#41: Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Others Sign Letter to Pause AI, Italy Bans ChatGPT, and the Future of Prompt Engineering

AI leaders say slow down, Italy blocks AI, the United Nations
implements global framework. But, other leaders keep finding ways
to integrate ChatGPT, and new companies are launched. This
dichotomy makes for an interesting episode. Paul and Mike break it
all down. “The Letter’ heard round the world made waves - but what
does it really mean? In an open letter published by the nonprofit
Future of Life Institute, a number of well-known AI researchers and
tech figures, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, have called on
all AI labs to pause the development of large-scale AI systems for
at least 6 months due to fears over the profound risks to society
and humanity that they pose.  The letter notes that AI labs
are currently locked in an “out-of-control race” to develop and
deploy machine learning systems that no one can understand,
predict, or reliably control.  The signatories call for a
public and verifiable pause and for the development of shared
safety protocols for advanced AI design and development. What does
it mean, will other countries follow suit, is it a PR play, and at
this point, does it even matter? Are we thinking about
misinformation and job loss the right way? At the same time, moves
are being made internationally: UNESCO (United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization) is calling for the immediate
implementation of its Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial
Intelligence, a global framework for the ethical use of AI. 
And, in a bold move, Italy has become the first Western country to
block OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, citing privacy concerns. The
Italian data protection authority said it would ban and investigate
OpenAI with immediate effect, following a data breach involving
user conversations and payment information. Will other countries
follow suit?  Prompt engineering - a job, a function, or a
skill?  Paul recently wrote about one possible future he’s
seeing for prompt engineering on LinkedIn, saying: “How soon until
we have a Prompt Copilot that helps users write far more effective
and optimized generative AI prompts? Think of it as a prompting
assistant that improves and expands your prompts as you type them.”
He also talked about how the quality of human user prompts is
crucial for the effectiveness and value of generative AI
software—and that companies are motivated to reduce the friction in
their products and speed up time to value for all users.  The
development of a prompting assistant that helps users write more
effective and optimized prompts using AI seems like an obvious and
achievable innovation to solve this problem and could render
prompting as a career path or human skill less important beyond
2023. Will it become a must-know in any career path? BloombergGPT
is announced Bloomberg has announced the development of a new
large-scale generative AI model specifically trained on a wide
range of financial data to support natural language processing
tasks within the financial industry.  The model, called
BloombergGPT, represents the first step in the development of a
domain-specific model to tackle the complexity and unique
terminology of the financial domain.  The new model will
enable Bloomberg to improve existing financial NLP tasks such as
sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, news classification,
and question answering while bringing the full potential of AI to
the financial domain. On top of this, Seth Godin and David Sacks
are using ChatGPT. What’s next? Rapid-fire topics include the
All-In podcast, a Redditor loses his love of his career because of
AI, Replit teams up with Google Cloud, Sam Altman chats with Lex
Fridman, Sam Altman launches Worldcoin, and more.  Listen to
this week’s episode on your favorite podcast player, and be sure to
explore the links below for more thoughts and perspectives on these
important topics.