Friday Wrap : Volume Six

GPT-5 is alive & Grok's a perv

The big tech news is, of course, the release by OpenAI of GPT-5, the latest iteration of its flagship large language model. It's a bit early for a proper assessment of it but that's not stopped the mainstream media from parroting Sam Altman's claims about it being a PhD-level expert.

Outside of mainstream media, there are a couple of more in-depth write-ups from Ethan Mollick and Simon Willson.

On the more cynical side, it appears it still can't spell "blueberry" and it's also happy to play chess with little regard for the rules.

Over at Elon Musk's xAI, the Grok chatbot has the hots for Taylor Swift and tries to take her clothes off without being asked.

And Google's AI has had a bash at being a radiologist and ended up inventing a new human body part.

AI money, money, money

Several commentators this week have discussed the economics of the AI boom. Ed Zitron has a long, in-depth look at what he calls the "money trap" of Gen AI.

The Financial Times was one of the "serious" newspapers to fret about the size of the AI bubble and its dominance of the finance markets. There's a lot riding on the bubble not bursting.

The Observer, erm, observed that AI has a lot of cash flying about but is decidedly less flush with actual profits.

For those of us who don't have direct lines to almost infinite amounts of VC capital, we could perhaps try "frugal tech" as the University of Cambridge's Eleanor Drage describes.

The Great Deceptions and Depressions

BBC News has an exclusive interview with a North Korean defector who describes life working undercover for Western companies. The secretive regime uses these workers both to earn money for the homeland and also to provide a foothold in corporate systems from which they can spread ransomware to earn even more cash.

Today’s global civilisation is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, according to Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

And finally, as if the job search process wasn't depressing enough already, companies have now started using AI avatars to conduct video conference interviews.