Google Declared A “Code Red", Elon Musk defends his Twitter Costs strategy, teachers are worried by AI, AI Generated Art, and Web3 Education Partnership

How ChatGPT Is Taking Over The Internet (& Google Has Declared A “Code Red

As the tech industry continues to evolve, one thing remains constant: Disruption is inevitable. Over the past three decades, a handful of products like Netscape’s web browser, Google’s search engine and Apple’s iPhone have truly upended the tech industry and made what came before them look like lumbering dinosaurs.

Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the next big disrupter. It can serve up information in clear, simple sentences, rather than just a list of internet links. It can explain concepts in ways people can easily understand. It can even generate ideas from scratch, including business strategies, Christmas gift suggestions, blog topics and vacation plans.

Although ChatGPT still has plenty of room for improvement, its release led Google’s management to declare a “code red.” For Google, this was akin to pulling the fire alarm. Some fear the company may be approaching a moment that the biggest Silicon Valley outfits dread — the arrival of an enormous technological change that could upend the business.

For more than 20 years, the Google search engine has served as the world’s primary gateway to the internet. But with a new kind of chat bot technology poised to reinvent or even replace traditional search engines, Google could face the first serious threat to its main search business. One Google executive described the efforts as make or break for Google’s future.Read more...

Elon Musk: Twitter’s Costs Were About To ‘Lead To Negative Cash Flow'

Elon Musk has defended his financial stewardship of Twitter, arguing that the social media platform would have faced a “negative cash flow situation of $3 billion a year” were it not for his controversial cost-cutting efforts.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who bought the social networking company for $44 billion in October after previously attempting to pull out of the deal, gave a snapshot of its dire finances during a Twitter Spaces online forum on Wednesday.

“We have an emergency fire drill on our hands. ... This company is like you’re in a plane that is headed towards the ground and high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” he said. “That’s the reason for my actions that may seem sometimes spurious.”

He said that the platform had been on course to spend about $5 billion in 2023. Overall costs at Twitter in 2021, the last annual period that the company reported before being taken private, were $5.6 billion, during which time it made a net loss of $221 million.

Musk predicted that Twitter’s net cash outflow, “if you didn’t make any changes,” would be about $6 billion to $6.5 billion next year. This is partly because the company has been loaded with $12.5 billion of debt to help to fund his acquisition, which required about $1.5 billion a year in annual debt servicing payments amid rising interest rates, he said.

“Not good since Twitter has $1 billion in cash,” he said. “So that’s why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy.”Read more...

AI can now write like a human. Some teachers are worried.

Artificial intelligence has advanced at an extraordinary pace over the past few years. Today, these incredibly complex algorithms are capable of creating award-winning art, penning scripts that can be turned into real films and — in the latest step that has dazzled people in the tech and media industries — mimic writing at a level so convincing that it’s impossible to tell whether the words were put together by a human or a machine.

A research company OpenAI released ChatGPT, a language model that can construct remarkably well-structured arguments based on simple prompts provided by a user. The system — which uses a massive repository of online text to predict what words should come next — is able to create new stories in the style of famous writers, write news articles about itself and produce essays that could easily receive a passing grade in most English classes.

That last use has raised concern among academics, who worry about the implications of an easily accessible platform that, in a matter of seconds, can put together prose on par with — if not better than — the writing of a typical student. 

Cheating in school is not new, but ChatGPT and other language models are categorically different from the hacks students have used to cut corners in the past. The writing these language models produce is completely original, meaning that it can’t be detected by even the most sophisticated plagiarism software.Read more...

AI Generated Art - Blockchain Technology To Protect Artists And Our Eyes

Oh damn, this is an interesting concept!

For those of you who missed it, AI generated art has been in the spotlight of late, and quickly made its way into the crosshairs of the art world. Why? Because the AI trained itself to make images, by looking at other artists' work.

On one hand, this is what human artists do anyway - look at other styles, to create your own unique hybrid. On the other, some of these AI recreations hit a little too close to home - some images even feature the jumbled signatures of other artists, in its work.

So here's where blockchain technology can help, according to Dan Neely, CEO of Vermillio (an 'authenticated AI' platform): Artists should be able to profit from AI generated art, that has lineage to their body of work (or, what us mere mortals refer to as 'taking inspiration from'). Blockchain can be employed to track which artists work an AI system is basing its work off, and have the AI company pay for access to that training data (and resulting creation). 

And it just so happens that that's exactly what Vermillio's 'authenticated AI' platform does. It tracks the training data and links the lineage of an AI's output, to the artists that informed it, and pays the artists in turn.Read more...

Brown Harris Stevens & The Metaverse Institute Announce Groundbreaking Web3 Education Partnership

The Metaverse Institute, the leading educational resource in Web3 technology, has partnered with Brown Harris Stevens to offer a comprehensive education program for its agents. The Metaverse Institute will provide the brokerage's agents with the tools they need to navigate this new world and successfully advise their clients on how their digital portfolios can factor into the real estate process.

"More of our clients are asking about how their digital portfolios can factor into the real estate process, and our agents need to understand how to navigate this new world," said Bess Freedman, CEO at BHS. "We are partnering with The Metaverse Institute because it’s no longer acceptable to operate in abstractions—Web3 is here and it is a growing wealth sector for our clients."

The Web3 Metalaureate course will provide BHS agents with a strong foundation for understanding topics including NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), DeFi (Decentralized Finance), blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and even the metaverse. The Web3 education platform will be available through The University on the BHS One digital hub so that agents can access it whenever they need it most.

Founded in 2022, The Metaverse Institute was developed to create a central source of information for those seeking a deeper understanding of Web3 technologies. The Metaverse Institute has quickly become one of the leading voices worldwide in Web3 education, and recently launched a content partnership with the European Institute which instructs students across 37 countries.Read more...