Weekly Review 7 June 2024

Some interesting links that I Tweeted about in the last week (I also post these on Mastodon, Threads, Newsmast, and Bluesky): 

1. How many people actually phone these days? Apart from my family, the only people who have phoned me recently are scammers: https://www.stuff.co.nz/society/350291334/newsable-ai-could-soon-be-answering-your-phone-you
2. At least Google is doing something about the bizarre answers its AI is producing: https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-bizarre-ai-answers
3. Three ways the relationship between AI and humans, especially customers, will develop in the future: https://www.datanami.com/2024/05/28/three-ways-the-human-and-ai-relationship-will-evolve/
4. How AI is changing retail: https://www.kdnuggets.com/how-ai-is-transforming-the-retail-industry
5. Three approaches to dealing with audio deepfakes: https://spectrum.ieee.org/deepfake-audio
6. Can AI help break the cycle of human loneliness? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/27/could-ai-help-cure-downward-spiral-of-human-loneliness
7. When my daughter was younger I told her to talk to her grandmother and write down the stories she told about growing up in World War 2. Would an app like this have made the process easier? https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/30/autobiographers-app-uses-ai-to-help-you-tell-your-life-story/
8. Since it isn't based an a large language model, hopefully this mental health counselling AI is less likely to hallucinate harmful responses: https://spectrum.ieee.org/woebot
9. Five times bad actors used AI to attempt to influence events: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/30/openai_stops_five_ineffective_ai/
10. The lack of security with research grant funded jobs is detrimental to research and is driving people away from research careers: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01570-y
11. Despite the hype, most people really don't care that much about AI: https://futurism.com/the-byte/people-disinterested-ai-survey
12. Reducing the energy demands of AI by representing neural network connection weights with one bit: https://spectrum.ieee.org/1-bit-llm
13. AI is likely to worsen inequality more than it boosts the economy: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/ai_gdp_inequality/
14. Using AI to allow headphones to separate a single person's voice out from the noise: https://www.washington.edu/news/2024/05/23/ai-headphones-noise-cancelling-target-speech-hearing/
15. There's a problem with reproducibility in science. AI is making it worse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/using_ai_in_science_can/
16. The skills gap around AI: https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/the-ai-skills-gap-and-how-to-address-it
17. If you're a researcher who is a parent, you do need more support to be able to travel to conferences and other research related events. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01571-x
18. Standards around AI need to be international, and not dominated by any particular superpower: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2132168/china-unveils-ambitious-three-year-plan-to-dominate-ai-and-computing-standards.html
19. I think there is a real problem with the quality of teaching at New Zealand unversities, not just in teacher training: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/516698/universities-reject-ero-criticism-of-teacher-training-courses
20. Managing networks is one of the ways AI can more immediately enter into IT: https://www.informationweek.com/data-management/can-ai-help-network-staffs-manage-network-complexity-
21. Are we doing enough to regulate AI? Or are the tech companies the only ones driving things? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/25/big-tech-existential-risk-ai-scientist-max-tegmark-regulations
22. What on earth is going on at OpenAI? Why are so many people quitting so spectacularly? https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-cryptic-warning
23. When it comes to AI, don't try going up against Yann LeCunn: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-destroyed-top-ai-scientist-yann-lecun
24. More of the why you should build autonomous AI agents, rather than the how: https://dataconomy.com/2024/05/30/how-to-create-autonomous-agents-the-future-of-generative-ai/