Welcome to this week's CS News!
Summary: Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, has taken a firm stand against a Pentagon request to remove safety guardrails from their AI models. The core of the argument is simple but profound: today's frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to be trusted with life-or-death decisions in fully autonomous weapons.
Mr McCallion's Commentary: The focus here is on the critical gap between intelligent processing and reliable judgment. Without human oversight, these systems can't replicate the professional judgment of trained troops. Even the most advanced tech has limits, especially when the stakes are as high as they get.
Edit update: Overview of the US Military's AI-Powered Systems (Perplexity)
Summary: Researchers at Cortical Labs have taught clumps of human brain cells grown on a chip to play the classic game Doom. While their performance isn't breaking any records yet, the "DishBrain" system learned the game in just a week using Python. Biological computers like this could eventually be used for complex real-time decision-making, like controlling robotic arms.
Mr McCallion's Commentary: It took me three weeks to get good, but in my defence, I had to breathe, eat and go to university as well!
Summary: Applying generative AI heavily across computing could lead to "RAMaggeddon," driving up hardware costs and making everything from mobile phones to cheap IoT devices less affordable and harder to upgrade.
Mr McCallion's Commentary: Applying "RAMaggeddon" to the whole computing world means hardware becomes less affordable. Mobile phones will not be upgraded as frequently, for example. Games machines cannot be easily upgraded, console costs will become unaffordable, and even cheap IoT devices will become more expensive.
We have an almost artisan approach to some industries appearing. People want artisanal games, using good old humans (GOH) with no generative AI in the process. This is much like how some people want artisanal food with no machinery, preservatives, or fertilizers, or artisanal fireguards made by a blacksmith.
The implications of both of these things strike me as reasons that a more retro gaming industry, focusing on performance through reducing resource usage, may be on the cards. Developers who can optimise instructions, improve cache hits, etc., are going to be in demand.