Episode 12: The worlds best AI, and weaponising TikTok
In this episode, episode 12, we discuss the wider release of what looks to be one of the worlds most advanced Artificial Intelligence systems, and we look at how TikTok is becoming a tool in the trade wars between the East (China) and the West (USA).
GPT-3: The world’s most advanced AI
GPT-3, an AI system developed by OpenAI has been released to a wider audience of developers this week. OpenAI is an AI research lab created back in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, an entrepreneur. It’s goal is to promote and develop human friendly AI that will benefit humanity as a whole.
It’s GPT model, which stands for Generative Pre-training, has been in development since around 2018 when the original academic paper on it was written. The model essentially learns from text-based information on the internet with the model originally using over 8 million documents to learn from.
The latest version, GPT-3, was only released to a select few organisations in order to keep it from abuse. Over the last week though it has been slowly opened up to more and more people who were on the waitlist. This has started to show what the AI is capable of… and it appears to be extremely powerful, especially compared to other models.
People have used it to write songs in the style of famous artists, write fake interviews with celebrities, to finish essays, write articles and so much more. To the non-techie amongst us this probably doesn’t sound like much but to create these sorts of materials that are convincing and appear to be written by humans is a huge thing… and a bit scary.
There’s some great early examples in these articles:
https://arr.am/2020/07/09/gpt-3-an-ai-thats-eerily-good-at-writing-almost-anything/
However, one of the cofounders of OpenAI has urged some caution to the hype.
Tweet from Sam Altman, one of the founders of OpenAI
I think this is probably the start of something big, and we really don’t understand what this means. In fact, our imaginations probably aren’t anywhere near creative enough to ever really understand what this early development means for us.
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Weaponising TikTok
TikTok, the hugely popular video app, is slowly going to way of Huawei among some western politics, particularly in the US. It is owned by one of China’s biggest companies ByteDance, reportedly worth over $100 billion.
Given China’s well known control over companies operating from the country there have been political calls to ban the app in countries where there is perhaps a not so good relationship with China.
One of the first to actually take action is India where 59 apps owned by Chinese companies have been blocked from app stores and are no longer working even if installed. It’s highly likely that TikTok, being by far the most popular is the real target of this action.
Tweet from TikTok India
In the US too there have been significant calls from politicians to block TikTok as the relationship between the US and China continues to sour. There’s also a good deal of momentum building on the back of a perceived win over the US’s ban on Huawei and subsequent pressure on other countries to follow suit.
Over the last week or so this cry has made its way across the Atlantic and down the Thames to Westminster where a small gaggle of Conservative MPs are also calling for TikTok to be banned.
One of these is Iain Duncan Smith who said to Evening Standard “TikTok has the ability to harvest data and is considered a security risk, not just in the UK and USA but in countries as diverse as India and Japan.” It appears that he has just figured out what the internet is and how companies operate on it. I wonder if he feels the same about Facebook, Twitter, or Google?
It seems that politicians have found a new political weapon in their scrap with China.
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