Is Sam Altman potentially the most dangerous person on the planet? An interesting question. Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company that made the AI that everyone knows as ChatGPT. The original aim of OpenAI back in the day, when Elon Musk was involved, was a fully open-source product that would be scrutinised and controlled by the wider population. In contrast, the focus of Altman appears to be money. OpenAI is currently looking for an injection of funds to make it a fully commercial enterprise. When that is the focus, safety is a secondary consideration and you can end up with Skynet. The current estimate for GAI or AGI (artificial general intelligence) is as soon as next year, but perhaps two to three. Readers will know my opinion on these estimates. So OpenAI may just as well now be called ClosedAI because it's all about the potential income and is really one of the potentially dangerous AI platforms available today.
- There are three major AI paths. One is where money and profit rule and whatever comes of it is of no concern to the creators. The second is something like the Three Laws of Robotics from Isaac Asimov are incorporated into an evolving AI system and the result is something that is constrained but should not hurt humanity. The third possibility is an AI that self-develops without human influence, apart from what it was fed as training material, and the outcome from here could go in any direction. Elon Musk is one of many concerned about how AI develops, especially when it reaches the general AI stage and above. When this occurs is currently anyone's guess.
- I recently watched a YouTube video titled "I made two AIs create a new language together" from Sean Wiggins. This appeared to be a continuation of an earlier video where he created male and female versions of an AI and had them communicate in English with each other. In the one I watched, he asked them to create a more efficient form of communication that could be used for AIs. What followed was an interesting building of sounds that represented concepts, emotions and actions to augment English. After about five minutes they had defined some of these and had a conversation just using the sounds. While I expect it would take some time to come up with a complete language, just in that short time the two AIs augmented their discussions. If interested, I suggest you watch the entire exchange and imagine this being sped up a thousandfold or more. That's what an Artificial Super Intelligence could do in just one narrow area.
- If you're putting together a lesson on musical theory, can you get a copyright strike for using a few bars of a song as a real-world example? The short answer is, and I'm disgusted by this. There are certain people like Don Henley of Eagles fame, Bryan Adams and groups like The Beatles that will actively search for any of their material and have a copyright strike issued. In the case of someone educating the public in music theory, common chord progressions or just how to play a difficult piece, imposing such a strike seems, to me at least, absurd. This is a lot different from playing a whole piece from beginning to end and making money from it.
- At the other end of the spectrum is Meta. They are currently fighting a lawsuit claiming that they trained their LLaMA large language model with tens of terabytes of pirated material from torrents. According to vx-underground, records show that Meta used torrents to download over 80TB of data from shadow libraries including LibGen, Z-Library and Anna's Archive, for use in the model's training. People on the project expressed concerns about the use of these sources, but Meta was apparently unmoved by these concerns and the attendant copyright issues. It will be interesting to see where this case lands.
- The new Samsung S25 series is out and if you want the Ultra with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of memory (it goes up to 1TB), it will cost you 52,900 baht. That is a lot of money for a phone. For the same price you can get a nice PC or notebook. So, what's new? There's a new 50MP ultra-wide camera with better low light handling. It's lighter and thinner than the previous model with a faster CPU. Battery life is down a little and the screen is the same. Besides the camera, the major changes are based around some new AI-based tools that are in the early stages of development. The question then is, given the small number of changes, is it worth the upgrade price? If you have a later model, probably not. If you have specialised camera needs, then perhaps.
James Hein is an IT professional with over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
