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The Metaverse was a Bust. Will AI Save the Day?

Microsoft is counting on it, investing billions into AI research and development

Just a couple of years ago, the metaverse was taking the tech world captive with grandiose promises of revolutionizing the internet and representing the future of human interaction. Microsoft was among the moguls who embraced the metaverse project with open arms, only to face the harsh fact that the technology was underdeveloped, investors were skeptical of its viability, and a massive swath of the American public seemed simply uninterested in the product. But, it was new technology. It was exciting. It was supposed to be the future. Now, Microsoft is hailing AI as the destiny of the internet, again with the sort of optimism that directed their love affair with virtual reality. The company has jumped the gun and sought Read More ›

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Love at First Click? A Creepy Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot

New York Times tech journalist thinks AI has crossed a line

The new Bing bot is freaky. Kevin Roose is a technology reporter for The New York Times and wrote a piece today detailing his “conversation” with Bing new’s chatbot. To put it simply, it was weird. The chatbot diverged from its initial informational output and ended up introducing itself as “Sydney” and then “confessed its love” for Roose. He writes, For much of the next hour, Sydney fixated on the idea of declaring love for me, and getting me to declare my love in return. I told it I was happily married, but no matter how hard I tried to deflect or change the subject, Sydney returned to the topic of loving me, eventually turning from love-struck flirt to obsessive Read More ›

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Whatever You Do, Don’t Ask GPT for Sources

The chatbot will give you a lot of links that don't necessarily direct you where you want to go

One of the more amusing things I’ve found from OpenAI’s GPT-3 and ChatGPT is the fact that it will very confidently provide you with sources on anything you ask—and they will often be completely made up. It will even provide fake (but real-looking) URLs for you! I stumbled across this feature when researching a previous GPT-3 article about how well it could write blog posts compared to real authors. I initially tried asking GPT-3 to include sources, and it generated complete nonsense for the sources. I decided that, for that article, sources were not the main question, so I left it out of the final queries. However, in response to my latest article about ChatGPT not being a Google replacement, someone commented Read More ›

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Illustration of synapse and neuron on a blue background.

Have Researchers Discovered Why Humans Are Smarter Than Animals?

According to a new study, human memories are not stored in patterns, like animal memories, but jumbled all together

Researchers have believed for fifty years that the hippocampus, the seat of memory storage in our brains, stores patterns of memories separately. That’s true in animals but not, it turns out, in humans, according to neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “In contrast to what everybody expects, when recording the activity of individual neurons we have found that there is an alternative model to pattern separation storing our memories… Shockingly, when we directly recorded the activity of individual neurons, we found something completely different to what has been described in other animals. This could well be a cornerstone of human’s intelligence.” University of Leicester, “Human intelligence just got less mysterious” at ScienceDaily He found that, human neurons, by contrast, store all the Read More ›