Q* is a symptom of our addiction to AI — This article is a selection from The Algorithmic Bridge, an educational project aimed at bridging the gap between AI and people. Join me to learn how to navigate a future that has already arrived. Even the best critical thinkers can fall victim to the contagious thrill and excitement caused by…

The things that went wrong this weekend have been wrong since the very beginning — the rest is fine and always has been — This is my fifth and final article about the recent OpenAI saga (you can read the other four here, here, here, and here). It is a calmer reflection on the significance of the events from Friday (the firing of CEO Sam Altman) to Tuesday (Altman’s return as CEO). It is…

It’s not a clash between doomers and accelerationists — both Altman and Sutskever are pro-safety and AI-optimists. So, what happened? — Let’s try to further elucidate, with the available information, what’s happened to OpenAI, which resulted yesterday in the unexpected ousting of CEO Sam Altman and Chairman Greg Brockman. I’ve seen people framing the internal clash as a conflict between AI doomers — those who think safety is the most important…

Expect many, many changes. Time to revisit our timelines for everything — Edit Tuesday Nov 22nd: Sam Altman is back as OpenAI CEO. A couple of important details: Changes to the non-profit board: The board was composed of six people before the firing: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D’angelo, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley. Now it’s only three members. Altman…

GPT-4 Turbo, GPTs, and the GPT Store are not the real state-of-the-art in AI — Everyone, myself included, is excited to try and succeed with the new GPTs, i.e., OpenAI’s create-your-own-ChatGPT service that Sam Altman announced during the DevDay opening keynote (they’re available only for paying subscribers). The possibility of making a customized quasi-AI agent is a game-changer. The capabilities of these GPTs are the…

The rampant cynicism in Silicon Valley AI companies is beyond me — Perhaps the most startling reality of AI, in the worst possible sense of the word, is that in the same week, you can find an article entitled OpenAI chief seeks new Microsoft funds to build ‘superintelligence’ published next to another entitled Underage Workers Are Training AI. A profoundly dystopian image…

It is an irrational fear but people are afraid of stupider things — Eric Schmidt says: I think a big problem w getting the public to care about AI risk is that it’s just a huge emotional ask — for someone to really consider that there’s a solid chance that the whole world’s about to end. People will instinctively resist it tooth-and-nail. People…

The US and the UK have decided what the future of AI looks like — This article is a selection from The Algorithmic Bridge, an educational newsletter to bridge the gap between AI, algorithms, and people. It was not the potential benefits of nuclear bombs that led the US to develop the first one in 1945, which was soon later replicated by other superpowers. It…

This world is a trap of perfectly-customized entertainment: We need boredom — I’ve been thinking about entertainment. And about boredom. And about how my body, which is always seeking new things to watch and play with, sometimes self-saturates to the point that it wants nothing. Just be there, bored. And I realize that we’ve forgotten what that is. Boredom is dead. And…