China Receives US Equipment To Make Advanced Chips Despite New Rules

schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Chinese companies are buying up U.S. chipmaking equipment to make advanced semiconductors, despite a raft of new export curbs aimed at thwarting advances in the country’s semiconductor industry, a report said on Tuesday. The 741 page annual report, released by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, takes aim at the Biden administration’s Oct. 2022 export curbs, which seek to bar Chinese chipmakers from getting U.S. chipmaking tools if they would be used to manufacture advanced chips at the 14 nanometer node or below. With the Commerce Department using the 14 nanometer restriction limit, ‘importers are often able to purchase the equipment if they claim it is being used on an older production line, and with limited capacity for end-use inspections, it is difficult to verify the equipment is not being used to produce more advanced chips,’ the report stated.

According to the document, between January and August 2023, China imported $3.2 billion (RMB 23.5 billion) worth of semiconductor manufacturing machines from the Netherlands, a 96.1% increase over the $1.7 billion (RMB 12 billion) recorded over the same period in 2022. China’s imports of semiconductor equipment from all countries totaled $13.8 billion (RMB 100 billion) over the first eight months of 2023, it added. The report does not outline a specific recommendation to address the gaps in the U.S. rules, but urges Congress to request an annual evaluation, to be completed within 6 months by the General Accountability Office and later made public, of the effectiveness of export controls on chipmaking equipment to China.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – China Receives US Equipment To Make Advanced Chips Despite New Rules

FAA Clears SpaceX To Launch Second Starship Flight

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch its second spaceflight attempt of its Starship rocket. CNBC reports: SpaceX posted on the social media platform X shortly after the greenlight that it was “targeting Friday, November 17 for Starship’s second flight test.” A two-hour launch window will begin at 8 a.m. ET. SpaceX plans to livestream the Starship launch, with a webcast beginning about 30 minutes before lift off. Starship first launched in April, achieving flight for a few minutes before exploding mid-air, severely damaging the ground infrastructure and raising environmental concerns. The FAA in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service launched a safety review prior to issuing a new flight license for the second attempt.

FWS determined that the rocket launch and subsequent damage to the pad infrastructure had no long-term negative effects on the surrounding ecology, according to an agency report released Wednesday. Still, SpaceX will help mitigate damage to the area by reducing sound waves and vibrations, assisting in fire suppression, and providing launch pad protection, the agency said. As a result, “the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement Wednesday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – FAA Clears SpaceX To Launch Second Starship Flight

Global Decline In Male Fertility Linked To Common Pesticides

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A prolonged decline in male fertility in the form of sperm concentrations appears to be connected to the use of pesticides, according to a study published Wednesday. Researchers compiled, rated and reviewed the results of 25 studies of certain pesticides and male fertility and found that men who had been exposed to certain classes of pesticides had significantly lower sperm concentrations. The study, published Wednesday in Environmental Health Perspectives, included data from more than 1,700 men and spanned several decades. “No matter how we looked at the analysis and results, we saw a persistent association between increasing levels of insecticide and decreases in sperm concentration,” said study author Melissa Perry, who is an environmental epidemiologist and the dean of the College of Public Health at George Mason University. “I would hope this study would get the attention of regulators seeking to make decisions to keep the public safe from inadvertent, unplanned impacts of insecticides.” […]

Scientists have long suspected changes to the environment could be contributing, and they’ve been probing the role of pesticides for decades in studies of animals and in human epidemiology research. The new analysis focuses on two groups of chemicals — organophosphates and some carbamates — that are commonly used in insecticides. The researchers looked at data collected from groups of people with exposures to pesticides and others who were not. Most, but not all, of the research centered on exposures in the workplace. The researchers controlled for outside factors that could contribute to lower sperm counts like smoking and age. Perry said researchers aren’t sure how pesticides are affecting sperm concentrations and more research will be needed.

It’s likely that pesticides are one of many environmental factors that could be contributing to a decline in sperm concentrations. The trend of sperm concentration declines has been widely observed in studies around the world, but it’s a complicated topic and some scientists still have reservations. Sperm are notoriously difficult to count and the technology to do so has changed over the years. There are many confounding factors that can affect male fertility, including age, obesity and opioid use, to name a few. Sperm concentrations are one important data point to consider, but other factors — like how sperm are shaped and how they swim — are also critical to male fertility. Perry said she hopes agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency begin to factor the impact of chemicals and pesticides on reproductive health in their assessments. “Given the body of evidence and these consistent findings, it’s time to proactively reduce these insecticide exposures for men wanting to have families,” Perry said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Global Decline In Male Fertility Linked To Common Pesticides

Prices For Offshore Wind Power To Rise By 50%

Simon Jack reports via the BBC: The price paid to generate electricity by offshore wind farms is set to rise by more than 50% as the government tries to entice energy firms to invest. Its comes after an auction for offshore wind projects failed to attract any bids, with firms arguing the price set for electricity generated was too low. The BBC understands the government now will raise the price it pays from 44 pounds per MWh to as much as 70 pounds. It is hoped more offshore wind capacity will lead to cheaper energy bills. Energy companies have told the BBC that electricity produced out at sea would remain cheaper and less prone to shock increases compared to power derived from gas-fired power stations.

The UK is a world leader in offshore wind and is home to the world’s four largest farms, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, which provided 13.8% of the UK’s electricity generation last year, according to government statistics. But when the government revealed in September that no companies bid for project contracts, plans to nearly quadruple offshore wind capacity from 13 gigawatts GW to 50 by 2030 — enough to power every home in the UK — were dealt a heavy blow.

The technology has been described as the “jewel in the UK’s renewable energy crown,” but firms have been hit by higher costs for building offshore farms, with materials such as steel and labour being more expensive. According to energy companies, the government’s failure to recognize the impact of higher costs led some firms to abandon existing projects, and all operators to boycott the most recent auction.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Prices For Offshore Wind Power To Rise By 50%

Google Paid $8 Billion To Make Its Apps Default On Samsung Phones

Lauren Irwin reports via The Hill: Google agreed to pay $8 billion over four years to Samsung to make its apps default on Samsung phones, according to information presented by Epic Games in court. James Kolotouros, vice president for partnerships at Google, testified Monday in a San Francisco trial, saying that the company and Samsung were to share app store revenue to ensure Android mobile devices came with Google Play preinstalled. Epic, the company that makes the popular video game “Fortnite,” sued Google in 2020, alleging the company’s app marketplace violates antitrust laws.

Epic is trying to show that Google executives have discouraged third-party app stores on Samsung devices so it wouldn’t cut into the profit of Google Play, Bloomberg reported. According to Kolotouros’s testimony, half or more of Google Play revenue comes from Samsung devices. The trial targets the app store that distributes apps for the company’s Android software, which powers virtually all the world’s smartphones that aren’t made by Apple.

Epic alleges Google has created an illegal monopoly on Android apps so it can boost its profits through commissions, ranging from 15 to 30 percent on purchases made within an app. Google argues it was doing so to compete with Apple and its app store, an argument attacked by Epic attorney Lauren Moskowitz. Earlier in the trial, Google’s attorney said the company can’t be a monopoly because it faces competition from companies such as Apple. Further reading: Apple Gets 36% of Google Revenue in Search Deal, Witness Says

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Google Paid Billion To Make Its Apps Default On Samsung Phones

Airbnb Acquires Secretive Firm Launched By Siri Co-Founder

Airbnb has acquired a secretive new AI startup, GamePlanner.AI, for around $200 million. TechCrunch reports: GamePlanner was co-founded by Adam Cheyer and Siamak Hodjat. Cheyer famously helped co-launch the startup Siri, which Apple acquired and whose technology became the basis for Apple’s AI-powered Siri assistant. Hodjat previously worked with Cheyer at Viv Labs, a firm that Samsung bought and leveraged to launch its own AI assistant, Bixby, in 2017. It’s not immediately clear what GamePlanner does. A LinkedIn search only turns up two associates: Gabe Greenbaum, a general partner at B Capital who sits on GamePlanner’s board of directors, and Joseph Huang, head of design at GamePlanner. GamePlanner hasn’t had a web presence for some time; the Internet Archive’s earliest cache of the website (from December 2021) yields a blank page.

But in a canned statement, Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky hinted that the 12-person startup combines expertise in AI and design toward crafting AI-driven experiences, sort of like an AI-focused consultancy. “AI will rapidly alter our world more than any other technology in our lifetime, but we need to ensure that it augments humanity in a positive way,” Chesky said, adding that the GamePlanner team will focus on “accelerating” select AI projects and integrating their tooling into Airbnb’s platform. “Airbnb is one of the more humanistic companies in technology, and I believe that, together with Adam and his team, we can develop some of the best interfaces and practical applications for AI.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Airbnb Acquires Secretive Firm Launched By Siri Co-Founder

Firefox Going To Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed… Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default! Mozilla Bug 1752398 to “ship the Wayland backend to release” has been closed this evening! After the ticket was open for the past two years, it’s now deemed ready to hopefully ship enabled for Firefox 121!

This patch drops the “early beta or earlier” check to let Wayland support be enabled by default when running on recent GTK versions (GTK 3.24.30 threshold). Firefox 121 is due for release around 19 December and if all continues to hold, it will finally ship with the Wayland back-end enabled by default as another big step forward.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Firefox Going To Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default

Microsoft Rebrands Bing Chat To Copilot

In what may be a potentially confusing rebranding move, Microsoft today has rebranded Bing Chat to Copilot, sharing the same brand name as multiple other Microsoft AI products. Search Engine Land reports: Bing is no longer “your AI-powered copilot for the web.” However, Microsoft Bing will still provide a combined Search and chat experience. It will just be called CoPilot heading forward. For people who may not want that combined experience, CoPilot will have its own standalone ChatGPT-style experience at https://copilot.microsoft.com/.

Microsoft said the rebrand is to unify the Copilot experience: “Our efforts to simplify the user experience and make Copilot more accessible to everyone starts with Bing, our leading experience for the web. Beginning today, Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise are becoming Copilot, with commercial data protection enforced when any eligible user is signed in with Microsoft Entra ID.”

While it’s definitely a more unified experience, it also seems a bit confusing because Microsoft’s chatbot “companion” is used across multiple apps, including Microsoft 365, Edge, Windows and more — some free, some not. In addition to Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is also rebranded as Copilot Pro. It offers the same chat functionality with greater commercial data protection for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Rebrands Bing Chat To Copilot

Qi2 Wireless Charging Spec Is Here, Offering Speed Boosts and Magnets

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you’ve only ever used standard Qi chargers with devices that don’t have their own schemes, the Wireless Power Consortium’s announcement today of the first Qi 2.0 devices being ready to launch before the holidays, with more than 100 in the queue behind them, is great. Qi2 sports a “Magnetic Power Profile” (MPP), created with help by Apple’s MagSafe team, to help align devices and chargers’ coils for faster, more efficient charging. Qi2-certified devices set onto Qi2 chargers can achieve 15 W charging, up from 7.5 W in the standard Qi scheme.

That brings Qi2 devices up to the same speed as iPhones on MagSafe chargers, and it clears up some consumer confusion about how fast a device might charge on Qi, MagSafe, or proprietary chargers. Should a phone and charger be Qi2 certified, you can now expect about 15 W out of it, regardless of whatever Google, Apple, or third party is behind them. Android and iPhone users alike are no longer beholden to their primary hardware vendor if they want 15 W of wireless juice. This announcement does not, however, bring the Qi2 standard close to the far-out speeds that proprietary setups now offer. […]

A number of accessory makers, including stalwarts Anker and Belkin, had already lined up their Qi2-compatible offerings, waiting for the certification to drop. It will be interesting to see if Qi2 brings a wave of magnet mania to Android phones, akin to the MagSafe-induced blitz a few years back. Magnetic charging packs, wallets, wireless charging for a non-wireless-charging phone — there’s a lot to work with, especially at now somewhat more respectable charging speeds. Regarding speed, the WPC told Android Authority back in January that the Qi2 standards group intends to standardize charging speeds above 15 W by mid-2024. If you need a fast charge, plugging in the right cable to a well-powered source is still the most certain route. But with magnetic alignment and a good deal more universal compatibility, Qi2 drags the broader wireless charging market forward.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Qi2 Wireless Charging Spec Is Here, Offering Speed Boosts and Magnets

Planet Where It Rains Sand Revealed By Nasa Telescope

Nasa’s James Webb space telescope has revealed a planet where specks of sand fall as rain, in groundbreaking observations. From a report: The planet, Wasp-107b, lies 200 light years away in the Virgo constellation and had already caught the attention of astronomers because it is very large but very light, earning it the nickname the “candy floss” planet. The latest observations give an unprecedented glimpse of a strange and exotic world beyond our solar system that features silicate sand clouds and rain, scorching temperatures, raging winds and the distinct burnt-matches scent of sulphur dioxide. “Our knowledge of other planets is based on what we know from Earth,” said Prof Leen Decin, of the Catholic Institute (KU) Leuven and first author of the research. “That’s a very restricted knowledge.”

The planet was discovered in 2017 after astronomers spotted a telltale periodic flickering of light from its host star each time the planet passed in front of it. “It’s like a fly in front of a street lamp,” said Decin. “You see a slight dimming of the light.” James Webb takes these observations to the next level by measuring starlight that is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere. Because different elements absorb different wavelengths of light, the spectrum of starlight indicates which gases are present. Wasp-107b is similar in mass to Neptune but almost the size of Jupiter, and its vast, diffuse nature allows the James Webb telescope to peer deep into its atmosphere.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Planet Where It Rains Sand Revealed By Nasa Telescope

Amazon To Stop Selling Seven Eyedrops After FDA Warning

Amazon said on Wednesday that it was removing seven eyedrops products from its website after the Food and Drug Administration warned the company that the eyedrops had not been recognized as safe and effective. From a report: The F.D.A. said in a letter to Andrew Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, on Monday that Amazon had violated federal regulations by selling the eyedrops, which claimed to help with problems including pink eye, dry eyes, eyestrain and floaters. “These products are especially concerning from a public health perspective,” the F.D.A. letter said. “Ophthalmic drug products, which are intended for administration into the eyes, in general pose a greater risk of harm to users because the route of administration for these products bypasses some of the body’s natural defenses.”

The eyedrops named in the letter are: Similasan Pink Eye Relief, The Goodbye Company Pink Eye, Can-C Eye Drops, Optique 1 Eye Drops, OcluMed Eye Drops, TRP Natural Eyes Floaters Relief, and Manzanilla Sophia Chamomile Herbal Eye Drops. None of the eyedrops appeared to be available for purchase on Amazon on Wednesday morning. The company said in an emailed statement on Wednesday that “safety is a top priority.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Amazon To Stop Selling Seven Eyedrops After FDA Warning

Microsoft and Nvidia Are Making It Easier To Run AI Models on Windows

Microsoft and Nvidia want to help developers run and configure AI models on their Windows PCs. During the Microsoft Ignite event on Wednesday, Microsoft announced Windows AI Studio: a new hub where developers can access AI models and tweak them to suit their needs. From a report: Windows AI Studio allows developers to access development tools and models from the existing Azure AI Studio and other services like Hugging Face. It also offers an end-to-end “guided workspace setup” with model configuration UI and walkthroughs to fine-tune various small language models (SLMs), such as Microsoft’s Phi, Meta’s Llama 2, and Mistral.

Windows AI Studio lets developers test the performance of their models using Prompt Flow and Gradio templates as well. Microsoft says it’s going to roll out Windows AI Studio as a Visual Studio Code extension in the “coming weeks.” Nvidia, similarly, revealed updates to TensorRT-LLM, which the company initially launched for Windows as a way to run large language models (LLMs) more efficiently on H100 GPUs. However, this latest update brings TensorRT-LLM to PCs powered by GeForce RTX 30 and 40 Series GPUs with 8GB of RAM or more.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Microsoft and Nvidia Are Making It Easier To Run AI Models on Windows

Disney Pulls TV Channels From Vietnam, Govt 'Concerned' Piracy Will Run Riot

An anonymous reader writes: A newspaper run by the Communist Party of Vietnam is reporting the “disappearance” of a number of popular channels from pay TV packages. Citing National Geographic and Nat Geo Wild as examples, the paper notes they’re owned by Disney. Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications is said to be “concerned” that the withdrawal will allow piracy to run rampant in Vietnam. Multiple high-level trade reports in the U.S. note that piracy has been rampant for years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Disney Pulls TV Channels From Vietnam, Govt ‘Concerned’ Piracy Will Run Riot

Tencent Stockpiled Nvidia AI Chips for 'a Couple of Generations'

Tencent dismissed concerns that US export controls will constrain its AI development capabilities, at least for the foreseeable future. From a report: The Shenzhen-based company has stockpiled Nvidia’s H800 artificial intelligence accelerators, enough to develop its proprietary Hunyuan AI model for at least another couple of generations, President Martin Lau said on an analyst call after earnings on Wednesday. “Right now we actually have one of the largest inventories of AI chips in China among all the players,” Lau said. “We were the first to put in orders for H800 and that allows us to have a pretty good inventory of H800 chips. So we have enough chips to continue our development.”

The Biden administration in October escalated export controls on AI semiconductors heading to China, depriving the Asian nation from access to a broad range of the world’s best AI-training hardware. The purpose of the measures is to prevent China’s military from obtaining the advanced technology, Washington argues, but they’re also making business harder for the country’s private sector. Elsewhere in China, AI industry veteran Kai-Fu Lee’s unicorn startup 01.AI has been buying up the Nvidia chips it needs to develop its own foundation models, with Lee saying the company has enough semiconductors for the next 18 months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Tencent Stockpiled Nvidia AI Chips for ‘a Couple of Generations’

Microsoft Officially Launches Loop, Its Notion Competitor

Microsoft is officially launching its Notion-like productivity and collaboration app called Loop. From a report: Loop lets you use flexible, collaborative workspaces and pages to make it easier to cooperate on work. If you’re familiar with Notion’s interface at all, Loop looks and feels remarkably similar — right down to the ability to easily access a bunch of tools and formatting options by typing the forward slash key (which pulls up what Microsoft calls the “insert menu”). But because Loop is built by Microsoft, that means it has some useful integrations with other Microsoft software.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Officially Launches Loop, Its Notion Competitor

EU Agrees Law To Curb Methane Emissions From Fossil Fuel Industry

The EU has struck a deal that will force the fossil fuel industry to rein in dangerous methane pollution. From a report: Under the proposed law, which is the first of its kind, coal, oil and gas companies would be required to report their methane emissions and take steps to avoid them. The measures include finding and fixing leaks, and limiting wasteful practices such as venting and flaring gas by 2027. Jutta Paulus, a German MEP with the Green grouping who worked on the proposal, said: “Finally, the EU tackles the second most important greenhouse gas with ambitious measures. Less methane emissions mean more climate protection and more energy sovereignty.”

Methane has more than 80 times the global heating power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year timespan but does not last as long in the atmosphere. Cutting methane emissions is seen as a cheap and easy way to stop extreme weather growing more violent in the short-term. The new EU rules, which were agreed on Wednesday by the European parliament and European Council, mean fossil fuel companies must try to repair leaks no more than five days after finding them, and fully fix them within a month. By the end of next year, operators will have to survey their existing sites and submit action plans to find and fix methane leaks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – EU Agrees Law To Curb Methane Emissions From Fossil Fuel Industry

Microsoft Unveils Its First Custom-Designed AI, Cloud Chips

Microsoft unveiled its first homegrown AI chip and cloud-computing processor in an attempt to take more control of its technology and ramp up its offerings in the increasingly competitive market for AI computing. The company also announced new software that lets clients design their own AI assistants. From a report: The Maia 100 chip, announced at the company’s annual Ignite conference in Seattle on Wednesday, will provide Microsoft Azure cloud customers with a new way run AI programs that generate content. Microsoft is already testing the chip with its Bing and Office AI products, said Rani Borkar, a vice president who oversees Azure’s chip unit. Microsoft’s main AI partner, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is also testing the processor. Both Maia and the server chip, Cobalt, will debut in some Microsoft data centers early next year.

Microsoft’s multi-year investment shows how critical chips have become to gaining an edge in both AI and the cloud. Making them in-house lets companies wring performance and price benefits from the hardware. The initiative also could insulate Microsoft from becoming overly dependent on any one supplier, a vulnerability currently underscored by the industrywide scramble for Nvidia’s AI chips. Microsoft’s push into processors follows similar moves by cloud rivals. Amazon.com Inc. acquired a chip maker in 2015 and sells services built on several kinds of cloud and AI chips. Google began letting customers use its AI accelerator processors in 2018.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Unveils Its First Custom-Designed AI, Cloud Chips

Google is Going To Let You Annotate Search Results

Ever wanted to add your own annotations to search results you find on Google? With Google’s new “Notes” experiment, launching Wednesday as an opt-in feature through Search Labs, you’ll be able to. From a report: If you’ve opted in to Notes, buttons to add and see notes will appear under search results and under articles on Discover in the Google app. When you create a note, you can add colorful fonts and images. During a briefing, Google showed me a note for an article about different kinds of frosting that had green text, an image of a cake, and a heart sticker. (At the bottom of the note, there was a link to the article the note was about.)

If you post a note, it should show up “within minutes,” unless it’s flagged for human review, Google VP Cathy Edwards said in an interview with The Verge. When you look at all of the notes for a link, what’s shown will be ranked dynamically based on things like the user’s query and a note’s relevance to the content on the page.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Google is Going To Let You Annotate Search Results

China Claims World's Fastest Internet With 1.2 Terabit-Per-Second Network

Huawei and China Mobile have built a 3,000 kilometer (1,860-mile) internet network linking Beijing to the south, which the country is touting as its latest technological breakthrough. From a report: The two firms teamed up with Tsinghua University and research provider Cernet.com to build what they claim is the world’s first internet network to achieve a “stable and reliable” bandwidth of 1.2 terabits per second, several times faster than typical speeds around the world. Trials began July 31 and it’s since passed various tests verifying that milestone, the university said in a statement.

Tsinghua, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s alma mater, is plugging the project as an industry-first built entirely on homegrown technology, and credits Huawei prominently in its statement. The Chinese firm in August made waves when it released a 5G smartphone with a sophisticated made-in-China processor, inspiring celebration in Chinese state and social media. That event also spurred debate in Washington about whether the Biden administration has gone far enough in attempts to contain Chinese technological achievement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – China Claims World’s Fastest Internet With 1.2 Terabit-Per-Second Network

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

Programmer and writer James Somers, writing for New Yorker: Yes, our jobs as programmers involve many things besides literally writing code, such as coaching junior hires and designing systems at a high level. But coding has always been the root of it. Throughout my career, I have been interviewed and selected precisely for my ability to solve fiddly little programming puzzles. Suddenly, this ability was less important.

I had gathered as much from Ben (friend of the author), who kept telling me about the spectacular successes he’d been having with GPT-4. It turned out that it was not only good at the fiddly stuff but also had the qualities of a senior engineer: from a deep well of knowledge, it could suggest ways of approaching a problem. For one project, Ben had wired a small speaker and a red L.E.D. light bulb into the frame of a portrait of King Charles, the light standing in for the gem in his crown; the idea was that when you entered a message on an accompanying Web site the speaker would play a tune and the light would flash out the message in Morse code. (This was a gift for an eccentric British expat.) Programming the device to fetch new messages eluded Ben; it seemed to require specialized knowledge not just of the microcontroller he was using but of Firebase, the back-end server technology that stored the messages. Ben asked me for advice, and I mumbled a few possibilities; in truth, I wasn’t sure that what he wanted would be possible. Then he asked GPT-4. It told Ben that Firebase had a capability that would make the project much simpler. Here it was — and here was some code to use that would be compatible with the microcontroller.

Afraid to use GPT-4 myself — and feeling somewhat unclean about the prospect of paying OpenAI twenty dollars a month for it — I nonetheless started probing its capabilities, via Ben. We’d sit down to work on our crossword project, and I’d say, “Why don’t you try prompting it this way?” He’d offer me the keyboard. “No, you drive,” I’d say. Together, we developed a sense of what the A.I. could do. Ben, who had more experience with it than I did, seemed able to get more out of it in a stroke. As he later put it, his own neural network had begun to align with GPT-4’s. I would have said that he had achieved mechanical sympathy. Once, in a feat I found particularly astonishing, he had the A.I. build him a Snake game, like the one on old Nokia phones. But then, after a brief exchange with GPT-4, he got it to modify the game so that when you lost it would show you how far you strayed from the most efficient route. It took the bot about ten seconds to achieve this. It was a task that, frankly, I was not sure I could do myself.

In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft