The New Turing Test

Read on to unravel AI's intriguing leap from Turing tests to reshaping our economy.

I’m Pascal Finette, co-founder of be radical – and this is our weekly Briefing. We share our latest insights, analysis, and articles we read; all focussed on the future of technology and business. Just like a good banana, it’s easy to digest. nutritious and yummy.

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Decode. Disrupt. Transform.

Please forgive me for, once again, discussing AI. Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Inflection AI (and previously a co-founder of Google’s DeepMind), recently published an oped in MIT Technology Review. He urges the industry to abandon its fixation with the Turing test as a measure of machine intelligence. Firstly, we might have already crossed the Turing test threshold, or at least we are close to doing so. Quite frankly, many of my interactions with GPT 4 already qualify as “intelligent conversations.” Secondly, and most importantly, the test doesn’t truly tell us all that much.

Instead, Suleyman proposes a very different kind of test: “Go make $1 million on a retail web platform in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.”

This radical reimagining of what intelligent machines should do, suggests that they should not just converse with us and convince us they are human-like, but rather venture into the world and create economic value on their own. Suleyman suggests that achieving this milestone would signify a seismic shift. Consider the economic, business, political, and societal implications:

“At that point, AI isn’t just a helpful tool for productive workers, a glorified word processor, or game player; it becomes a productive worker of unprecedented scope. This is the point at which AI transitions from being useful but optional, to being the center of the world economy. This is when the risks of automation and job displacement truly start to be felt.”

Observing the current developments of systems like LangChain, AutoGPT, ChatGPT’s plug-ins, and others, it becomes clear that this is the direction we are heading. Which prompts the question: Are we (as individuals, enterprises, and societies) prepared for this? And if not (and quite frankly, I doubt anyone is), how can we prepare ourselves? For me, this all comes down to building muscle memory - we need to learn to play a new game, with new rules, mechanics, and patterns. And the best (perhaps the only) way to do this is to be on the field, playing the game. (via Pascal)

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The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow

Lessons from the Frontline: Don’t Use Ambiguous URLs. The US military’s email domains end in .mil (their top-level domain). The top-level domain for the country Mali (which has ties to Russia these days) ends in .ml. Do you see the problem? The Financial Times just reported [Paywall] that millions of emails are being misdirected due to simple typos – someone typing mark.a.milley@army.ml instead of mark.a.milley@army.mil. Of course, some smart sysop could have easily spotted this decades ago – as did Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch entrepreneur who currently (but not for much longer) manages Mail’s country domain. Cyber security becomes increasingly complex (especially with the advent of AI), but it truly starts with the basics.

AIs Evolve – And Not Always for the Better. A recent paper explored the performance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 over multiple release cycles – and found that the models change pretty dramatically in their performance (e.g., GPT–4 performed very well in a test to identify prime numbers in March ’23 but flubbed the test in June). As these models are completely opaque black boxes, the findings highlight the necessity for continuous performance monitoring when using proprietary models.

The Future Called and Wants Its Makeup Back. Just when you thought you had seen it all, something comes up. Point in case: Microsoft, the company which gave the world not only Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, but also Clippy, partnered with not-quite-cool-anymore cosmetic company Maybelline Beauty to create a virtual makeup filter for – gasp – Microsoft’s Teams video conferencing platform. I don’t think this needs any more (digital) ink…

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What We Are Reading

🎭 Situation deepfakes are the next frontier of political misinformation Situation deepfakes are on the rise. With the advent of ChatGPT, large language models are now able to combine with manipulated or generated faces and voice to form “situation deepfakes. The basic idea and technology is the same as with any other deepfake, but with a bolder ambition: to manipulate a real event or invent one from thin air. Jane ⇢ Read

🧠 How to Make Smart Decisions Without Getting Lucky There are many reasons why we fail to make effective decisions. Some of the main ones are: having the wrong information, using the wrong model, and being unintentionally stupid. Mafe ⇢ Read

🌿 America Can’t Build a Green Economy Without China The free flow of “tacit knowledge” and collaboration across borders has been critical to scaling innovation in the modern world and may be the key to greening economies of the future. Jeffrey ⇢ Read

💡 The Real Lesson from the Making of the Atomic Bomb Drawing on the classic of the development of the atomic bomb, AI researchers and developers are seeing the concept of complementarity of technology as a guide and warning at the same time. Julian ⇢ Read

💸 Has Financialization Ruined NFTs? A former financial consultant and semi-retired high-volume NFT trader explain how the introduction of trading features and token incentives transformed NFTs into fungible assets, negatively impacting collectors’ desire to hold these assets and, of course, their hype and price. Pedro ⇢ Read

🕵️‍♂️ WormGPT – The Generative AI Tool Cybercriminals Are Using to Launch Business Email Compromise Attacks Unmask the dark side of AI: Discover how cybercriminals are exploiting generative AI tools like WormGPT to launch sophisticated Business Email Compromise attacks in this eye-opening blog post. Pascal ⇢ Read

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Around The Horn

Turns out, bringing manufacturing back to the US is hard. So hard, that you can’t even make a wrench anymore.

Meanwhile we now have self-healing metals.

Bitumen, the stuff which binds asphalt, has been reinvented to be a carbon sink instead of a polluter.

The precursor to the CIA, the OSS, compiled this handy manual on how to sabotage your organization.

Teaching in the age of AI.

Surprise! 59% of orgs lack resources to meet generative AI expectations.

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Some Fun Stuff

Brush up your physics and build some stellar paper airplanes. Here is a little cheat-sheet. 📚✈️🧮

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Postscript

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