🔮 Weekly Dose of AI: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority”
Extinction Risk / Fake legal cases / Rogue AI / AI job losses
Good morning,
This is your weekly thoughtful exploration of the latest developments in AI.
Let’s get to it.
👀 What to read/watch
1️⃣ Top AI researchers and CEOs warn against ‘risk of extinction’ in 22-word statement
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority” reads the start of a statement signed by a group of top AI researchers and high profile individuals including the CEO of Deepmind, the CEO of OpenAI, Elon Musk and hundreds of others.
This public statement reflects escalating concern amongst experts to match the blistering pace of AI developments.
2️⃣ Lawyer Faces Sanctions for Using Fake ChatGPT Citations
Lawyers are trained to be good at detail. Right? Well, you hope so, but if your lawyer is relying on ChatGPT, it might not go well for you. This guy sounds like a ‘better call Saul’ character.
Using ChatGPT to help prepare his case, the lawyer ran into trouble when ChatGPT made up a bunch of fake cases as evidence.
When the judge found out, he was not too happy, and now the lawyer is in hot water.
This just shows that many people have no idea that generative AI models can hallucinate, and instead they treat it like Google search.
3️⃣ US Air Force denies AI drone attacked operator in test
Over the last few days you may have seen viral news stories talking about an AI program that turned on its human operators. It was a story that Hollywood has us all primed to believe - rogue AI turns on humans and kills them.
As usual, the real story is far less scary. In fact, it all came from a presentation given by a US Colonel, in which he described a ‘thought experiment’.
Following the viral story, “Col Hamilton admits he "mis-spoke" in his presentation at the Royal Aeronautical Society FCAS Summit and the 'rogue AI drone simulation' was a hypothetical "thought experiment" from outside the military”.
So for now we are safe. But you better believe the military is actively adding AI to weapons and drones as fast as they can. And in this environment, misinformation continues to spread faster than ever.
4️⃣ ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners.
Rumblings of an AI jobs apocalypse have started to turn to reality, as this article starts to tell the stories of real people that have lost their jobs to AI. How much of this is part of a larger trend? In March Goldman Sachs predicted that 18% of jobs worldwide could be automated with AI.
Whether this is just the start of an avalanche of job losses only time will tell. Hopefully the increased productivity leads to new job creation in lots of other areas, such as ‘prompt engineers’. Speaking of jobs….
💼 Awesome jobs to consider
🛠️ Engineering
Apple is hiring Generative AI Engineers
Braintrust is hiring Machine Learning Engineers
Deep 6 AI is hiring a Clinical NLP Engineer
🦺 AI Safety
The Centre for AI Safety is hiring an Editorial Lead
Anthropic is hiring Research Scientists
Deepmind is hiring for a Research Engineer
👨👩👦 Product and Management
Zuora is hiring a Product Manager AI/ML
💰 AI deals
Strong Compute, a Sydney Australia-based ML training pipeline acceleration startup raised $7.8 million
Checkstep a London, U.K.-based startup providing AI products for contextual content moderation to social media and enterprise platforms, raised $5 million
Dumme a London, U.K.-based startup that uses AI-driven video editing to create short-form social media content, raised $3.4 million
Hypervision Surgical a London, U.K.-based startup which has built an AI-powered hyperspectral vision system for precise surgeries, raised $8.1 million
I hope you enjoyed the digest this week. Let me know what you think by hitting reply or one of the feedback buttons below.
Until next week
Jamie
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