From the 12 December issue, lots of AI entries in Nature (soon moving to NAIture??), from the arrival of AGI, artificial general intelligence, and the usual barren call for companies to take responsibility (!) and equally repeated pious wishes for (better) controlling the incoming “human intelligent” AIs, to the two year anniversary of ChatGPT, which came as a significant support to non-native English speakers, if raising concern about the privacy losses in delivering unprotected data to the model, to the incoming dearth of data to feed AIs (duh? why would new data be necessary for new AI systems?), with the danger that using AI generated data to train new AIs is not good being repeated anew, to the poor performances of LLMs on African languages, and the correlated dearth of funding in Africa, to DeepMind doing better than weather agency supercomputers to predict weather on a 15 day window, including extreme weather events (not much of a surprise, as climate change does not mean that history of past weather patterns cannot be exploited) albeit the probabilistic nature of the forecast seems to derive from the randomness of the starting conditions, hence depends on the choice of that distribution, to the (unsurprising) 50% productivity boost in design in a material science company afforded by seconding (or supplanting!) researchers with AI tools, to the poor design of bar plots (inc. Nature) that induce misunderstandings. A fair degree of double entries when considering the earlier 5 December issue, also read in the plane, with again fossilized poo, AI soon reaching human intelligence level (??), and the AI computing gap between academy and industry. Beside this AI frenzy, a news article reporting on the EU trying to create an applied research council equivalent to what the ERC succeeded for academic research. (And I will not mention the digestive track article further than pointing out it added bromalite, cololite, and regurgitalite, to my digestive vocabulary!)
A long article in The Guardian on how the island of Haida Gwaii along the northern coast of British Columbia managed to turn resistance to logging into a global success in nature and culture preservation. Our original holiday plans last August were to spend half our time there. But the travel costs were alas such that we ended up in Prince Rupert, 100 km east across Hecate Strait. A mere seven-hour ferry crossing!
