AI Reading for Saturday August 9

Sam Altman says OpenAI will restore GPT-4o for Plus users after backlash over GPT-5 changes, citing underestimated attachment to older models - TechRadar

Sam Altman responds to reddit complaints, says they will look at keeping 4o for Plus users, say gpt-5 is not as dumb today compared to yesterday and will presumably think harder, they are still working through outages and kinks and high traffic - Reddit

Sam Altman doing a bit of damage control as some people think GPT-5 is worse at some things - X

Sam Altman says some users want ChatGPT to be a 'yes man' because they've never had anyone support them before - Business Insider

GPT-5 is potentially cheaper than Claude for coding, but is it really as good? - VentureBeat

GPT-5 makes up presidents, states - The Register

Red teams find it's easy to make GPT-5 say bad stuff - SecurityWeek

You can run OpenAI's gpt-oss-20b on your Macbook but it will take 90 seconds to tell you how many b's are in blueberry and 2 minutes to tell you who it thinks was the first king of England. - Lifehacker

ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine - Gizmodo

The AI Commerce Wars Have Begun - Forbes

Google’s in its AI era, of course its Finance page is getting a chatbot - The Verge

As AI Comes for Consulting, McKinsey Faces an “Existential” Shift - The Wall Street Journal

AI industry appeals certification of 7m-claimant class action that could ruin many players - Ars Technica

Wikipedia adopts speedy-deletion process for unreviewed AI-generated articles to curb “slop content” - The Verge

How to spot an AI video? Here's the thing, you can’t. - The Washington Post

Are you in a mid-career to senior job? Don’t fear AI – you could have this important advantage - The Conversation

Stanford AI Agents’ Lab Finds Promising COVID-19 Drug/Vaccine Leads in Days - News Center

AI slop tattoos? - New Atlas

AI as a relationship advisor: ‘It gave me the right words, to the point I was moved to tears’ - EL PAÍS English

An AI version of you could live forever - New York Post

Slow-news-day shower thoughts.

Medicine is high-bias in the mathematical sense. It over-indexes on pedigree and is slow to adapt in the face of new evidence. For life-and-death decisions, you would certainly hope so.

Health influencers like Huberman, Dr. Mike, Dr. Phil are maybe over-indexing on engagement; but there probably are ways to synthesize, leverage all the crowdsourced data and discussions better to make medicine better and more adaptable over time and customized to different populations and individuals. Doctors should be a bit concerned that ChatGPT sometimes does a better job of listening and diagnosing.

'Cultishness' and not 'engagement' is probably a better description what newer social-media movements over-index on, the health influencers, Trump and TESCREA and bitcoin.

Unfortunately it's the story of our age, a similar thing happens with bitcoin, government generally. There's a lack of trust in institutions partly due to of emergence of social collective action mechanisms. Trolls like Q, and Alex Jones, find the pressure points, as well as mountebanks like Fox, Trump, Musk doing it opportunistically to gain wealth and power.

You really need decent folks and politicians to figure out how to do this stuff or we're pretty screwed. Well, we are already screwed. AOC does an OK job, the barrage of SMS messages from ActBlue really do not. There are folks like MeidasTouch and the Krassensteins who sometimes get labeled grifters and clout chasers. But every successful business is a bit of a cult or a racket, everything human that endures has an element of grift and graft, they had to sell indulgences to build the Sistine Chapel.

US democracy is pretty low-bias and high-variance. That’s what makes it boundedly responsive to voters and to money. It also has some pressure points, that folks like Putin and Murdoch and Musk figured out how to use against us. Someone has to figure out how to take it back but I don’t really see anyone.

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