How to talk about A.I. like an insider

Published

2 years ago

May 21, 2023

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Here’s a list of some terms used by AI insiders:

AGI — AGI stands for “artificial general intelligence.” As a concept, it’s used to mean a significantly more advanced AI than is currently possible, that can do most things as well or better than most humans, including improving itself.

Example: “For me, AGI is the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a coworker, and they could say do anything you would be happy with a remote coworker doing behind a computer,” Sam Altman said at a recent Greylock VC event.

AI ethics describes the desire to prevent AI from causing immediate harm, and often focuses on questions like how AI systems collect and process data and the possibility of bias in areas like housing or employment.

AI safety describes the longer-term fear that AI will progress so suddenly that a super-intelligent AI might harm or even eliminate humanity.

Alignment is the practice of tweaking an AI model so that it produces the outputs its creators desired. In the short term, alignment refers to the practice of building software and content moderation. But it can also refer to the much larger and still theoretical task of ensuring that any AGI would be friendly towards humanity.

Example: “What these systems get aligned to — whose values, what those bounds are — that is somehow set by society as a whole, by governments. And so creating that dataset, our alignment dataset, it could be, an AI constitution, whatever it is, that has got to come very broadly from society,” Sam Altman said last week during the Senate hearing.

Emergent behavior — Emergent behavior is the technical way of saying that some AI models show abilities that weren’t initially intended. It can also describe surprising results from AI tools being deployed widely to the public.

Example: “Even as a first step, however, GPT-4 challenges a considerable number of widely held assumptions about machine intelligence, and exhibits emergent behaviors and capabilities whose sources and mechanisms are, at this moment, hard to discern precisely,” Microsoft researchers wrote in Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence.

Fast takeoff or hard takeoff — A phrase that suggests if someone succeeds at building an AGI that it will already be too late to save humanity.

Example: “AGI could happen soon or far in the future; the takeoff speed from the initial AGI to more powerful successor systems could be slow or fast,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a blog post.

Foom — Another way to say “hard takeoff.” It’s an onomatopeia, and has also been described as an acronym for “Fast Onset of Overwhelming Mastery” in several blog posts and essays.

Example: “It’s like you believe in the ridiculous hard take-off ‘foom’ scenario, which makes it sound like you have zero understanding of how everything works,” tweeted Meta AI chief Yann LeCun.

GPU — The chips used to train models and run inference, which are descendants of chips used to play advanced computer games. The most commonly used model at the moment is Nvidia’s A100.

Example: From Stability AI founder Emad Mostque:

Guardrails are software and policies that big tech companies are currently building around AI models to ensure that they don’t leak data or produce disturbing content, which is often called “going off the rails.” It can also refer to specific applications that protect the AI from going off topic, like Nvidia’s “NeMo Guardrails” product.

Example: “The moment for government to play a role has not passed us by this period of focused public attention on AI is precisely the time to define and build the right guardrails to protect people and their interests,” Christina Montgomery, the chair of IBM’s AI ethics board and VP at the company, said in Congress this week.

Inference — The act of using an AI model to make predictions or generate text, images, or other content. Inference can require a lot of computing power.

Example: “The problem with inference is if the workload spikes very rapidly, which is what happened to ChatGPT. It went to like a million users in five days. There is no way your GPU capacity can keep up with that,” Sid Sheth, founder of D-Matrix, previously told CNBC.

Large language model — A kind of AI model that underpins ChatGPT and Google’s new generative AI features. Its defining feature is that it uses terabytes of data to find the statistical relationships between words, which is how it produces text that seems like a human wrote it.

Example: “Google’s new large language model, which the company announced last week, uses almost five times as much training data as its predecessor from 2022, allowing its to perform more advanced coding, math and creative writing tasks,” CNBC reported earlier this week.

Paperclips are an important symbol for AI Safety proponents because they symbolize the chance an AGI could destroy humanity. It refers to a thought experiment published by philosopher Nick Bostrom about a “superintelligence” given the mission to make as many paperclips as possible. It decides to turn all humans, Earth, and increasing parts of the cosmos into paperclips. OpenAI’s logo is a reference to this tale.

Example: “It also seems perfectly possible to have a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal,” Bostrom wrote in his thought experiment.

Singularity is an older term that’s not used often anymore, but it refers to the moment that technological change becomes self-reinforcing, or the moment of creation of an AGI. It’s a metaphor — literally, singularity refers to the point of a black hole with infinite density.

Example: “The advent of artificial general intelligence is called a singularity because it is so hard to predict what will happen after that,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an interview with CNBC this week.

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How quantum could supercharge Google’s AI ambitions

Published

19 hours ago

April 18, 2025

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How quantum could supercharge Google’s AI ambitions

Inside a secretive set of buildings in Santa Barbara, California, scientists at Alphabet are working on one of the company’s most ambitious bets yet. They’re attempting to develop the world’s most advanced quantum computers.

“In the future, quantum and AI, they could really complement each other back and forth,” said Julian Kelly, director of hardware at Google Quantum AI.

Google has been viewed by many as late to the generative AI boom, because OpenAI broke into the mainstream first with ChatGPT in late 2022.

Late last year, Google made clear that it wouldn’t be caught on the backfoot again. The company unveiled a breakthrough quantum computing chip called Willow, which it says can solve a benchmark problem unimaginably faster than what’s possible with a classical computer, and demonstrated that adding more quantum bits to the chip reduced errors exponentially.

“That’s a milestone for the field,” said John Preskill, director of the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. “We’ve been wanting to see that for quite a while.”

Willow may now give Google a chance to take the lead in the next technological era. It also could be a way to turn research into a commercial opportunity, especially as AI hits a data wall. Leading AI models are running out of high-quality data to train on after already scraping much of the data on the internet.

“One of the potential applications that you can think of for a quantum computer is generating new and novel data,” said Kelly.

He uses the example of AlphaFold, an AI model developed by Google DeepMind that helps scientists study protein structures. Its creators won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“[AlphaFold] trains on data that’s informed by quantum mechanics, but that’s actually not that common,” said Kelly. “So a thing that a quantum computer could do is generate data that AI could then be trained on in order to give it a little more information about how quantum mechanics works.”

Kelly has said that he believes Google is only about five years away from a breakout, practical application that can only be solved on a quantum computer. But for Google to win the next big platform shift, it would have to turn a breakthrough into a business.

Watch the video to learn more.

Technology

Nintendo Switch 2 retail preorder to begin April 24 following tariff delays

Published

19 hours ago

April 18, 2025

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Nintendo Switch 2 retail preorder to begin April 24 following tariff delays

An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.

Isabel Infantes | Reuters

Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.

Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.

Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.

Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.

“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”

The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.

However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”

It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.

WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games

Technology

Etsy touts ‘shopping domestically’ as Trump tariffs threaten price increases for imports

Published

1 day ago

April 17, 2025

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Etsy touts 'shopping domestically' as Trump tariffs threaten price increases for imports

An employee walks past a quilt displaying Etsy Inc. signage at the company’s headquarters in the Brooklyn.

Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Etsy is trying to make it easier for shoppers to purchase products from local merchants and avoid the extra cost of imports as President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs raise concerns about soaring prices.

In a post to Etsy’s website on Thursday, CEO Josh Silverman said the company is “surfacing new ways for buyers to discover businesses in their countries” via shopping pages and by featuring local sellers on its website and app.

“While we continue to nurture and enable cross-border trade on Etsy, we understand that people are increasingly interested in shopping domestically,” Silverman said.

Etsy operates an online marketplace that connects buyers and sellers with mostly artisanal and handcrafted goods. The site, which had 5.6 million active sellers as of the end of December, competes with e-commerce juggernaut Amazon, as well as newer entrants that have ties to China like Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop.

By highlighting local sellers, Etsy could relieve some shoppers from having to pay higher prices induced by President Trump’s widespread tariffs on trade partners. Trump has imposed tariffs on most foreign countries, with China facing a rate of 145%, and other nations facing 10% rates after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations. Trump also signed an executive order that will end the de minimis provision, a loophole for low-value shipments often used by online businesses, on May 2.

Temu and Shein have already announced they plan to raise prices late next week in response to the tariffs. Sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, many of whom source their products from China, have said they’re considering raising prices.

Silverman said Etsy has provided guidance for its sellers to help them “run their businesses with as little disruption as possible” in the wake of tariffs and changes to the de minimis exemption.

Before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs took effect, Silverman said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in late February that he expects Etsy to benefit from the tariffs and de minimis restrictions because it “has much less dependence on products coming in from China.”

“We’re doing whatever work we can do to anticipate and prepare for come what may,” Silverman said at the time. “In general, though, I think Etsy will be more resilient than many of our competitors in these situations.”

Still, American shoppers may face higher prices on Etsy as U.S. businesses that source their products or components from China pass some of those costs on to consumers.

Etsy shares are down 17% this year, slightly more than the Nasdaq.

WATCH: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says sellers will pass cost of tariffs on to consumers