Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

Stay for the end and the hilarious idea that OpenAI’s board could declare one day that they’ve created AGI simply to weasel out of their contract with Microsoft.

Ask a typical "everyday joe" and they'll probably tell you they already did due to how ChatGPT has been reported and hyped. I've spoken with/helped quite a few older folks who are terrified that ChatGPT in its current form is going to kill them.

I'm pretty surprised by this! Can you tell me more about what that experience is like? What are the sorts of things they say or do? Is there fear really embodied or very abstract? (When I imagine it, I struggle to believe that they're very moved by the fear, like definitely not smashing their laptop, etc)

In my experience, the fuss around "AI" and the complete lack of actual explanations of what current "AI" technologies mean leads people to fill in the gaps themselves, largely from what they know from pop culture and sci-fi.

ChatGPT can produce output that sounds very much like a person, albeit often an obviously computerized person. The typical layperson doesn't know that this is merely the emulation of text formation, and not actual cognition.

Once I've explained to people who are worried about what AI could represent that current generative AI models are effectively just text autocomplete but a billion times more complex, and that they don't actually have any capacity to think or reason (even though they often sound like they do).

It also doesn't help that any sort of "machine learning" is now being referred to as "AI" for buzzword/marketing purposes, muddying the waters even further.