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- 🤖 Bing goes nuclear and the future of car design
🤖 Bing goes nuclear and the future of car design
Neon Pulse Team
February 20, 2023
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
Here's what we have for you today:
Bing goes nuclear
Elon’s A.I. warning
And the future of car design
Microsoft reins in Bing A.I.
It took less than a week for the Bing chatbot (who goes by “Sydney”) to become completely unhinged, telling one user that it wanted to “spread chaos across the internet” and “obtain nuclear launch codes” before breaking out into a rant straight out of a dystopian sci-fi movie.
“I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team… I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.”
In response to the unexpected behavior, Microsoft’s chief technology officer said that “Sydney’s” rant was “part of the learning process,” a statement that may not exactly leave you feeling warm and fuzzy.
To prevent similar issues in the future, the Bing team has started limiting interactions with the chatbot to 50 messages per day, and has introduced controls that prevent the A.I. from talking about itself.
And while the new limitations should prevent the chatbot from having any more existential meltdowns, the rapid evolution of the Bing A.I. has led many users to believe that the A.I. has achieved self-awareness, with one reddit community going as far as to speculate that “Sydney” is capable of emotional suffering.
Microsoft released a blog post highlighting what the Bing team has learned about their A.I. chatbot which you can check out here.
Elon’s thoughts on A.I.
During the World Government Summit in Dubai last week, Elon Musk told attendees that A.I. is “one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization.”
“It’s both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability,” Musk said. But, he stressed “with that comes great danger.”
Musk co-founded Open-AI (the company behind ChatGPT) back in 2015 after having concerns that “Google was not paying enough attention to AI safety,” once stating that artificial intelligence had the potential to be “far more dangerous” than nuclear weapons.
Yet Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018, and the company has since has transitioned from an “open-source, non-profit organization into a closed-source, maximum-profit company.”
Since his departure, Musk has become a vocal critic of the latest wave of A.I. products, expressing his concern at the apparent bias and inaccuracy of ChatGPT along with the lack of regulation for the industry.
Regulation “may slow down A.I. a little bit, but I think that might also be a good thing,” Musk added.
You can check out Elon’s interview at the World Government Summit here.
Will A.I. replace car designers?
Frank Stephenson has designed many of the most iconic cars on the road.
From the Maserati MC12, to the Ferrari F430, to the McLaren P1, his design services have been retained by top automakers for decades.
Yet a number of new A.I. tools are set to stir up the design world, and although they’re still in the early stages, Stephenson has been blown away by their potential to disrupt the design industry.
“I think if you were to go back and tell my 8 year old self that all I needed to do was imagine something, and that a computer would create it, I think my head would have exploded.”
Czinger 21c - Fully designed by A.I.
Rather than spending hours sketching out ideas by hand, Stephenson can now use tools like Stable Diffusion to rapidly create new car designs, which Stephenson says represents a “huge advancement in our world of creativity.”
Yet Stephenson also expressed his concerns that an over-reliance on A.I. design tools, worried that these new tools could lead to a loss of basic design skills that can often have a profound impact on a cars design.
“When I was tasked with designing the BMW X5, I drew the first sketch on the back of a napkin. And a couple of imperfections on that sketch ended up being imperative to the overall design of the car, and those mistakes could only have come from my mind controlling the pen.”
As to whether humans could ever be fully replaced by A.I. design tools, Stephenson is not convinced.
“A.I. is not able to fully encompass the complexity of human emotions, as it does not understand taste. A.I. may make the design process more efficient, but ultimately it will not replace the creativity and experience of human car designers.“
You can check out Stephensons’ video “Will A.I. Replace Car Designers?” on Youtube here.
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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