1. Backlash. More than 800 people including AI scientists, politicians, celebrities and religious leaders have signed a statement to prevent the creation of “superintelligence”, AI systems that are more intelligent than most humans. “We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in,” the statement said. Its signatories include the godfathers of AI Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, Steve Bannon, former Ireland president Mary Robinson and Prince Harry. The Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit campaign group, published the letter on Wednesday along with a poll showing 5 per cent of Americans support “the current status quo of unregulated development”. Nearly three-quarters of respondents were in favor of robust regulation, according to the survey conducted by the campaign group. (Sources: ft.com, nobelprize.org, amturing.acm.org, futureoflife.org, superintelligence-statement.org)
2. Interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots. Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers. (Source: nytimes.com, assets.aboutamazon.com)
3. OpenAI has more than 100 ex-investment bankers helping train its artificial intelligence on how to build financial models as it looks to replace the hours of grunt work performed by junior bankers across the industry. The group, which includes former employees of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is part of a secretive project inside the startup that’s code named Mercury, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Participants are paid $150 per hour to write prompts and build financial models for a range of transaction types, including restructurings and initial public offerings, according to a person familiar with the effort. The company has also granted the contractors early access to the AI it’s creating that aims to replace entry-level tasks at investment banks. The project underscores the urgency at Sam Altman’s OpenAI to make its powerful AI technology more useful to businesses across a wide swath of industries, from consulting to finance to legal to technology. (Source: bloomberg.com)
4. These days, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is applying its considerable resources to a moonshot: creating virtual cell models, including a virtual immune system, that can explore the body’s responses to threats. Using huge data sets, large language models and artificial intelligence—and making the models and findings free and publicly available—CZI is creating tools and technologies that scientists can use to spot diseases lurking in cells and then, by engineering individualized treatments, outsmart them. Read the rest. (Source: wsj.com)
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