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Here’s today at a glance:

• OpenAI Gain of Function Test

• Overlaying Reality

• Things happen

• AI artwork of the day

🚨 OpenAI Gain of Function Test

OpenAI’s preparedness team did its first biorisk threat test, which they call an early warning system. It generally looks like a good baseline assessment to start discussions of what may eventually become necessary in a world where every individual may have Mutually Assured Destruction levels of biological knowledge and know-how.

First, they had 2 types of participants

• Wetlab biology experts with PhDs

• Undergrad level with one bio course

Assigned to 2 groups:

• Allowed access to Google and any other non-AI source access

• In addition, allowed ChatGPT access

Each participant was asked to complete a list of tasks normally involved in biothreat creation from idea to release. However, they disconnected the task sequences, so for eg, if a participant was asked to ideate the Ebola virus, the acquisition task would be for anthrax.

Results:

• No difference in risk from AI

• The ChatGPT group was slightly more successful but under the statistical threshold

• Ideation was easy, but the other steps were very difficult. Only 3 of the Experts, with ChatGPT’s help could clear all steps.

Conclusion:

• Biorisk info is easily accessible without AI 🤣

Comments:

• It’s an actual gain-of-function test!

• Actually no, because they disconnected the steps

• They had to remove the safety guardrails for ChatGPT version provided to participants, if not it would refuse to answer questions

Notably:

• We are drifting away from AI Paperclip End Of World to AI as a powerful tool in the hand of human

• The Gain of Function test was ON humans, the “mutation“ was the AI

• The obvious next step is to declare certain kinds of information dangerous and restrict access

• As Congress has said “we’re not going to make the same mistake we did with social media”, seems like really a push to reverse information openness

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🎨 Overlaying Reality

I loved this app (applet? extension), which is Chrome extension (Glif - Style Hunter), where you can right-click type in a prompt and get a transformed image in 30 seconds. No login, no subscription, no pic upload, no temperature settings, no fiddly knobs.

What really matters for AI is removing frictions for normies. It’s notable that all the small breakout lucrative apps have been one-click single-function apps deploying Stable Diffusion tech to the hungry masses (90s high school photo, looksmaxxed personal images etc).

This is the easiest-to-use SD iteration I’ve seen so far

More here.

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🗞️ Things Happen

• AI music generation may finally have its moment, as Universal Music Group threatens to pull its music from TikTok after failing to reach an agreement on royalties. TikTok, originally founded as the Musical.ly lip sync app, now creates music trends, and I suspect the team will quickly switch over to AI music generation, and start producing new hits. Stay… uh.. tuned.

• Another open-source large language and vision model, Llava-1.6, now beating Gemini Pro in some benchmarks. It’s pretty amazing to watch these benchmarks fall in successive months as the tempo of innovation across the sector steps up.

• Teknium1, the open source developer behind some of the most popular models, open sources his datasets! Applause is necessary, because for all the talk of open source (which is supposed to mean you can see how you make it!) what we really have are open weights, with no way to tinker with creation.

🖼️ AI Artwork Of The Day

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