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😺 Elon: "Please stop!"

😺 Elon: "Please stop!"

PLUS: ads are back!

Pete Huang & Noah Edelman
March 30, 2023

Welcome, humans.

We've never seen a group of tech innovators call for a pause in tech innovation. AI is moving that fast — fasten your seatbelts, folks!

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

📨 An open letter to pause AI
🎟 Ads are coming to Bing
✈️ Sam Altman is going on a world tour
😍 AI trivia is back

Leaders Call For Immediate Pause On Training AI Past GPT-4 😱

If you think AI is moving too fast, you're not alone.

Prominent leaders, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Andrew Yang, are calling for an immediate pause on training AI systems beyond GPT-4 for at least six months.

Their argument: AI is becoming too powerful, and the proper safety protocols are lacking. Plus, the rush to ship AI products ASAP (hi, Microsoft!) has only made matters worse:

"...recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control."

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

It's a bold proposal that has been met with a healthy amount of skepticism online.

The counterarguments:

Pausing research is impractical and only enforceable if the government steps in
We're starting to make huge progress in education and healthcare via AI
China sure ain't slowing down

Our take: We don't think this goes anywhere. It's targeted at OpenAI (which Elon wants to compete with), and even Elon has said: "Leading AGI developers will not heed this warning."

What Does AI Know About You?

Good? Bad? Or is it hallucinating?

Typing in your name is a super fun way to explore Learn.xyz: They’re a learning platform that uses AI to make learning about anything fun again.

Just type in your name, and it’ll create an entire course about you, including quizzes.

(Use my code REPETE to skip the waitlist)

🙈 Don’t want to see what’s out there about you? Try any other topic, like…

“Who is [replace with your friend’s name]?”
“Why is the sky pink at sunset?”
“How do I make $10k/month with my own newsletter business?”

And in seconds, their app spits out an entire course with lessons, images, and quizzes. It also suggests new topics, so you’ll spend hours going down (productive) 🌪️ rabbit holes.

If you love to learn, this might end up on your home screen.

They’re in closed beta but are giving The Neuron readers exclusive access to the platform with code “REPETE”.

Try it out at Learn.xyz!

Bing Chat Is Open For Advertising 💬

Microsoft is bringing ads to Bing Chat.

The company announced in a blog post that ads will be incorporated into Bing's chat outputs as 'Ad' citations. It's also exploring ways to share ad revenue with the actual content contributors.

It's a small win for publishers, who now exist at the mercy of LLMs that gobble up and repurpose their content.
ChatGPT, for instance, doesn't cite or share revenue with web publishers whose content it scrapes and uses for outputs.

Why it matters: Microsoft CFO Amy Hood courted investors by saying that every 1% of market share in search advertising is worth $2 billion in revenue. Time to see if Bing Chat can deliver.

Around the Horn 🦄

Roles for prompt engineers are becoming increasingly popular and lucrative (Bloomberg).
Sam Altman is doing a tour around the world to speak with OpenAI users and developers.
A paper on LLaMa Adapter, a fine-tuning method, was released and lets devs fine-tune Meta's LLaMA way quicker.
A top Google AI researcher resigned after conversations with senior management that Alphabet was using data from ChatGPT to power Bard.

Treats To Try 🍿

Featured: Flexible, scalable, affordable inference. Get 4x more inferences per dollar with Salad’s Inference Endpoints API. Start generating results in 2 minutes with Salad.
Vocode is an open-source library for building voice-based LLM applications.
Generate shownotes, timestamps, and newsletters from your podcast with Podsqueeze.
Pico uses GPT-4 to build simple web apps instantly.
See how David Sacks prompts ChatGPT to write a blog post.

DM us links on Twitter: @nonmayorpete & @noahedelman02.