Weekly Top Picks #109
MIT study fraud / Bruce Lee, AI researcher / Teachers cheating / Google's Flow (I/O) / Karen Hao on OpenAI's coup / On AI literacy / Gwern on LLM's reality
The week(s) in AI at a glance
MIT says it no longer stands behind student’s AI paper: What looked like a promising paper on AI’s value for scientific discovery turned out to be fraud.
If Bruce Lee had been an AI researcher: I fear not the LLM who has practiced 10,000 questions once, but the one who has practiced one question 10,000 times.
The professors are using ChatGPT, students aren’t happy: A professor was caught using AI when the university instructed students not to use it, and one of them demanded to have her tuition back.
Google to present Flow (video + image + music) during I/O: If Google plays its marketing cards well, Flow could break the internet.
What really happened when OpenAI turned on Sam Altman: Karen Hao reveals secrets previously unreported that further reinforce a popular take: Sam Altman is untrustworthy.
On AI literacy: Disempowerment is never the answer: Here’s a hot take: Those who advocate against “AI literacy” do so from a deep distrust of human beings and a deep fear of the unknown.
Gwern on large language models’ view of reality: “. . . for an LLM, 'reality' is just the largest fictional setting - the one that encompasses all the other fictional settings it reads about from time to time.”
The week(s) in The Algorithmic Bridge
(PAID) Weekly Top Picks #108: Grok vs. MAGA / AI vs. uni graduates / Reddit experiment / Zuck being Zuck / Who's never tried ChatGPT? / Gemini beats Pokémon / AI won
(FREE) New Grads Need Not Apply: AI could be the reason why employment among young university graduates in the US dropped so drastically, to the point that they're worse off than the average.
(FREE) AI Apps Need a Higher Minimum Age: Google will roll out Gemini to kids under 13, and I don’t think this is a good idea.
(PAID) How I Use AI: Seven daily use cases—thesaurus, intuition engine, idea guy, translator, researcher, illustrator, and friend.
(FREE) Sam Altman Is Going to Win: He’s effortlessly witty, has nerve, is charming, and his focus is unmatched.
(PAID) How to Use AI Better: 10 lessons to increase the value you get out of AI 10x. Not dumb slogans that sound nice but are useless. These are deep mindset reframes.
(FREE) Why There Are No AI Masterpieces: “AI has generated tons of text, billions of images, video and songs. I feel however it has never generated a song worth listening, a book worth reading or a movie worth watching. Why?”
(PAID) How Google Created an AI That Improves Itself: AlphaEvolve marks the dawn of recursive AI with the forgotten power of evolutionary algorithms.