Google's Bard chatbot got a big upgrade. It's now powered by Gemini, "the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding), one of the most popular methods to test the knowledge and problem solving abilities of AI models". Google compares it directly to GPT-4 in a range of benchmarks, with Gemini coming out on top in the vast majority of them. There's 3 models, Nano, Pro and Ultra. Pro is available now via Bard if you wanna muck around with it, but Ultra is the one with all the impressive benchmarks Google is comparing to GPT-4. Plebs won't get access to Gemini Ultra until Bard Advanced is made public some time next year. If you have any technical knowledge about this stuff (I don't), you might find the white paper on Gemini useful.
US Senator Ron Wyden revealed that "government agencies in foreign countries were demanding smartphone push notification records from Google and Apple", placing these companies in a "unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps". This handily provides access to unencrypted messages that would normally be sent via end-to-end encryption, as the messages have to be decrypted in order to appear in a push notification preview (if enabled on the user's device) and are not end-to-end encrypted themselves. Apple and Google has confirmed this takes place and Google even said it "already documents requests for push notification data in aggregated data of all government requests for user information". Senator Wyden wants to make it so companies can be more specific about push notification interception in their transparency reports.
In the latest ACCC "influencer sweep" (I love that phrase), the regulatory body found that 81% are "making posts that raised concerns under the Australian Consumer Law for potentially misleading advertising" - 96% of fashion influencers and 73% of gaming and tech influencers raised "concern" for the ACCC as they did "not make adequate disclosures in their posts where it appeared they were receiving payment, gifts or other incentives to promote brands, products or services" or "using vague or confusing language to disclose advertising, such as sp and spon instead of sponsored". There doesn't appear to be any punishments, just the usual "continue to monitor influencers and businesses and where we see continued non-compliance we may take enforcement action". Jail! Jail for the influencers!!!
When I used to work for a company that handled a lot of financial transactions (hello Dan!), I was asked multiple times if I wanted to learn IBM's mainframe OS. Not because I was good at it or anything, but simply because the people running the beasts that keep the dollars moving keep retiring and the banks need new blood in the system. I kinda regret not taking up that offer - it would have earned me a shitload more cash than this stupid newsletter! Anyway, that anecdote fell out of my brain because of an article explaining how important the 70 year old COBOL programming language is to the world's money systems despite the shrinking amount of people skilled in it. Learn it and you have a secure, high paying job. COBOL is just too hard to replace as it's perfect for the task of handling gazillions of transactions and the applications out there are so battle hardened that to replace them now is a fool's errand.
Circuitry in DVD reader, 100x magnification, Dennis Hinks (2014 Nikon Photomicrography Competition)
📻 Prick - Something For Kate
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