The Memo - 19/Mar/2023 (20+ announcements)

ERNIE Bot, Stanford Alpaca 7B, Midjourney v5 with hands, ChatGLM-6B, and much more!

Mar 19, 2023

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 19/Mar/2023

Welcome back to The Memo.

There are over 20 major announcements in this edition.

If you’ve been following my work on post-2020 AI, you will have noticed that I tend towards optimistic. In my recent livestream about GPT-4 (watch the replay), I commented—for perhaps the first time—that the GPT-4 model and its implications are ‘scary’. I’ve generally avoided using that word, and even chastised media for using it, preferring the word ‘exhilarating’ and sometimes ‘confronting’ to describe post-2020 AI.

A few hours after my livestream, OpenAI’s CEO also went live, admitting that he feels the same way. On 17/Mar/2023, he told ABC America:

We've got to be careful here… we are a little bit scared of this.

The reasons for my fear around this particular model are many, and I address each of them in the livestream (replay). They include:

OpenAI cronyism and preferential treatment. Some ‘friends’ of OpenAI got access to the GPT-4 model 8 months ago, in August 2022. This included OpenAI’s President giving his former company Stripe early access to the model. I find this to be especially egregious given that OpenAI planned on ‘delaying deployment of GPT-4 by a further six months [to Sep/2023]’ (paper) before making the model more generally available.
OpenAI trade secrets. OpenAI hid all technical details about the model, including token and parameter counts, architecture, and training dataset. We don’t know what’s in it. OpenAI’s Chief Scientist went on record to confirm that they were ‘wrong’ to ever publish details about models (16/Mar/2023).
GPT-4 capabilities. The performance of GPT-4 has been understated. GPT-4 is in the 90th percentile of human testing for many metrics, including one particularly difficult competitive Olympiad (99.5th percentile), and now vastly outperforms the human average in many fields ranging from medicine to law to wine tasting theory (LifeArchitect.ai/GPT-4#capabilities).
GPT-4 power-seeking. As discussed in The Memo edition 12/Feb/2023, AI safety is about more than just alignment with humanity. The GPT-4 model was tested for ‘power-seeking,’ including setting it loose (in a sandbox) and giving it money and VMs to see if it could replicate itself and hoard resources. Additionally, GPT-4 was allowed to (successfully) socially engineer (deceive) a real human worker at TaskRabbit to solve a Captcha for it, which they did. (I hope you can see exactly why I’m a little concerned here!)
Economic impacts without a mitigation strategy. UBI—universal basic income—is not ready, and workers are beginning to be displaced already. As previously reported in The Memo edition 2/Mar/2023, 48% of surveyed companies admitted that they have already replaced workers with GPT-4’s predecessor (25/Feb/2023).

I’m using a temporary new format for this very-long edition, due to the sheer depth and breadth of AI releases in the last few days. Format is:

Organization name: AI announcement or tool (date)

In the Toys to play with section, we look at the first book written with GPT-4, available for free download.

An eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that The Memo sits very high in the leaderboard for all paid technology newsletters worldwide!

I’d also like to invite you to test out a little pilot roundtable for paid subscribers. This is a video call in an informal setting, an opportunity for you to ask me any questions you have, and to meet other paid readers. The first roundtable will be:

Life Architect - The Memo - Roundtable #1
Saturday 1/Apr/2023 at 5PM Los Angeles
Saturday 1/Apr/2023 at 8PM New York
Sunday 2/Apr/2023 at 8AM Perth
or check your timezone.

You don’t need to do anything for this; there’s no registration or forms to fill in, I don’t want your email, you don’t even need to turn on your camera or give your real name!

Join the roundtable at the date and time above using this Google Meet link.

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Add to calendar (fixed).

The BIG Stuff

Microsoft: Microsoft 365 Copilot (17/Mar/2023)

What is it: GPT-4 built-in to the big Microsoft productivity apps. Above, it writes an email based on a short prompt.

The Interesting Stuff

Stability: Stable Diffusion Reimagine (18/Mar/2023)

What is it: Reimagine is a new text-to-image tool, allowing users to create infinite variations of uploaded images.

Tsinghua ChatGLM-6B (19/Mar/2023)

Tsinghua fine-tuned their GLM-130B model with dialogue, for an open-source ChatGLM-6B. ‘With the quantization technique, users can deploy locally on consumer-grade graphics cards (only 6GB of GPU memory is required at the INT4 quantization level).’

Boston Consulting Group: BCG X to use GPT-4 (Mar/2023)

…we have established the Center for Responsible Generative AI within BCG X, with dedicated teams supporting our clients in realizing the power of OpenAI technologies.
We launched BCG X—home to nearly 3,000 technologists, scientists, programmers, engineers, and human-centered designers—to turbocharge BCG’s deep industry and functional expertise…
At BCG, we are at the forefront of responsible AI and were the first in our industry to launch an AI Code of Conduct.

Toys to Play With

Milo: GPT-4 Copilot for parents and families (17/Mar/2023)

‘…a simple SMS copilot that can take in all manners of chaos - grocery list, reminders by voice, bday party screenshots, school newsletter pdfs… and get them back to you (and everyone else in the family) as work cal invites or SMS reminders or easy lists.’

Apply for beta testing: https://www.joinmilo.com/

Read the first book co-authored by GPT-4 (16/Mar/2023)

Reid Hoffman: I wrote a new book with OpenAI’s latest, most powerful large language model [GPT-4]. It’s called Impromptu: Amplifying our Humanity through AI. This, as far as I know, is the first book written with GPT-4… Last summer [August 2022, more than 8 months before release], I got access to GPT-4. It felt like I had a new kind of passport. - via Twitter

(I resolutely condemn cronyism, nepotism, and other favoritism in the distribution of intelligence and artificial intelligence technology. This kind of unjustifiable preferential treatment is contemptible, and the antithesis of the equity available through AI. - Alan)

Download here: