DeepMind

Friday

Geoffrey Cain

The Founding Fathers of AI

From our US edition

In the spring of 1722, a 16-year-old apprentice in a Boston print shop began slipping letters under the door at night, signed by a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood, who did not exist. The apprentice was Benjamin Franklin. His brother James, who owned the paper, had no intention of printing his kid brother, so Franklin invented a woman and let her say the things he couldn’t. Readers wrote in guessing at the author. No one suspected the boy sweeping the floor. Franklin would go on to be a printer, a postmaster, a scientist famous across Europe for his electrical experiments and a founder of libraries, fire companies and, in time, of the United States itself.

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.

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 jazz musicians – black men in white suits nursing saxophones.