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The Weekend Reader
US and China might be in a bitter chip (and cold) war, but don’t tell that to Nvidia. The company is (or was) selling a shit ton of GPUs to Bytedance and Alibaba. Bytedance has ordered a billion dollars worth of GPUs and according to rumors, has so far “received a total of 100,000 A100 and H800 accelerator cards.” The $36,000-a-acard H800 went into production in March 2023.
(Pandaily)
Mechanical Turks are becoming less human.
As humans, we are inherently looking for shortcuts, no matter the risks of those shortcuts. The introduction of “large language models” into the world by OpenAI (and others) has already started to modify human behavior. A recent research report shows that “textual data collected via crowdsourc-ing is already produced to a large extent by machines, rather than by the hired human crowd workers. An abstract summarization task from the literature on Amazon Mechanical Turk and, through a combination of keystroke detection and synthetic text classification, estimate that 33–46% of crowd workers used LLMs when completing the task.”
5 Weekend Reads
- Google is garbage, whether it wants to acknowledge it or not.
- Money, unprofessionalism, Reddit. Ben Brooks is mad. And rightfully so.
- The furor over LLMs shouldn’t distract us from the fact that this is a big step for the world from a technological perspective. Just as it shouldn’t distract us from the fact that this is an error-prone technology, writes The National Interest magazine.
- Apple’s biggest competitor in India — Apple itself. Talking about iPhones, iPhone theft is a big business worthy of a Bollywood thriller.
- Not-so-blue skies for Jack Dorsey’s second attempt at Twitter.
Not Just The Tech Reads
- Inside the hunt for the Idaho Killer. A great report in the New York Times on how a new DNA technique helped crack the case.
- The 25 dubious Basquiats and the Museum scandal. It is a great yarn that makes you wonder if art experts are full of it.
Parting thoughts
“To gain knowledge add one thing each day. To gain wisdom subtract one thing each day.”…a Confucian expression.