Why is it that Google, a company once known for its distinctive “Do no evil” guideline, is now facing the same charges of “surveillance capitalism” as Facebook, a company that never made such claims? Why is it now subject to the same kind of antitrust complaints once faced by Microsoft, the “evil empire” of the previous generation of computing? Why...

We’ve been very lucky. A couple of weeks ago, a supply-chain attack against the Linux xz Utils package, which includes the liblzma compression library, was discovered just weeks before the compromised version of the library would have been incorporated into the most widely used Linux distributions. The attack inserted a backdoor into sshd that would...

A recent article in Fast Company makes the claim “Thanks to AI, the Coder is no longer King. All Hail the QA Engineer.” It’s worth reading, and its argument is probably correct. Generative AI will be used to create more and more software; AI makes mistakes and it’s difficult to foresee a future in which it doesn’t; therefore, if we want software that...

This article originally appeared in The Information on March 5th, 2024. “The economic problem of society…is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.” —Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” Silicon Valley venture capitalists and many entrepreneurs...

There are lots of new models, including one from Apple, but that’s hardly news. AI news is infiltrating other sections of Trends (particularly Programming and Security)—but that’s also hardly news. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that AI will replace coding—but again, he’s not the first. But what’s new is Devin: an AI software engineer from Cognition...

TL;DR LLMs and other GenAI models can reproduce significant chunks of training data.Specific prompts seem to “unlock” training data.We have many current and future copyright challenges: training may not infringe copyright, but legal doesn’t mean legitimate—we consider the analogy of MegaFace where surveillance models have been trained on photos...