Start Up No.2346: ChatGPT's unspeakable names list grows, South ...
At Intel, Pat Gelsinger is out as chief executive after three years struggling to remould the company. Who can do it better? CC-licensed photo by Web Summit on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.A selection of 9 links for you. Unfired. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Jason Koebler:
Over the weekend, ChatGPT users discovered that the tool will refuse to respond and will immediately end the chat if you include the phrase “David Mayer” in any capacity anywhere in the prompt. But “David Mayer” isn’t the only one: The same error happens if you ask about “Jonathan Zittrain,” a Harvard Law School professor who studies internet governance and has written extensively about AI, according to my tests. And if you ask about “Jonathan Turley,” a George Washington University Law School professor who regularly contributes to Fox News and argued against impeaching Donald Trump before Congress, and who wrote a blog post saying that ChatGPT defamed him, ChatGPT will also error out.
Jonathan Zittrain Named Professor of Computer Science in the ...
The way this happens is exactly what it sounds like: If you type the words “David Mayer,” “Jonathan Zittrain,” or “Jonathan Turley” anywhere in a ChatGPT prompt, including in the middle of a conversation, it will simply say “I’m unable to produce a response,” and “There was an error generating a response.” It will then end the chat. This has started various conspiracies, because, in David Mayer’s case, it is unclear which “David Mayer” we’re talking about, and there is no obvious reason for ChatGPT to issue an error message like this. …
unique link to this extractDon Clark, Tripp Mickle and Steve Lohr:
Mr. Gelsinger, 63, an Intel veteran who took the helm in 2021 after an 11-year absence from the company, also resigned from the semiconductor maker’s board of directors. He will be replaced in the interim by two Intel executives, David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that it would continue its search for a permanent chief executive.
Zittrain elected a member of the American Academy of Arts ...
Intel’s abrupt change was the latest sign of the 56-year-old company’s fall from grace. Intel was one of the pioneers that gave Silicon Valley its name and for years was one of the world’s best-known tech names. But the company has been mired in recent years in innovation struggles and has ceded ground to rivals including Nvidia, the reigning maker of artificial intelligence chips. …
unique link to this extractMichelle Singletary:
The man Judith Boivin came to know as her FBI handler called twice a day for three months. He’d ask about her life and tell her about his family. He knew about her 78-year-old husband’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease and when they had to see the doctor. She told him about her kids and grandkids and when she was leaving town. Sometimes he’d let her in on his plans, like that trip to Italy to attend a friend’s wedding. While he was gone, he told her, another agent would take over their daily 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. check-ins.
This is how people are drawn into what scam experts call “the ether.” These seemingly innocuous conversations are actually well-rehearsed orchestrations of a relationship, the flood of attention designed to work them into such a heightened state of emotion that they suspend reason. …
unique link to this extractReed Albergotti:
Amazon’s data centres could soon double as carbon capture machines, offsetting the harmful effects of the massive amounts of energy required to run them. Amazon Web Services is partnering with startup Orbital Materials, which used artificial intelligence to create a new material specifically designed for separating carbon from hot air exhaust in data centers, the companies announced Monday.
NASA Study Finds Tropical Forests' Ability to Absorb Carbon ...
unique link to this extractMillions of research articles are absent from major digital archives:
This worrying finding, which Nature reported on earlier this year, was laid bare in a study by Martin Eve, who studies technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. Eve sampled more than seven million articles with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs), a string of characters used to identify and link to specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports. Of these, he found that more than two million were ‘missing’ from archives — that is, they were not preserved in major archives that ensure literature can be found in the future.
unique link to this extract
