🦸 Can AI save the world? 

PLUS: Musk Lauds China’s AI Prowess While Warning of Tech’s Dangers

Author

Haroon Choudery
July 07, 2023

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Happy Friday, fellow humans. 👋

It’s been one (1) day, and Zuck has already received a lawsuit from Twitter, stating that Meta hired former Twitter employees to create Threads.

We might be seeing Zuck vs. Musk earlier than anticipated.

Anyhoo, let’s dive into some AI news…

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🧵 In today's edition:

  • 📏 Artificial Super Alignment

  • 🦸 Can AI save the world?

  • 🥷 AI tool helps banks fight fraud

  • 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

📏 Artificial Super Alignment

A big reason for AI advancement is to reach one destination: Artificial Super Intelligence, or ASI. It should also come as no surprise that OpenAI is one of the companies leading the charge.

As with any AI, there are serious risks associated with AI that becomes too powerful:

  • They can stop listening to humans

  • They could start harming humans

  • They could be “misaligned” with our goals as a species

Current ways of aligning AI, like reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on humans’ ability to supervise AI.

But humans can't reliably do that as AI grows in brain power. It would be like a toddler telling an 18-year-old what to do.

I.e., it’s not scalable.

To avoid these issues, OpenAI is creating a team to manage the risks associated with superintelligent AI.

The new team will be co-led by OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike (ultra-smart AI researchers), and their objective is simple:

To develop an automated alignment researcher to ensure that a superintelligence is safe and aligned with human values.

This might be one of the first and most important precautionary steps in AI tech ever taken.

Unless Zuck comes out of the woodwork and creates his own Superalignment team, ofc.

Read more: Engadget | OpenAI

🦸 Can AI save the world?

The researchers over at Five AI sure do feel that way.

According to them, AI could:

  1. Extend human life by curing diseases and using AI to discover new drugs

  2. Optimize systems to improve energy efficiency to fight climate change

  3. Speed up scientific simulations, for instance, in climate and weather modeling

  4. Radically accelerate technological progress

In the article, Max Tegmark, an AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said something that puts ASI into perspective:

If we can build and control superintelligence, we can quickly go from being limited by our own stupidity to being limited by the laws of physics.

What a bar.

Read more: The Guardian

🥷 AI tool helps banks fight fraud

Source: Pitchbook

Web3 was supposed to change the banking industry and protect against fraud. Or so they said.

Unfortunately, no real turnkey solution ever came to fruition.

To change this, Mastercard has launched an AI-powered tool for banks to fight payment fraud in real time based on transaction data provided by UK banks.

The tool can predict whether a user is transferring funds to an account previously associated with “authorized push payment scams.”

According to Ajay Bhalla, the president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard, fraud within this sector has been particularly difficult to detect. The goal is to use AI to allow banks to catch such scenarios in real time.

Currently, nine UK banks have signed up with the Mastercard solution, with more partnerships in the works.

🤑 AI Fundraising News

DigitalOcean acquires cloud computing startup Paperspace for $111M in cash

SoftBank backs Japanese robotics startup Telexistence in $170M Series B funding round

🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes

What else is going on?

  1. Microsoft Launches Free AI Training With Professional Certificate

  2. Musk Lauds China’s AI Prowess While Warning of Tech’s Dangers

  3. G/O Media’s AI ‘innovation’ is off to a rocky start

  4. Threads needs user-generated alt text ASAP

  5. Oracle's cloud business, which runs TikTok, could be hurt the most by Biden's new proposed restrictions for China.

  6. Alibaba Gets Home-Province Backing for AI, Digital Economy Plans

🐦️ Tweet of the day

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And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

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