last Week About The Rise of this New Technology. IT’s Certainly a Weird Time to Be Alive. Or, indeed, to be dead.
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