Good morning. A cease-fire in Ethiopia could bring an end to years of violence.
Negotiators at Ethiopia’s peace talks. Themba Hadebe/Associated Press
A tenuous peace
For two years, Ethiopia has been at war with itself.
Fighting there has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions more in Africa’s second-most-populous country, a scale of conflict that some have compared to that in Ukraine.
But a surprise cease-fire aims to pause the violence, and one side said it had pulled back nearly two-thirds of its troops from the front lines in recent weeks. I spoke to Abdi Latif Dahir, the East Africa correspondent for The Times, who has reported on the war, about what the peace deal means for Ethiopia.
Lauren: Ethiopia went from being one of the most prosperous nations in Africa to the site of a brutal civil war. How did it get there?
Abdi: The story starts in northern Ethiopia, in a region called Tigray. It’s home to an ancient kingdom, filled with jagged mountains and sesame fields.
The Tigrayan ethnic group is a small fraction of the country’s population of almost 120 million people. But for the past few decades, Tigrayans controlled Ethiopian politics. Their party, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, dominated the ruling coalition in Ethiopia’s parliament.
Their rule was defined by both immense economic progress, but also a lot of repression. The authorities jailed journalists and cracked down on the opposition. They also made enemies with Eritrea, a neighbor that they fought over a disputed border town. In 2018, after nationwide protests demanding political reform, the prime minister of the ruling coalition that was dominated by the T.P.L.F. resigned.
After he resigned, Abiy Ahmed, a member of Ethiopia’s parliament, rose to power and quickly won a Nobel Peace Prize. Tell me about him.
I was in a cab in the Ethiopian city of Bahir Dar after Abiy became prime minister. My driver was so excited that he followed me out of the car after the ride was over, standing on the street to keep telling me Abiy’s story. He was one of Africa’s youngest leaders, just 41, and everybody thought he was going to change the country. He did.
After Abiy took control he won a Nobel Peace Prize, in part for brokering an agreement with Eritrea. He also removed Tigrayans from government positions in an effort to weaken their power. Then tensions rose with the group.
In November 2020, Abiy sent troops into Tigray after he accused T.P.L.F. forces of attacking a federal military base there. But what started as a quick incursion turned into one of the bloodiest conflicts in the world.
How did the war devolve so quickly?
Abiy wanted to ensure the Tigrayan forces were defeated. He called the T.P.L.F. “cancer” and “weeds” that needed to be rooted out. That kind of dehumanizing talk was a shock to many people across the continent.
Other regional actors harboring resentment against Tigrayans or driven by other interests soon joined in the fight. Eritreans allied with Ethiopian forces. Militias made up of Amharas, the country’s second-largest ethnic group, also began killing Tigrayans and were accused of committing massacres in several towns. Tigrayan forces responded violently.
Tigrayan forces marched thousands of captured Ethiopian government soldiers in 2021.Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
Can you give me a sense of the scale of devastation?
It’s sad to even speak about. Tigray was once one of the most developed regions in Ethiopia, filled with universities and bustling businesses. There were bookshops and beekeepers. Everything was destroyed.
The Ethiopian government shut down the internet, cutting the region off from the world. Journalists have had to rely on satellites and limited reporting to understand the conflict. But acts of ethnic cleansing have been well documented, committed not just by the government and Eritrean forces, but also by the Tigrayans.
The U.S. government estimates as many as 500,000 people have been killed. Allegations have surfaced of children being recruited as soldiers. The warring parties have used starvation and rape as weapons of war. And millions who survived were displaced.
Is there a story that sticks with you from your reporting?
Early in the war, I met a Tigrayan refugee in Sudan. He told me how a militia tied a noose around his neck and dragged him behind a motorcycle for hours, then left him for dead. He woke up later and stumbled his way to safety. I still think about him.
I also think about the Sudanese town where he found refuge. It’s called Hamdayet, across the border from Tigray. When refugees arrived, people gave them jobs and even their own homes. Many times, we cover negative stories across Africa. But that town gave me hope.
Last month, the Tigrayans and the Ethiopian government reached a cease-fire. How did that happen?
The war was intensifying, and Ethiopian forces captured several major towns in Tigray. After months of stonewalling, they were now ready to accept entreaties to come to the table.
After a few days, the parties finally announced an agreement. The cease-fire called for Tigrayan forces to disarm within a month, and for Ethiopian forces to take over airports and government facilities within Tigray. There was a clear winner.
Is this cease-fire going to hold?
The T.P.L.F. said it withdrew 65 percent of its forces from the front lines. Party officials said they will not fully demobilize until Eritrea withdraws, as the Tigrayans are worried about ongoing attacks from their northern neighbor. So the question of Eritrea is hanging over this crisis.
What is next for Ethiopia?
The Ethiopian government has been trying to defeat Tigray forces for years, using every tool of war to decimate them. What does justice and reconciliation look like? How does Tigray economically recover? How can Ethiopia rejoin the rest of the world?
Ethiopia is home to the headquarters of the African Union. It is the only country on the African continent that was never colonized. Before the war, Ethiopia held a huge significance for Africans. It’s still significant, but for an entirely different reason.
Abdi Latif Dahir is based in Nairobi, and has covered East Africa for The Times since 2019. He grew up in Mogadishu and has 21 siblings. Together, they could field two full soccer teams.
interesting read on what's cooking in the conservative side of jurisprudence:
Critics Call It Theocratic and Authoritarian. Young Conservatives Call It an Exciting New Legal Theory.
‘Common good constitutionalism’ has emerged as a leading contender to replace originalism as the dominant legal theory on the right.
from Nature Magazine:
Last week, I told you about the oldest cooked meal ever found: a tasty-sounding seed flatbread that might have been cooked by Neanderthals 70,000 years ago.
Readers, you told me that you had to see that recipe, and palaeoecologist Chris Hunt did not let us down. Here are the edited details, which I’m sharing on the understanding that you will send me your photos and reviews of your own efforts:
Neanderthal ‘flatbread’
Based on an analysis by archaeobotanist Ceren Kabukcu, Hunt and their colleagues at Shanidar Cave in the north-west Zagros Mountains. “Following this recipe, you get something quite earthy tasting from the lentils and quite toasty, too, from the ‘grass’ seeds,” says Hunt.
Ingredients:
Two parts grass seeds — Hunt recommends wheat berries or pot barley
One part lentils — try brown or Puy lentils
Soak everything overnight and then drain.
Grind in a pestle and mortar, or use a stick blender if you must.
Keep going until you have a mush with most components “in the 1-2 millimetre or smaller range” — add a little water as you go if needed.
Add more water until you have a thick paste.
Scoop some mixture onto a flat griddle or frying pan.
Cook gently, browning on each side. “Better for 15–20 minutes on a low heat rather than getting things really smoking!” advises Hunt, who sounds like he speaks from experience here.
Fast-forward 30,000 years and there is evidence from Shanidar that food was more diverse, including fruit from the terebinth (related to the pistachio), a wild precursor of the fava bean and mustard seeds, as well as wild grasses and wild lentils. And there is separate evidence that Neanderthals ate almonds. Add modern versions of these to your mix, and you’ll find the taste “significantly more interesting”, says Chris. Combining it with grilled goat or fish would also be “quite legitimate”, he adds. Sorry — strictly no salt.
As a result, if this tiling problem turns out to be undecidable as well, it can serve as one more tool for demonstrating undecidability in other contexts — contexts well beyond questions about how to tile spaces.
"Relaxing unitarity could resolve the glitches in the thought experiment that has troubled Giddings and others. It would do so through a conceptual change to how we think about the relationship between the past and the future, and which states of the universe are really possible."
Happy new year and welcome to the 2023 version of Plaintext. I vow that for all this year I will refrain from using AI prosthetics to produce this newsletter. After that, no promises.
This Week's Big Moment
The Plain View
Late last year, I attended an event hosted by Google to celebrate its AI advances. The company’s domain in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood now extends literally onto the Hudson River, and about a hundred of us gathered in a pierside exhibition space to watch scripted presentations from executives and demos of the latest advances. Speaking remotely from the West Coast, the company’s high priest of computation, Jeff Dean, promised “a hopeful vision for the future.”
The theme of the day was “exploring the (im)possible.” We learned how Google’s AI was being put to use fighting wildfires, forecasting floods, and assessing retinal disease. But the stars of this show were what Google called “generative AI models.” These are the content machines, schooled on massive training sets of data, designed to churn out writings, images, and even computer code that once only humans could hope to produce.
Something weird is happening in the world of AI. In the early part of this century, the field burst out of a lethargy—known as an AI winter—by the innovation of “deep learning” led by three academics. This approach to AI transformed the field and made many of our applications more useful, powering language translations, search, Uber routing, and just about everything that has “smart” as part of its name. We’ve spent a dozen years in this AI springtime. But in the past year or so there has been a dramatic aftershock to that earthquake as a sudden profusion of mind-bending generative models have appeared.
Most of the toys Google demoed on the pier in New York showed the fruits of generative models like its flagship large language model, called LaMDA. It can answer questions and work with creative writers to make stories. Other projects can produce 3D images from text prompts or even help to produce videos by cranking out storyboard-like suggestions on a scene-by-scene basis. But a big piece of the program dealt with some of the ethical issues and potential dangers of unleashing robot content generators on the world. The company took pains to emphasize how it was proceeding cautiously in employing its powerful creations. The most telling statement came from Douglas Eck, a principal scientist at Google Research. “Generative AI models are powerful—there’s no doubt about that,” he said. “But we also have to acknowledge the real risks that this technology can pose if we don’t take care, which is why we’ve been slow to release them. And I’m proud we’ve been slow to release them.”
But Google’s competitors don’t seem to have “slow” in their vocabularies. While Google has provided limited access to LaMDA in a protected “Test Kitchen” app, other companies have been offering an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord with their own chatbots and image generators. Only a few weeks after the Google event came the most consequential release yet: OpenAI’s latest version of its own powerful text generation technology, ChatGPT, a lightning-fast, logorrheic gadfly that spits out coherent essays, poems, plays, songs, and even obituaries at the merest hint of a prompt. Taking advantage of the chatbot’s wide availability, millions of people have tinkered with it and shared its amazing responses, to the point where it’s become an international obsession, as well as a source of wonder and fear. Will ChatGPT kill the college essay? Destroy traditional internet search? Put millions of copywriters, journalists, artists, songwriters, and legal assistants out of a job?
Answers to those questions aren’t clear right now. But one thing is. Granting open access to these models has kicked off a wet hot AI summer that’s energizing the tech sector, even as the current giants are laying off chunks of their workforces. Contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s belief, the next big paradigm isn’t the metaverse—it’s this new wave of AI content engines, and it’s here now. In the 1980s, we saw a gold rush of products moving tasks from paper to PC application. In the 1990s, you could make a quick fortune by shifting those desktop products to online. A decade later, the movement was to mobile. In the 2020s the big shift is toward building with generative AI. This year thousands of startups will emerge with business plans based on tapping into the APIs of those systems. The cost of churning out generic copy will go to zero. By the end of the decade, AI video-generation systems may well dominate TikTok and other apps. They may not be anywhere as good as the innovative creations of talented human beings, but the robots will quantitatively dominate.
After ChatGPT became a blockbuster, some people laughed at Google for its apparent naiveté in slow-walking its products to market. But I think Google’s original instinct to slow things down has merit. There are zillions of unresolved issues involved in opening the dam to a tidal wave of AI content. It’s imperative that we start dealing with those, ideally before the technology becomes ubiquitous. “We know it's going to be transformative,” says Google’s VP of research Zoubin Ghahramani. “So what can we do as a company, as a society, to make sure that the transformative bits that are good for society are the ones that move forward faster than the ones that are damaging?”
Let’s consider just one issue: What, if anything, should limit the output of those engines? Google’s SVP of technology and society, James Manyika, explained to me that one reason for holding back a mass release of LaMDA is the time-consuming effort to set limits on what comes out of the bot’s mouth. “When you prompt it, what you're getting from it isn't the first thing LaMDA came up with,” he says. “We're looking at the output before we present it back to you to say, is it safe?” He further explains that Google winds up defining “safe” by using human moderators to identify what’s proper and then putting those standards into code.
Laudable intentions, to be sure. But in the long run, setting boundaries might be futile—if they are easily circumvented—or even counterproductive. It might seem like a good idea to forbid a language model to express certain ideas, like Covid misinformation or racial animus. But you could also imagine an authoritarian regime rigging a system to prevent any statement that might express doubt about the infallibility of its leaders. It could be that designing easy-to-implement guardrails could be a blueprint for creating propaganda machines. By the way, former Google engineer Blake Lemoine—the guy who thinks that LaMDA is sentient—is predictably against imposing such limits on bots. “You have some purpose in creating the person [bot] in the first place, but once they exist they’re their own person and an end in and of themselves,” he told me in a Twitter DM.
Now that the chatbots are out of their sandboxes, we’ll have to argue all those issues after the fact. Also you can expect Google’s own generative progeny to soon burst out of their test kitchens. Its scientists consider LaMDA best in class, but the company is miffed that it’s second rate in terms of buzz. Reports are that Google has declared an internal Code Red alert to respond to what is now a competitive emergency.
Ideally, Google will fast-track LaMDA while maintaining the same caution that let OpenAI zip past it in the chatbot war, but that may be (im)possible.
Besides acting as a legal assistant in a court of law, DoNoPay promises users to “fight corporations, beat bureaucracy and sue anyone at the press of a button.”
Comments
"Poodle Springs" by Raymond Chandler and Robert Parker 1989. Parker finished a unfinished Chandler. Good read
"Papillon" by Henri Charriere a nonfiction biography by Henri Charriere who in 1933 escaped Devil's Island. True high adventure.
Dark territory by Fred Kaplan. Interesting book about cyber warfare. Free download on audible if you want to listen.
good article:
Good morning. A cease-fire in Ethiopia could bring an end to years of violence.
Negotiators at Ethiopia’s peace talks. Themba Hadebe/Associated Press
A tenuous peace
For two years, Ethiopia has been at war with itself.
Fighting there has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions more in Africa’s second-most-populous country, a scale of conflict that some have compared to that in Ukraine.
But a surprise cease-fire aims to pause the violence, and one side said it had pulled back nearly two-thirds of its troops from the front lines in recent weeks. I spoke to Abdi Latif Dahir, the East Africa correspondent for The Times, who has reported on the war, about what the peace deal means for Ethiopia.
Lauren: Ethiopia went from being one of the most prosperous nations in Africa to the site of a brutal civil war. How did it get there?
Abdi: The story starts in northern Ethiopia, in a region called Tigray. It’s home to an ancient kingdom, filled with jagged mountains and sesame fields.
The Tigrayan ethnic group is a small fraction of the country’s population of almost 120 million people. But for the past few decades, Tigrayans controlled Ethiopian politics. Their party, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, dominated the ruling coalition in Ethiopia’s parliament.
Their rule was defined by both immense economic progress, but also a lot of repression. The authorities jailed journalists and cracked down on the opposition. They also made enemies with Eritrea, a neighbor that they fought over a disputed border town. In 2018, after nationwide protests demanding political reform, the prime minister of the ruling coalition that was dominated by the T.P.L.F. resigned.
After he resigned, Abiy Ahmed, a member of Ethiopia’s parliament, rose to power and quickly won a Nobel Peace Prize. Tell me about him.
I was in a cab in the Ethiopian city of Bahir Dar after Abiy became prime minister. My driver was so excited that he followed me out of the car after the ride was over, standing on the street to keep telling me Abiy’s story. He was one of Africa’s youngest leaders, just 41, and everybody thought he was going to change the country. He did.
After Abiy took control he won a Nobel Peace Prize, in part for brokering an agreement with Eritrea. He also removed Tigrayans from government positions in an effort to weaken their power. Then tensions rose with the group.
In November 2020, Abiy sent troops into Tigray after he accused T.P.L.F. forces of attacking a federal military base there. But what started as a quick incursion turned into one of the bloodiest conflicts in the world.
How did the war devolve so quickly?
Abiy wanted to ensure the Tigrayan forces were defeated. He called the T.P.L.F. “cancer” and “weeds” that needed to be rooted out. That kind of dehumanizing talk was a shock to many people across the continent.
Other regional actors harboring resentment against Tigrayans or driven by other interests soon joined in the fight. Eritreans allied with Ethiopian forces. Militias made up of Amharas, the country’s second-largest ethnic group, also began killing Tigrayans and were accused of committing massacres in several towns. Tigrayan forces responded violently.
Tigrayan forces marched thousands of captured Ethiopian government soldiers in 2021.Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
Can you give me a sense of the scale of devastation?
It’s sad to even speak about. Tigray was once one of the most developed regions in Ethiopia, filled with universities and bustling businesses. There were bookshops and beekeepers. Everything was destroyed.
The Ethiopian government shut down the internet, cutting the region off from the world. Journalists have had to rely on satellites and limited reporting to understand the conflict. But acts of ethnic cleansing have been well documented, committed not just by the government and Eritrean forces, but also by the Tigrayans.
The U.S. government estimates as many as 500,000 people have been killed. Allegations have surfaced of children being recruited as soldiers. The warring parties have used starvation and rape as weapons of war. And millions who survived were displaced.
Is there a story that sticks with you from your reporting?
Early in the war, I met a Tigrayan refugee in Sudan. He told me how a militia tied a noose around his neck and dragged him behind a motorcycle for hours, then left him for dead. He woke up later and stumbled his way to safety. I still think about him.
I also think about the Sudanese town where he found refuge. It’s called Hamdayet, across the border from Tigray. When refugees arrived, people gave them jobs and even their own homes. Many times, we cover negative stories across Africa. But that town gave me hope.
Last month, the Tigrayans and the Ethiopian government reached a cease-fire. How did that happen?
The war was intensifying, and Ethiopian forces captured several major towns in Tigray. After months of stonewalling, they were now ready to accept entreaties to come to the table.
After a few days, the parties finally announced an agreement. The cease-fire called for Tigrayan forces to disarm within a month, and for Ethiopian forces to take over airports and government facilities within Tigray. There was a clear winner.
Is this cease-fire going to hold?
The T.P.L.F. said it withdrew 65 percent of its forces from the front lines. Party officials said they will not fully demobilize until Eritrea withdraws, as the Tigrayans are worried about ongoing attacks from their northern neighbor. So the question of Eritrea is hanging over this crisis.
What is next for Ethiopia?
The Ethiopian government has been trying to defeat Tigray forces for years, using every tool of war to decimate them. What does justice and reconciliation look like? How does Tigray economically recover? How can Ethiopia rejoin the rest of the world?
Ethiopia is home to the headquarters of the African Union. It is the only country on the African continent that was never colonized. Before the war, Ethiopia held a huge significance for Africans. It’s still significant, but for an entirely different reason.
Abdi Latif Dahir is based in Nairobi, and has covered East Africa for The Times since 2019. He grew up in Mogadishu and has 21 siblings. Together, they could field two full soccer teams.
interesting read on what's cooking in the conservative side of jurisprudence:
Critics Call It Theocratic and Authoritarian. Young Conservatives Call It an Exciting New Legal Theory.
‘Common good constitutionalism’ has emerged as a leading contender to replace originalism as the dominant legal theory on the right.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/09/revolutionary-conservative-legal-philosophy-courts-00069201
Aren't originalism and constitutionality the same thing?
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
"No Plan B" by Lee Child and Andrew Child.
Lee Child will be retiring and his younger brother Andrew will be taking over the Reacher series. We'll have to see how things go.
from Nature Magazine:
Last week, I told you about the oldest cooked meal ever found: a tasty-sounding seed flatbread that might have been cooked by Neanderthals 70,000 years ago.
Readers, you told me that you had to see that recipe, and palaeoecologist Chris Hunt did not let us down. Here are the edited details, which I’m sharing on the understanding that you will send me your photos and reviews of your own efforts:
Neanderthal ‘flatbread’
Based on an analysis by archaeobotanist Ceren Kabukcu, Hunt and their colleagues at Shanidar Cave in the north-west Zagros Mountains. “Following this recipe, you get something quite earthy tasting from the lentils and quite toasty, too, from the ‘grass’ seeds,” says Hunt.
Ingredients:
Two parts grass seeds — Hunt recommends wheat berries or pot barley
One part lentils — try brown or Puy lentils
Soak everything overnight and then drain.
Grind in a pestle and mortar, or use a stick blender if you must.
Keep going until you have a mush with most components “in the 1-2 millimetre or smaller range” — add a little water as you go if needed.
Add more water until you have a thick paste.
Scoop some mixture onto a flat griddle or frying pan.
Cook gently, browning on each side. “Better for 15–20 minutes on a low heat rather than getting things really smoking!” advises Hunt, who sounds like he speaks from experience here.
Fast-forward 30,000 years and there is evidence from Shanidar that food was more diverse, including fruit from the terebinth (related to the pistachio), a wild precursor of the fava bean and mustard seeds, as well as wild grasses and wild lentils. And there is separate evidence that Neanderthals ate almonds. Add modern versions of these to your mix, and you’ll find the taste “significantly more interesting”, says Chris. Combining it with grilled goat or fish would also be “quite legitimate”, he adds. Sorry — strictly no salt.
https://entomologytoday.org/2022/12/15/miami-blue-butterfly-caterpillars-sugary-treats-earn-florida-carpenter-ant-care/
As a result, if this tiling problem turns out to be undecidable as well, it can serve as one more tool for demonstrating undecidability in other contexts — contexts well beyond questions about how to tile spaces.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/nasty-geometry-breaks-decades-old-tiling-conjecture-20221215/
https://www.popsci.com/science/worm-grunters-florida/
^^^well, ya learn somethin' new every day.
I'll stick to catfish noodling, no tools to carry.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-rewrite-a-quantum-rule-that-clashes-with-our-universe-20220926/
"Relaxing unitarity could resolve the glitches in the thought experiment that has troubled Giddings and others. It would do so through a conceptual change to how we think about the relationship between the past and the future, and which states of the universe are really possible."
" The Corps Series" by W.E.B. Griffin. Read them 15 years ago, rereading them now.
“Reckoning” by Catherine Coulter. One of the FBI series.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
Maybe I'll start him out on a purrcussion pistol.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
Shady defends his home from all enemies, both furrin and domesticated.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
Looks like it might be time for a new holsturr with that much indentation on the triggurr guard.
That's what locks the gun into the holster.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
"Clive Cussler's The Sea Wolves" by Jack DuBrul. On of the Isaac Bell series.
The Dark Risk of Large Language Models
AI is better at fooling humans than ever—and the consequences will be serious.
https://www.wired.com/story/large-language-models-artificial-intelligence/
I am beginning to feel like a techno-Luddite...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/20/1065667/how-ai-generated-text-is-poisoning-the-internet/
https://aeon.co/essays/the-indian-epic-mahabharata-imparts-a-dark-nuanced-moral-vision\
Winter reading, this is going to take a while:
https://sacred-texts.com/hin/m01/m01002.htm
Another sign of the times: interesting essay on the negative effect of surveillance on personality and society:
https://psyche.co/ideas/kafka-warned-us-surveillance-turns-the-watched-into-watchers
and AI:
Happy new year and welcome to the 2023 version of Plaintext. I vow that for all this year I will refrain from using AI prosthetics to produce this newsletter. After that, no promises.
This Week's Big Moment
The Plain View
Late last year, I attended an event hosted by Google to celebrate its AI advances. The company’s domain in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood now extends literally onto the Hudson River, and about a hundred of us gathered in a pierside exhibition space to watch scripted presentations from executives and demos of the latest advances. Speaking remotely from the West Coast, the company’s high priest of computation, Jeff Dean, promised “a hopeful vision for the future.”
The theme of the day was “exploring the (im)possible.” We learned how Google’s AI was being put to use fighting wildfires, forecasting floods, and assessing retinal disease. But the stars of this show were what Google called “generative AI models.” These are the content machines, schooled on massive training sets of data, designed to churn out writings, images, and even computer code that once only humans could hope to produce.
Something weird is happening in the world of AI. In the early part of this century, the field burst out of a lethargy—known as an AI winter—by the innovation of “deep learning” led by three academics. This approach to AI transformed the field and made many of our applications more useful, powering language translations, search, Uber routing, and just about everything that has “smart” as part of its name. We’ve spent a dozen years in this AI springtime. But in the past year or so there has been a dramatic aftershock to that earthquake as a sudden profusion of mind-bending generative models have appeared.
Most of the toys Google demoed on the pier in New York showed the fruits of generative models like its flagship large language model, called LaMDA. It can answer questions and work with creative writers to make stories. Other projects can produce 3D images from text prompts or even help to produce videos by cranking out storyboard-like suggestions on a scene-by-scene basis. But a big piece of the program dealt with some of the ethical issues and potential dangers of unleashing robot content generators on the world. The company took pains to emphasize how it was proceeding cautiously in employing its powerful creations. The most telling statement came from Douglas Eck, a principal scientist at Google Research. “Generative AI models are powerful—there’s no doubt about that,” he said. “But we also have to acknowledge the real risks that this technology can pose if we don’t take care, which is why we’ve been slow to release them. And I’m proud we’ve been slow to release them.”
But Google’s competitors don’t seem to have “slow” in their vocabularies. While Google has provided limited access to LaMDA in a protected “Test Kitchen” app, other companies have been offering an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord with their own chatbots and image generators. Only a few weeks after the Google event came the most consequential release yet: OpenAI’s latest version of its own powerful text generation technology, ChatGPT, a lightning-fast, logorrheic gadfly that spits out coherent essays, poems, plays, songs, and even obituaries at the merest hint of a prompt. Taking advantage of the chatbot’s wide availability, millions of people have tinkered with it and shared its amazing responses, to the point where it’s become an international obsession, as well as a source of wonder and fear. Will ChatGPT kill the college essay? Destroy traditional internet search? Put millions of copywriters, journalists, artists, songwriters, and legal assistants out of a job?
Answers to those questions aren’t clear right now. But one thing is. Granting open access to these models has kicked off a wet hot AI summer that’s energizing the tech sector, even as the current giants are laying off chunks of their workforces. Contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s belief, the next big paradigm isn’t the metaverse—it’s this new wave of AI content engines, and it’s here now. In the 1980s, we saw a gold rush of products moving tasks from paper to PC application. In the 1990s, you could make a quick fortune by shifting those desktop products to online. A decade later, the movement was to mobile. In the 2020s the big shift is toward building with generative AI. This year thousands of startups will emerge with business plans based on tapping into the APIs of those systems. The cost of churning out generic copy will go to zero. By the end of the decade, AI video-generation systems may well dominate TikTok and other apps. They may not be anywhere as good as the innovative creations of talented human beings, but the robots will quantitatively dominate.
After ChatGPT became a blockbuster, some people laughed at Google for its apparent naiveté in slow-walking its products to market. But I think Google’s original instinct to slow things down has merit. There are zillions of unresolved issues involved in opening the dam to a tidal wave of AI content. It’s imperative that we start dealing with those, ideally before the technology becomes ubiquitous. “We know it's going to be transformative,” says Google’s VP of research Zoubin Ghahramani. “So what can we do as a company, as a society, to make sure that the transformative bits that are good for society are the ones that move forward faster than the ones that are damaging?”
Let’s consider just one issue: What, if anything, should limit the output of those engines? Google’s SVP of technology and society, James Manyika, explained to me that one reason for holding back a mass release of LaMDA is the time-consuming effort to set limits on what comes out of the bot’s mouth. “When you prompt it, what you're getting from it isn't the first thing LaMDA came up with,” he says. “We're looking at the output before we present it back to you to say, is it safe?” He further explains that Google winds up defining “safe” by using human moderators to identify what’s proper and then putting those standards into code.
Laudable intentions, to be sure. But in the long run, setting boundaries might be futile—if they are easily circumvented—or even counterproductive. It might seem like a good idea to forbid a language model to express certain ideas, like Covid misinformation or racial animus. But you could also imagine an authoritarian regime rigging a system to prevent any statement that might express doubt about the infallibility of its leaders. It could be that designing easy-to-implement guardrails could be a blueprint for creating propaganda machines. By the way, former Google engineer Blake Lemoine—the guy who thinks that LaMDA is sentient—is predictably against imposing such limits on bots. “You have some purpose in creating the person [bot] in the first place, but once they exist they’re their own person and an end in and of themselves,” he told me in a Twitter DM.
Now that the chatbots are out of their sandboxes, we’ll have to argue all those issues after the fact. Also you can expect Google’s own generative progeny to soon burst out of their test kitchens. Its scientists consider LaMDA best in class, but the company is miffed that it’s second rate in terms of buzz. Reports are that Google has declared an internal Code Red alert to respond to what is now a competitive emergency.
Ideally, Google will fast-track LaMDA while maintaining the same caution that let OpenAI zip past it in the chatbot war, but that may be (im)possible.
I’m just waiting to see which one of these companies is the first to name their program Skynet.
another sign of the times:
Besides acting as a legal assistant in a court of law, DoNoPay promises users to “fight corporations, beat bureaucracy and sue anyone at the press of a button.”
https://nypost.com/2023/01/05/robot-lawyer-powered-by-ai-will-help-fight-speeding-ticket-as-it-takes-first-case-in-court/
Might have to start a dystopia thread the way things are going.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/chatgpt-is-enabling-script-kiddies-to-write-functional-malware/