Showing 1 - 10 of 37
News, Published on 09/09/2024
» Over two weeks from the first report of Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc's bid to acquire Japan's Seven & I Holdings Co, the battle lines for public opinion are being drawn.
News, Published on 31/08/2024
» 'Wonderwall' is all I remember. The rest of Oasis is a blur to me. I was still living in New York City when the band had their global breakthrough -- and that song was everywhere. From the album (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, it's one of the few mid-1990s songs whose lyrics this Boomer can remember. I admired its Beatles-like off-kilter poetics, its love-will-save-the-day (if not, maybe it'll just save me) sentimentality. And Liam Gallagher's voice, while not beautiful, was pure plaintive Britpop, a plangent inflexion echoing from as far back as 1962's Love Me Do by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
News, Adam Minter, Published on 15/07/2024
» The first-ever Esports World Cup was launched in Saudi Arabia last weekend with a record-breaking US$60 million (2.1 billion baht) prize pool.
News, Published on 05/07/2024
» Ever notice how science fiction gets things wrong about future technology? Instead of flying cars, we got viral tweets that fuelled culture wars. Instead of a fax machine on your wrist, we got memes. We're having a similar reality check with artificial intelligence. Sci-fi painted a future with computers that delivered reliable information in robotic parlance. Yet businesses who've tried plugging generative AI tools into their infrastructure have found, with some dismay, that the tools "hallucinate" and make mistakes. They are hardly reliable. And the tools themselves aren't stiff and mechanistic either. They're almost whimsical.
News, Published on 18/06/2024
» Here's an AI advancement that should benefit all of us: It's getting easier for builders of artificial intelligence to warn the world about the harms their algorithms can cause -- from spreading misinformation and displacing jobs, to hallucinating and providing a new form of surveillance. But who can these would-be whistleblowers turn to? An encouraging shift toward better oversight is underway, thanks to changes in compensation policies, renewed momentum to speak out among engineers and the growing clout of a British government-backed safety group.
News, Tyler Cowen, Published on 08/04/2024
» The best large-language models can already write like humans, especially if prompted properly. Photos and images can be faked at low cost. Yet-to-be-released technology can create convincing voice simulations. There are signs that some academic papers contain traces of GPT-4. If even professors are faking it, then surely the dam has burst.
News, Published on 22/02/2024
» Realistic AI-generated images and voice recordings may be the newest threat to democracy, but they're part of a longstanding family of deceptions. The way to fight so-called deepfakes isn't to develop some rumour-busting form of AI or to train the public to spot fake images. A better tactic would be to encourage a few well-known critical thinking methods -- refocusing our attention, reconsidering our sources, and questioning ourselves.
News, Published on 12/02/2024
» A history student told me recently that he loves researching the 20th century but can't see the point of the Middle Ages. I responded that it can be a big help to understanding our own times -- very troubled times -- to view them in the context even of the remote past.
News, Published on 27/01/2024
» It's a big year for elections -- and that includes McKinsey & Co's poll to pick the Global Managing Partner for the next three years. As in so many elections, there's a difference between the skills needed to get the job and those required once elected.
Oped, Published on 16/01/2024
» Behavioural economists have popularised the term "recency bias" to describe our tendency to be disproportionately influenced by the latest events compared to earlier ones. Could this cognitive phenomenon explain why numerous analysts have a rather optimistic tilt for the world economy in 2024? Or are there really positive trends counterbalancing the obvious and mounting challenges to global growth?