DeepMind

Wednesday

Sebastian Mallaby

The new AI system causing panic over cybersecurity

It’s tempting, even fashionable, to pooh-pooh the hyperbole from our tech overlords. The release in 2022 of ChatGPT, the first mass-market conversational AI system, unleashed a volley of supercilious put-downs. The chatbot was not intelligent. It was merely hallucinating, manipulating statistics, regurgitating phrases from the internet: it was a ‘stochastic parrot’. Well, over the next three years, ChatGPT became unputdownable. It learned to handle photographs and videos, extract wisdom from dense textbooks, sound like Scarlett Johansson, write everything from code to songs to emails and offer tips on fixing washing machines. Not bad for a parrot. Claude Mythos heralds a future in which AI-empowered hoodlums empty your bank account Since

Tuesday

Simon Parkin

Playing Monopoly is not such a trivial pursuit

Which came first to the designers of chess: the rules or the metaphor? It feels impossible to prise the system from the story: a military battle between two monarchs, each with perfectly symmetrical assets and equally balanced capabilities. Yet there have been dozens of ‘reskins’ of chess, swapping the kings and their minions for characters from, say, Lord of the Rings, or The Simpsons, or even, bewilderingly, M&M chocolates. Play is the primary way in which every human first tests and explores the world  Sometimes the new metaphor imbues the game with a socio-political frisson. A recent example pitches rockers – white men in leathers holding screaming guitars – against