Thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, went extinct decades ago – but now their RNA has been sequenced, in a first. CC-licensed photo by State Library of New South Wales on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Stripey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak • OpenAI
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We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT. They offer a new, more intuitive type of interface by allowing you to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about.
Voice and image give you more ways to use ChatGPT in your life. Snap a picture of a landmark while traveling and have a live conversation about what’s interesting about it. When you’re home, snap pictures of your fridge and pantry to figure out what’s for dinner (and ask follow up questions for a step by step recipe). After dinner, help your child with a math problem by taking a photo, circling the problem set, and having it share hints with both of you.
We’re rolling out voice and images in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks. Voice is coming on iOS and Android (opt-in in your settings) and images will be available on all platforms.
You can now use voice to engage in a back-and-forth conversation with your assistant. Speak with it on the go, request a bedtime story for your family, or settle a dinner table debate.
…The new voice technology—capable of crafting realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech—opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications. However, these capabilities also present new risks, such as the potential for malicious actors to impersonate public figures or commit fraud.
This is why we are using this technology to power a specific use case—voice chat. Voice chat was created with voice actors we have directly worked with. We’re also collaborating in a similar way with others.
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Faintly concerning. Also I wouldn’t trust ChatGPT to settle a dinner table debate. It would just be an invitation to lower ourselves deeper into the ocean of misinformation.
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Erotica, Atwood, and ‘For Dummies’: the books behind Meta’s generative AI • The Atlantic
Alex Reisner:
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Books play a crucial role in the training of generative-AI systems. Their long, thematically consistent paragraphs provide information about how to construct long, thematically consistent paragraphs—something that’s essential to creating the illusion of intelligence. Consequently, tech companies use huge data sets of books, typically without permission, purchase, or licensing. (Lawyers for Meta argued in a recent court filing that neither outputs from the company’s generative AI nor the model itself are “substantially similar” to existing books.)
In its training process, a generative-AI system essentially builds a giant map of English words—the distance between two words correlates with how often they appear near each other in the training text. The final system, known as a large language model, will produce more plausible responses for subjects that appear more often in its training text. (For further details on this process, you can read about transformer architecture, the innovation that precipitated the boom in large language models such as LLaMA and ChatGPT.) A system trained primarily on the Western canon, for example, will produce poor answers to questions about Eastern literature. This is just one reason it’s important to understand the training data used by these models, and why it’s troubling that there is generally so little transparency.
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You can find out whether a book you wrote (🙋♂️) or someone you know wrote is in the database. It’s hungry for fiction and non-fiction. The point about long paragraphs being useful for creating the illusion of intelligence is very apt.
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Meta pays £149m to break London office lease • Financial Times
Joshua Oliver and Cristina Criddle:
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Meta has paid £149m to break its lease on a major London development near Regent’s Park as hybrid working prompts big tech groups to pull back on office space.
British Land, which owns the building at 1 Triton Square, on Tuesday flagged a short-term hit to earnings as it will now have to find a new tenant for the eight-storey building in a challenging London office market.
“It is a staggering amount of money. In my 20 years, I can’t think of a tenant paying [so much] to give back space they don’t occupy,” said Matthew Saperia, analyst at Peel Hunt.
The news is the latest sign of Big Tech’s determination to reduce costs by cutting office space as more staff work from home. The contraction has hit cities such as San Francisco that rely heavily on tech companies. Office tenants and European markets including Dublin and London have not been spared.
Colm Lauder, real estate analyst at Goodbody, estimated Meta was now proposing to sublet or surrender close to 1m sq ft of office space in Europe, mostly in London and Dublin.
…Meta never moved into 1 Triton Square but let the space in 2021 following a major refurbishment. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on dramatic cuts to the company of tens of thousands of staff, he has also committed to shrinking its office space, with hybrid workers asked to share desks.
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Macron launches ‘ecological plan’ to end France’s use of fossil fuels by 2030 • The Guardian
Kim Willsher:
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Emmanuel Macron has unveiled a national “ecological plan” to reduce France’s greenhouse gas emissions by 55% and end the use of fossil fuels by 2030.
Speaking after a special ministerial council at the Elysée, the French president said an extra €10bn (£8.7bn) would be put towards the 50-point programme, which he described as “ecology à la Française”.
The plan was aimed at addressing the climate crisis while ensuring that France remained competitive in agriculture and industry, said Macron.
It was essential, he said, that “France reduces our dependence on so-called fossil fuels, coal, petrol and gas, which we don’t produce any more but on which we depend”. The aim, he added, was to reduce this dependence from 60% to 40% by 2030.
“The priority that we have set is that by January 2027 we will have totally ended the use of coal for our electricity production,” he said.
Other measures in the plan include the acceleration of electric car production, with brakes on gas boilers, though the president stopped short of a total ban. It also includes new projects for offshore windfarms, the opening of several electric battery factories in northern France, a map to establish where natural resources can be found in France, including hydrogen gas and essential elements for lithium batteries, and €700m state investment in the regional train network.
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Quite the contrast with Snooze Button” Sunak, who thinks pausing something doesn’t mean it will take any longer to do.
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Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year • BBC News
Lora Jones:
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Amazon is set to introduce adverts to its Prime Video streaming service in 2024 as it seeks to put more cash into creating TV shows and films.
UK Prime customers, along with those in the US, Germany and Canada, will see ads early next year unless they subscribe for an “ad-free” option at an additional cost. In a statement, Amazon said Prime Video still offered “very compelling value”. It follows similar moves by rivals including Disney+ and Netflix.
Amazon said that the ads would be introduced across France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Australia later in 2024. It will roll out the “ad-free” subscription tier for an extra $2.99 (£2.44) per month for Prime subscribers in the United States. Pricing for other countries will be announced at a later date, Amazon said.
At the moment, a Prime subscription, which includes free one-day delivery on goods as well as access to its streaming service, costs £8.99 per month, or £95 a year, in the UK.
“To continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time, starting in 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements in the UK,” Amazon said.
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Feels like a bait-and-switch, doesn’t it. The BBC TV licence, which provides access to multiple ad-free TV channels and also to a big news website and multiple radio channels (though the latter two don’t require a licence) feels like comparatively good value at £159 annually, fixed for some time.
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In-depth Q&A: Can ‘carbon offsets’ help to tackle climate change? • Carbon Brief
Josh Gabbatiss, Daisy Dunne, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Orla Dwyer, Molly Lempriere, Yanine Quiroz, Ayesha Tandon, Dr Giuliana Viglione, Joe Goodman, Tom Pearson, and Tom Prater:
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According to Carbon Brief analysis of data from the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, just 3% of offsets on the four largest voluntary offset registries involve removing CO2 – all from tree-planting projects.
Many available offsets have been labelled “junk” or “hot air” because they result from carbon-market design flaws and do not represent real emissions reductions.
The ideas and experiments with carbon offsets and trading trace back at least half a century, as outlined in the timeline of the 60-year history of carbon offsets.Over the years, offset projects have been dogged by allegations of land conflicts, human rights abuses, hampering conservation and furthering coal use and pollution.
They have been decried as a “false solution” by activists. Negotiations over new carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement have seen a sustained outcry for not delivering mitigation at scale, threatening Indigenous rights and “carbon colonialism”.
Meanwhile, companies claiming carbon neutrality using voluntary offsets have been increasingly called out and restrained from making “greenwashing” claims. (See: Why is there a risk of greenwashing with carbon offsets?)
The central problem of carbon offsetting is summarised by Robert Mendelsohn, a forest policy and economics professor at Yale School of the Environment. Reflecting on the achievements of carbon offsets, he tells Carbon Brief: “They have not changed behaviour and so they have not led to any reduction of carbon in the atmosphere…They have achieved zero mitigation.”
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There’s a whole week-long look at the reality of carbon offsets. Worth a bookmark.
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Google antitrust trial spills details on deals with Apple, Samsung • WSJ
Miles Kruppa:
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Apple began licensing Google’s search engine for the 2003 release of its Safari web browser. Google in 2005 offered Apple a portion of advertising revenue if it made the search engine the default choice on desktop computers.
Two years later, Apple asked Google for an amendment to the contract that would allow it to present users with several options for the default search engine, according to an email presented by the Justice Department. Apple approached Yahoo about participating in the setup.
In response, Google told Apple: “No default—no revenue share,” according to an internal email chain that included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin. Apple dropped the idea and hasn’t raised it again, said DOJ lead trial attorney Kenneth Dintzer.
A Google spokesman pointed to a previous statement saying the company competes for default placement so that users can easily access its services, and Apple has said it picks Google because it is the best search engine. Apple declined to comment.
…In 2021, Google analyzed the potential hit if Apple switched to another default search-engine provider, according to an internal email presented in court, calling it a “Code Red” scenario.
Google also tussled with Samsung about changes the smartphone company had made to its mobile web browser. The design tweaks made it easier for users to switch default search engines, according to testimony from Antonio Rangel, a behavioral economics professor called by the DOJ.
Google protested, telling Samsung it had violated their agreement, and the phone maker rolled back the change, Rangel said. Samsung didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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Of course, the level of Google’s concern about Apple defecting is easy to evaluate: it’s measured in the billions of dollars that it pays Apple every year to be the Safari default.
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The world’s biggest crypto firm is melting down • WSJ via MSN
Patricia Kowsmann, Caitlin Ostroff and Angus Berwick:
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After FTX crashed, the world of crypto seemed to belong to the largest exchange, Binance. Less than a year later, Binance is the one in distress.
Under threat of enforcement actions by US agencies, Binance’s empire is quaking. Over the past three months, more than a dozen senior executives have left, and the exchange has laid off at least 1,500 employees this year to cut costs and prepare for a decline in business. And while Binance still looms large in crypto, its dominance is dwindling.
Binance now handles about half of all trades where cryptocurrencies are directly bought and sold, down from about 70% at the start of the year, according to data provider Kaiko.
What happens to Binance will have immense implications for the crypto industry because the exchange is so big. Industry players and watchers say other exchanges would fill the void if Binance were to collapse. But in the short term, liquidity in the market could evaporate, driving the price of tokens sharply down.
One institutional trader told The Wall Street Journal that his company has conducted fire drills to withdraw its assets from Binance quickly in the event of a meltdown.
Yi He, Binance’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, vowed to overcome the troubles in a message to Binance staff last month.
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I’d have thought that the biggest firm in crypto was Tether, which basically keeps the whole shenanigans afloat. The problem for all these crypto firms will be the extent to which they’re wrapped up with extremely shady, prone-to-violence people when everything starts going south.
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Tasmanian tiger RNA is first to be recovered from an extinct animal • Nature
Miryan Naddaf:
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For the first time, researchers have sequenced RNA from an extinct animal species — the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus).
Using muscle and skin samples from a 132-year-old museum specimen, scientists isolated millions of RNA sequences. This genetic material provides information about the animal’s genes and the proteins that were made in its cells and tissues. The findings, published in Genome Research1, offer hope that RNA locked up in the world’s museum collections could provide new insights into long-dead species.
Being able to look at RNA in particular “opens up a whole new potential source of information”, says Oliver Smith, a geneticist at the medical-diagnostics company Micropathology in Coventry, UK. “As opposed to looking at what a genome is, we can look at what the genome does.”
…Obtaining RNA from historical samples is challenging because unlike DNA — which is highly stable and has been extracted from extinct species that lived more than one million years ago — RNA rapidly breaks down into smaller fragments. “Outside of living cells, it’s believed to be degraded or destroyed in minutes,” says study co-author Marc Friedländer, a geneticist at Stockholm University.
The team developed a protocol specifically for extracting ancient RNA from tissue samples, adapting standard methods that are used on fresher samples. Nevertheless, “it was surprising that we found these authentic RNA sequences in this mummified Tasmanian tiger”, says Friedländer.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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