According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the WEF Conference in Davos, AI won’t advance until cleaner energy resources are available, mainly nuclear fission… so perhaps fears about AGI threatening AGI are unfounded for now.
About five days ago, Reuters carried Sam’s remarks.
The OpenAI CEO believes AI progress depends on cleaner energy, like nuclear fission, casting doubt on imminent AGI threats. Meanwhile, Meta’s CEO aims to dominate AI, potentially making AGI open source. Conflicting views on AGI safety persist, as Zuckerberg faces criticism but remains committed to Meta’s AI pursuits and the Metaverse project.
I did a lot of cinematic generative AI at the end of last year and the beginning of this year.
I carved out a hundred days of doing frequent, often daily, short cinematic generative AI videos, typically about three-quarters of a minute long, accompanied by music.
My idea came from Steven Musielski, who posted daily videos on X devoted to forming a supportive community of thankful people. Steven spoke on thankfulness for one hundred days and more.
The Twitter handle @StevenMusielski belongs to Steven.
Among the polls he has included are those asking how much contact is needed to gain the trust of a new contact. I felt as low as five given Steven’s answers. Trust must be earned over five contacts, I answered.
Likewise, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised concerns when he decided Meta could potentially dominate AI development by applying its substantial resources. AGI has been regarded by many as dangerous, but Zuckerberg has been anticipating Meta could reach it in less than a decade, which could be the same amount of time it takes to reach it otherwise. In addition, Zuckerberg said that Meta could be open source.
Zuckerberg has somewhat of a reputation for being inscrutable, so it is unknown if he will back down on his strategy of pursuing AGI and, if reaching it, will continue making it open source. I suspect he will pursue it at Meta.
Are you a Canadian like me? If you are, you probably know that there is a Facebook news link ban. Do any of these three news stories ring a bell?
Prince Harry and Meghan to “Step Back” from Royal Duties
Harry and Meghan Markle declared their progress out of their jobs as senior individuals from the Family. “We now plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America, continuing to honour our duty to The Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages,” their statement read. Buckingham Palace responded with a statement explaining that “Discussions with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are at an early stage,” and that “these are complicated issues that will take time to work through.”
Canada Wins First Medal at 2020 Tokyo Olympics
Swimmers Maggie Mac Neil, Kayla Sanchez, Rebecca Smit, and Penny Oleksiak posted a time of 3:32.78 to win silver in the women’s 4×100 m freestyle relay. The most memorable decoration of the Tokyo Games was this one. Mac Neil went on to win Canada’s first gold of the Games in the women’s 100 m butterfly.
Decathlete Damian Warner Wins Lou Marsh Trophy
Damian Warner received the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s athlete of the year, in recognition of his gold medal victory in decathlon at the 2020 Olympic Summer Games in Tokyo. Warner set an Olympic record with 9,018 total points and became one of only four decathletes to reach 9,000 points in international competition. He additionally got the 2021 Lionel Conacher as Canada’s Male of the Year.
All of these news stories were widely discussed on Facebook. Certainly, they were in mainstream media around the world, but Facebook calls its wall a “news feed.” Facebook users discuss stuff like this.
This does not mean it is any less of a juggernaut of Big Tech. Except for TikTok and YouTube, Facebook has little competition. Even with Mark Zuckerberg being a wanker, changing the company’s name from Facebook to Meta, or losing billions of dollars in value by obsessing over the idea of a future in which we live in a “metaverse,” Facebook remains important.
In Canada, the Liberal government and Zuckerberg have clashed over the perception that news journalism on services like Facebook should be paid for. I know journalism is a tough, competitive business. However, it doesn’t mean journalists should get such a free ride that Facebook pay for their ice cream.
Many journalists employed by big media outlets sell lies, at least occasionally.
Moreover, news on Facebook is notoriously uninformed. The Internet battle between the political spheres of the Left and the Right, particularly in the US and in the UK, where much power is seated, is hard not to notice.
A platform that had an excellent reputation as a place to go for news, and now is not so hot and trustworthy, is X (formerly Twitter). It is declining in popularity and will probably keep going that way, but it’s still a giant platform.
I don’t see radical hate running willy-nilly. The biggest problem is that what’s trending is sometimes pretty goofy now, whereas before it was cooler. Anyway, it doesn’t mean you can’t still get news on X, and while it’s easy to argue that unless he manages to make it visibly profitable, it could be in for trouble, he might find a way to do that and X will seem cool again.
You might just get ahead of a surge in popularity for X if Elon has his way. He wants to see a lot of change in X.
He sometimes makes announcements that don’t come true, a habit about which he needs to be more careful in the future.
Twitter Indeed Verified or whatever it’s called is no longer useful. That’s the thing where you spend your monthly $8, or maybe $12 if you’re in Canada (I don’t actually know the prices) and then you get priority service when you tweet and some other advantages. I personally am not checkmarked blue.
I respect Elon, he certainly provides a lot of fun, but I just don’t think messing around with the checkmark for clout is in my interest.
Most X users don’t tweet themselves. They lurk, which is fine because it makes sense that people just want to read cool tweets or whatever.
So, you could try lurking on X, and maybe tweeting an opinion, or putting in the extra mile and getting yourself a blue badge.
If you’re already on X, you got this!
Anyway, if you’ve left Twitter because Elon bought it, you could consider returning (to X). This is even more true if you’re a Canadian who formerly relied on Facebook for news.
Even with X‘s decline in popularity, returning to X, the fact that it’s now a notorious platform, is one thing you could do for news.
I hope that the legislation around Canadian Internet content won’t negatively impact our Facebook use, our X use, our streaming video services, and our YouTube usage. I am not sure we have that luxury.
You’re welcome to “like” this post, to comment, and to follow the blog. Good luck getting your Internet news. The story is ongoing.
Do you read the news? I would say I’m sure everyone does.
Do you visit Wikipedia? How about Google News?
It might not have the same authority as Google, which was the leading search engine at one time. However, Google News is a tried-and-true offshoot website that provides news headlines for any search you desire and helps you get to that news.
I like it. When I want to find a specific news item, I use Google News. Google searches are easy, it is readable, and it contains legitimate news.
While Wikipedia is a user-submitted encyclopedia, it does not provide real-time news coverage.
Historical news events have Wikipedia pages written about them by users who understand the news. It’s not as useful as Google News or social media, however.
For example, Wikipedia is useful for finding out which tracks on an album have been released as singles. Sometimes I use Wikipedia for getting biographical information. As I’m a blogger with a personal blog, I sometimes research a blog post with Wikipedia.
If the information I need is something as grand as understanding an ideology, Wikipedia might be the site to visit.
All that said and done, another source of news on the Internet is Facebook. Facebook is full of news.
It isn’t all good. A lot of it is misinformation, some of it is political misinformation, and a lot of it has various kinds of shortcomings to it.
Now that Bill C-18 has nearly passed, Meta likely has only six months to stop providing news on Facebook.
Bill C-18 says journalists should be paid to provide news. To make that work, it effectively means that Facebook users will not be able to share news on Facebook, I should think.
More probably, Facebook will not be able to ink deals with news distributors for users inside Canada. I have a feeling, as with Bill C-11, that at the level of using Facebook, users will still be free to share news items.
It sounds like it could be a return to insisting that Facebook users contain their interests to keep up with family and friends. However, it also means Facebook’s popularity will likely continue to decline in Canada.
Thanks to CEO Zuckerberg’s previous intrigue with his metaverse ideas, Facebook lost enormous sums of money. This proved Zuckerberg to be losing his Midas touch.
Zuckerberg won’t play ball; he insists that Facebook will no longer distribute news.
On a feature of Facebook called the “news feed.” It is not very pleasant.
Zuckerberg has demonstrated with his bizarre pursuit of the metaverse that, billionaire or not, he can be wrong. Even Mark Zuckerberg appears in The Social Network, the wonderful film directed by David Fincher tells Facebook’s beginnings.
Zuckerberg is not too reasonable on his path to success. I sometimes claim that it is the defining movie of this century to date.
My dad runs a small business in his golden years, and I am the social media manager for his company.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 