Mentioned in today’s edition: Sam Altman, Phil Spencer, Tesla, Wikipedia, Visual Intelligence, LLMs, Uber Eats and e-ink. Plus, deals on Ring doorbells, AMD processors and Optus mobile plans.

OpenAI's systems flagged a future mass shooter's gun violence-related use of ChatGPT, but the company decided against alerting police (WSJ). Months before Jesse Van Rootselaar killed 8 others at a Canadian school, a dozen OpenAI staffers debated whether her use of ChatGPT — involved "describ[ing] scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days" — was a threat of potential real-world violence. The company decided not to tell police, but banned her account. 

The Sizzle: The key question here is: why did OpenAI decide that this future shooter's behaviour was too extreme for its products, but also not extreme enough to be worth telling police about? It's not like it can claim that it missed the signs — clearly it knew something, hence the ban — but apparently that wasn't bad enough to tell anyone else. I think the only way that this makes sense is if you are a company that's less interested in protecting people than it is in protecting itself.

What amazes me is the way that these AI companies are repeating the exact same problems as social media companies, despite having seen — and in some cases having staff from social media companies who worked on — all the things that can go wrong. When you get to have a billion users, we know there will be people who use these platforms that will do terrible things. OpenAI isn't to blame for the shooter's violence as far as we know. But it does have the capability to do something about it: to flag and intervene. Choosing not to is, well, just that. It's a choice. 

Related OpenAI reading: OpenAI now says it only needs US$600b in compute spending through to 2030 (ITNews), the latest OpenAI gadget thought bubble is a smart speaker with a camera (Verge) and Sam Altman defends AI energy and water use by saying that "it takes a lot of energy to train a human" (TechCrunch)

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The bad vibes around the future of Xbox have gotten even worse with some big departures. Long-time Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and his heir apparent, Xbox President Sarah Bond, have both resigned (IGN). The unit's new president is, uh, currently the president of "Microsoft's CoreAI product" which is the engineering division dedicated to building a "new AI-first app stack" (Microsoft). Which is the obvious pick to run all the gaming stuff in Microsoft. 

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Wikipedia is ditching Archive.today after its maintainer DDoSed a critic and tampered with its saved pages (Ars Technica). Volunteers at the English version of Wikipedia are in the process of removing 695,000 Archive.today links (and its variants like archive.is etc) from more than 400,000 pages. The catalyst was that editors found that the pseudonymous person behind Archive.today was carrying out a revenge campaign against a blogger who tried to unmask them. This involved setting up Archive.today's CAPTCHA so that users were DDoSing them, and inserting the blogger's name into captures of pages -- meaning that they couldn't be trusted as authoritative sources anymore :/

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Australia:

Rest of World:

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Sizzler Ben shared a link to a fun newsletter that tells a story in an interesting way: every few paragraphs, the language changes to the style of a century earlier. 

It goes from 2000 to 1900 to 1800 etc. for a thousand years. I tapped out at 1500 - I wonder how far you can go? 

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Electronics

Computing

Mobile

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