Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

‘Counterfeit people’: The dangers posed by Meta’s AI celebrity lookalike chatbots

Post By World , , , , , ,

Meta announced on Wednesday the arrival of chatbots with personalities similar to certain celebrities, with whom it will be possible to chat. Presented as an entertaining evolution of ChatGPT and other forms of AI, this latest technological development could prove dangerous.

Meta (formerly known as Facebook) sees these as “fun” artificial intelligence. Others, however, feel that this latest technological development could mark the first step towards creating “the most dangerous artefacts in human history”, to quote from American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett’s essay about “counterfeit people”. 

On Wednesday, September 27, the social networking giant announced the launch of 28 chatbots (conversational agents), which supposedly have their own personalities and have been specially designed for younger users. These include Victor, a so-called triathlete who can motivate “you to be your best self”, and Sally, the “free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath”.

Internet users can also chat to Max, a “seasoned sous chef” who will give you “culinary tips and tricks”, or engage in a verbal joust with Luiz, who “can back up his trash talk”. 

A chatbot that looks like Paris Hilton

To reinforce the idea that these chatbots have personalities and are not simply an amalgam of algorithms, Meta has given each of them a face. Thanks to partnerships with celebrities, these robots look like American jet-setter and DJ Paris Hilton, TikTok star Charli D’Amelio and American-Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka.

Read moreShould we worry? ChatGPT passes Ivy League business exam

And that’s not all. Meta has opened Facebook and Instagram accounts for each of its conversational agents to give them an existence outside chat interfaces and is working on giving them a voice by next year. The parent company of Mark Zuckerberg‘s empire was also looking for screenwriters who can “write character, and other supporting narrative content that appeal to wide audiences”.

Meta may present these 28 chatbots as an innocent undertaking to massively distract young internet users, but all these efforts point towards an ambitious project to build AIs that resemble humans as much as possible, writes The Rolling Stone.  

This race to “counterfeit people” worries many observers, who are already concerned about recent developments made in large language model (LLM) research such as ChatGPT and Llama 2, its Facebook counterpart. Without going as far as Dennett, who is calling for people like Zuckerberg to be locked up, “there are a number of thinkers who are denouncing these major groups’ deliberately deceptive approach”, said Ibo van de Poel, professor of ethics and technology at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

AIs with personalities are ‘literally impossible’

The idea of conversational agents “with a personality is literally impossible”, said van de Poel. Algorithms are incapable of demonstrating “intention in their actions or ‘free will’, two characteristics that are considered to be intimately linked to the idea of a personality”.

Meta and others can, at best, imitate certain traits that make up a personality. “It must be technologically possible, for example, to teach a chatbot to act like the person they represent,” said van de Poel. For instance, Meta’s AI Amber, which is supposed to resemble Hilton, may be able to speak the same way as its human alter ego. 

The next step will be to train these LLMs to express the same opinions as the person they resemble. This is a much more complicated behaviour to programme, as it involves creating a sort of accurate mental picture of all of a person’s opinions. There is also a risk that chatbots with personalities could go awry. One of the conversational agents that Meta tested expressed “misogynistic” opinions, according to the Wall Street Journal, which was able to consult internal company documents. Another committed the “mortal sin” of criticising Zuckerberg and praising TikTok.

To build these chatbots, Meta explains that it set out to give them “unique personal stories”. In other words, these AIs’ creators have written biographies for them in the hopes that they will be able to develop a personality based on what they have read about themselves. “It’s an interesting approach, but it would have been beneficial to add psychologists to these teams to get a better understanding of personality traits”, said Anna Strasser, a German philosopher who was involved in a project to create a large language model capable of philosophising.

Meta’s latest AI project is clearly driven by a thirst for profit. “People will no doubt be prepared to pay to be able to talk and have a direct relationship with Paris Hilton or another celebrity,” said Strasser.

The more users feel like they are speaking with a human being, “the more comfortable they’ll feel, the longer they’ll stay and the more likely they’ll come back”, said van de Poel. And in the world of social media, time – spent on Facebook and its ads –  is money.

Tool, living thing or somewhere between?

It is certainly not surprising that Meta’s first foray into AI with “personality” are chatbots aimed primarily at teenagers. “We know that young people are more likely to be anthropomorphic,” said Strasser.

However, the experts interviewed feel that Meta is playing a dangerous game by stressing the “human characteristics” of their AIs. “I really would have preferred if this group had put more effort into explaining the limits of these conversational agents, rather than trying to make them seem more human”, said van de Poel.

Read moreChatGPT: Cybercriminals salivate over world-beating AI chatbot

The emergence of these powerful LLMs has upset “the dichotomy between what is a tool or object and what is a living thing. These ChatGPTs are a third type of agent that stands somewhere between the two extremes”, said Strasser. Human beings are still learning how to interact with these strange new entities, so by making people believe that a conversational agent can have a personality Meta is suggesting that it be treated more like another human being than a tool. 

“Internet users tend to trust what these AIs say” which make them dangerous, said van de Poel. This is not just a theoretical risk: a man in Belgium ended up committing suicide in March 2023 after discussing the consequences of global warming with a conversational agent for six weeks.

Above all, if the boundary between the world of AIs and humans is eventually blurred completely, “this could potentially destroy trust in everything we find online because we won’t know who wrote what”, said Strasser. This would, as Dennett warned in his essay, open the door to “destroying our civilisation. Democracy depends on the informed (not misinformed) consent of the governed [which cannot be obtained if we no longer know what and whom to trust]”.

It remains to be seen if chatting with an AI lookalike of Hilton means that we are on the path to destroying the world as we know it. 

This article has been translated from the original in French. 

Source link

#Counterfeit #people #dangers #posed #Metas #celebrity #lookalike #chatbots

Eight Hours Of Sleep And No Back-To-Back Meetings: How Mark Zuckerberg Organizes His Days

Post By World , , , , , , , ,

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t pulling many all-nighters these days.

The CEO of Facebook parent Meta—who once embodied the hoodie-clad, hackathon, boy wonder startup founder—has grown up after running the social networking giant for almost two decades.

For years, Zuckerberg had been cast as one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious leaders, as Facebook faced ire from lawmakers and the public for allegedly crippling democracy, being used as a tool to fuel genocide and harming users as the company chased relentless growth. Zuckerberg, who turns 40 next year, has since begun a transformation into one of tech’s elder statesmen—especially as he plays foil to Elon Musk and his chaos at Facebook rival X, formerly known as Twitter.

So who is this new grown-up Zuck, and how does that translate into everyday life for the famous billionaire? For starters, he gets roughly eight hours of sleep. (He measures it using an Oura sleep tracker). He also shuns back-to-back meetings, allocating at least an hour to process and follow up with folks afterward.

In a wide-ranging interview with Forbes’ Kerry Dolan, Zuckerberg opened up about several other topics, including his new obsession with mixed martial arts, singing Taylor Swift songs with his young daughters, and flying (well, co-piloting) a helicopter to work.

Here are a few of the most interesting details from their conversation.

On company growth:

“One philosophy that I’ve always had is … the thing that determines your destiny is not a competitor, it’s how you execute. And I think most companies probably focus too much on competitors, and maybe even focus too much on ideas. And I think at the end of the day, a lot of what makes great companies great is the ability to just relentlessly execute, and efficiently execute and do that rigorously and just get better and better at it all the time.”

On fatherhood:

Zuckerberg has a special routine he follows every night to put his daughters–ages 7, 6 and 6 months old–to bed, says Zuckerberg’s pediatrician wife, Priscilla Chan. First, he does something with them that they really like. “Recently it’s been learning every lyric of the Taylor Swift songs,” says Chan. (They went as a family to see Swift in concert in late July, which-natch– Zuckerberg posted about on Instagram.) His two older girls read to themselves. “Right now Max is reading Harry Potter, which is a little bit scary … so sometimes I’ll read it to her,” says Zuckerberg. And, then, says Chan, “He goes through everyone that loves them, he tells them the three most important things in life are health, family and friends, and something to look forward to. And then he sings to them, I think it’s Debbie Freidman’s version of Mi Shebeirach,” a Hebrew prayer for healing. The only time Chan puts the girls to bed, she says, is if there’s a board meeting or if he’s traveling. Work dinners for her husband happen after the girls’ bedtime.

On jiujitsu and mixed martial arts:

His latest passion, picked up during the pandemic, is jiujitsu and mixed martial arts (MMA). On his Instagram account in July, Zuckerberg shared bare-chested photos of himself and his MMA sparring partners at Lake Tahoe, and another set from when his coach awarded him a blue belt in jiujitsu. And in early September, he posted a reel of him and his friends having an MMA battle on a floating dojo on Lake Tahoe. He lights up when talking about the sport, and pulls out his phone to share more photos from a recent MMA session.

“My physical routine in the morning has been really helpful for me to reset. I try to do something where I don’t or actually can’t think too much,” he says, explaining that’s why he switched from running to jiujitsu and MMA. “The thing that those have in common is you really need to focus on what you’re doing, or else you’re going to … get punched in the face.” And as he told his followers on Threads about jiujitsu: “I just love this sport. It’s so primal and lets me be my true competitive self.”

For years, Zuckerberg has publicly set himself annual challenges: learn Chinese, visit cities all over the U.S., only eat meat that he killed himself. His new challenge: “I want to do an MMA competition, or do a kind of formal fight sometime in the next year.” Who would his opponent be? “I’m probably going to do it with somebody that takes the sport really seriously and does it competitively or as a professional.”

On his daily schedule:

“I don’t stay up super late at night. … I’ll wake up and there will be a bunch of emails. Usually, people aren’t emailing me about things that are going well. It’s a very diverse set of things that are breaking across the company.”

“I’ll respond to a bunch of emails in the morning and have a bunch of time to do that. But then I want to be able to show up to work and be able to push forward.” So he takes a break to exercise (often jiujitsu or MMA —see above). “I try to work out six or seven days a week.”

Zuckerberg says he gets eight hours of sleep a night, which he describes as “very instrumented.” He uses an Oura ring, which “tells you [your] level of deep sleep, and what your heart rate is when you’re sleeping.”

On meetings:

“I actually like trying to have a rule… for every hour of meeting that I have, the team sends out the pre-reads in advance. I want to have at least an hour to read the materials and think about it. And then I want to have at least an hour to follow up with different people after the meeting.”

On what he’s learned after being CEO of Facebook and Meta for almost 20 years:

“I knew so little when I was getting started… I’d say there’s a lot about management and leadership that I’ve learned. I think probably the most important thing is I feel like I’ve learned how to express the things that are important to me in a way that is that can translate to an organization.”

On flying:

Zuckerberg flew in from his home in Lake Tahoe to the Meta offices in Menlo Park to speak with Forbes. “Normally I’d fly a helicopter. I like flying,” he says. But 100 mile an hour winds in the mountains near Tahoe derailed that plan. “You can actually do it,” Zuckerberg says of flying in winds that high. “It’s just uncomfortable.”

He says he started learning to fly a helicopter a couple years ago, and flies with a co-pilot now. The F.A.A. lists him as having a student license.

On turning down a $1 billion buyout from Yahoo in 2006:

“When I didn’t want to sell the company early on, I think the investors were like, oh, maybe we should get like, should we get a different team? And it’s like, oh, well, you can’t.”

“If someone offers you a billion dollars, you’re like, oh, well, we’re not really making much money today. So what does it mean to be worth a billion dollars, and what does that mean over time? And we haven’t really spent a lot of time, to that point, talking about the long term vision. I think most people are at the company because they just love the product and thought it was awesome and just want to make things better every day. So that was probably the hardest moment in running a company. I mean, it’s just because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

On taking big swings:

“I think over time, what matters is just taking a bunch of big swings, and being able to connect on enough of them. And I think there just aren’t that many places in the world where you can make the kind of long term bets that we have.”

On management:

“I actually think that when you’re running something, you should be as involved in the details as you can be. Obviously, there’s way more stuff that I just don’t have time to be involved with. …Anything that I’m kind of focused on or interested in or want to be in the details on, I will be. I try to be in the details of as many things as possible.”

On Threads:

“I’m optimistic about our trajectory. We saw unprecedented growth out of the gate and more importantly we’re seeing more people coming back daily than I’d expected. Now, we’re focused on retention and improving the basics. After that, we’ll focus on growing the community to the scale we think is possible. We’ve run this playbook many times before — with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Stories, Reels, and more — and this is as good of a start as we could have hoped for, so I’m really happy with the path we’re on here.”

On AI and Facebook products:

AI “will go across everything. The characters will have Instagram and Facebook profiles. And you’ll be able to talk to them in WhatsApp and Messenger and Instagram, and they’ll be embodied as avatars and virtual reality.”

On that possible fight with Elon Musk:

“I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

On retirement:

“I think I’m going to be running Meta for a long time.”



Source link

#Hours #Sleep #BackToBack #Meetings #Mark #Zuckerberg #Organizes #Days

Billionaire Brawl: Now Who’s Winning The Fight Between Musk And Zuckerberg?

Post By World , , , , ,

Musk and Zuckerberg continue to deal blows to each other, even if the cage fight is still metaphorical—for now.

By Phoebe Liu, Forbes Staff

The yearslong battle between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—which might turn physical—continued this week. The Meta CEO dealt a blow to Musk on Wednesday, when he launched a direct competitor to Musk’s Twitter, called Threads, in a surprise announcement accompanied by Zuckerberg’s first tweet in a decade: the Spiderman meme often used to poke fun at two very similar things.

Musk is fighting back. On July 5, the day Threads launched, an attorney for Twitter threatened legal action against Meta, accusing the company of misusing Twitter’s “trade secrets and other intellectual property.” Threads’ user experience differs from that of Twitter in several key ways, including eschewing hashtags and the chronological timeline, but still looks a lot like Twitter. Musk referred to Threads as a metaphorical “tapeworm.”

Still, Threads seems to be off to a solid start, reporting more than 30 million sign-ups within 24 hours, including a smattering of billionaires, pop stars and politicians. Analyst optimism around Threads’ launch also helped push Zuckerberg’s net worth, mostly held in Meta stock, up by $1.2 billion this week. He is the world’s 8th-richest person, according to Forbes’ real-time tracker. Musk, who reclaimed his spot as the world’s wealthiest person last week, had an even better week than Zuckerberg. Shares of his electric vehicle maker Tesla climbed 5%, translating to a $8.2 billion jump in Musk’s net worth. As of Friday’s market close, Musk is worth $246 billion, while Zuckerberg is worth $103 billion.

Despite their public brawling, both tech executives are riding high—really high—this year. Zuckerberg’s wealth has grown by the bigger percentage, while the richer Musk has added more wealth in sheer dollar terms. Since the beginning of 2023, Zuckerberg’s fortune has jumped 137%, from $43.8 billion to $103 billion. Over the same period, Musk’s net worth has climbed by 68%, from $146.5 billion to $246 billion. Their main shareholdings, Meta and Tesla, are the second- and third-best performing stocks in the S&P 500 in the first half of 2023, up 141% and 123% respectively.

Opinions differ on whether the physical fight will occur: Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, says they’ve been planning; Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, says the cage match won’t happen. Still, even aside from Twitter vs. Threads and net worths, there’s much to compare:

  • Zuckerberg first became a billionaire in 2008, just four years after founding Facebook. At 23, he was the youngest self-made billionaire at the time, debuting at No. 321 on The Forbes 400, worth with a net worth of $1.5 billion. Musk debuted on Forbes’ Billionaires List four years later, worth $2 billion and ranked no. 634
  • Zuckerberg appears on Forbes’ 2023 list of America’s most generous givers, while Musk doesn’t. Musk gifted Tesla shares last year, but it’s unclear whether they were actually disbursed to charity.
  • Zuckerberg has a sprawling real estate portfolio worth an estimated $300 million—including some 1,500 acres of land and a former sugar plantation in Hawaii. Musk pledged to sell almost all of his real estate two years ago.
  • Musk has led more companies (including Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX and Neuralink) causing some critics and investors to worry that he’s distracted. Zuckerberg has focused his attention on Facebook-turned-Meta, which he famously launched from his Harvard dorm nearly two decades ago.
  • Musk owns more of the main company that made him rich. He has approximately 20% of Tesla shares, while Zuckerberg owns just under 15% of Meta.
  • Musk immigrated to the U.S. from South Africa via Canada and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist, grew up in Westchester County in New York. He dropped out of Harvard during his sophomore year.
  • Zuckerberg has three children with his wife, Priscilla Chan (All are named after Roman emperors). Musk has at least nine living children with three women, including triplets and two sets of twins; one is named X. Still he has expressed worries about population collapse.

Here’s how the net worths of Musk and Zuckerberg fared in the week spanning from market close on Friday, June 30, to the close on Friday, July 7:

Elon Musk

NET WORTH: $246 BILLION 🟢 UP $8.2 BILLION

COUNTRY: UNITED STATES

SOURCE OF WEALTH: TESLA, SPACEX

VIEW PROFILE

Musk is once again the world’s richest person, after sitting at the No. 2 spot for six months. His net worth is up $8.2 billion this week, thanks to Tesla’s 5% stock jump. Over the weekend, the world’s top-selling electric vehicle brand announced a quarterly delivery record of nearly 500,000 sedans and crossovers, aided by price cuts—beating analysts’ expectations and enriching Musk, who owns around one-fifth of the company.

Mark Zuckerberg

NET WORTH: $103 BILLION 🟢 UP $1.2 BILLION

COUNTRY: UNITED STATES

SOURCE OF WEALTH: META

VIEW PROFILE

Multiple analyst upgrades for Meta followed the launch of Twitter competitor Threads, leading to an uptick in Meta stock this week. After more than a year out of the world’s top ten richest, Zuckerberg reentered those ranks late last month. Meta’s new product and its cost-cutting narrative—including 21,000 layoffs since late 2022—in what Zuckerberg has called a “year of efficiency” has helped rocket its stock price up from a November 2022 low.

MORE FROM FORBES

MORE FROM FORBES‘Like Gen Z’s Takeover Of Twitter’: Creators React To Threads, Meta’s New Social AppBy Rashi ShrivastavaMORE FROM FORBESSilvio Berlusconi’s Five Children Are Now BillionairesBy Giacomo TogniniMORE FROM FORBESHow A Magazine Claiming To Empower Female Founders Was ‘Birthed’ By A Controversial ChurchBy Iain MartinMORE FROM FORBESWhy It Took A Civilian To Save The Military’s $8.5 Billion Retail OperationBy Lauren DebterMORE FROM FORBESBrazil’s Nubank Is Leaving U.S. Digital Banks In The DustBy Jeff Kauflin



Source link

#Billionaire #Brawl #Whos #Winning #Fight #Musk #Zuckerberg

To go or not to go? Von der Leyen’s COVID committee dilemma

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Press play to listen to this article

Voiced by artificial intelligence.

There won’t be any severed horses’ heads but the European Commission president may soon receive an offer that she can’t refuse — at least without causing an institutional dust-up.

Last week, the coordinators of the European Parliament’s special committee on COVID-19 voted to invite Ursula von der Leyen to appear in front of the panel to answer their questions on vaccine procurement. 

It’s not a courtesy call. EU lawmakers want to shine a light on exactly what happened during those hectic months at the height of the pandemic in 2021, when the bloc was frantically searching for vaccine doses to protect its population from the coronavirus.

The committee’s chair, Belgian MEP Kathleen Van Brempt has said she wants full transparency on the “preliminary negotations” leading up to vaccine purchases — a reference to the Commission president’s unusual personal role in negotiating the EU’s biggest vaccine contract, signed with Pfizer and its partner BioNTech. An appearance would refocus attention on von der Leyen’s highly contentious undisclosed text messages with Pfizer’s chief executive.

It’s a topic von der Leyen has so far fiercely resisted opening up about — but the COVI committee invite could put the Commission president in a sticky situation.

All bark, no bite? 

On the face of it, von der Leyen could just say no. European Parliament committees don’t have many formal powers. They have no rights to compel witnesses to appear or to get them to tell the truth — and there’s no recourse if someone refuses to appear or lies in front of the committee.

Indeed, Pfizer’s Chief Executive Albert Bourla — with whom von der Leyen is reported to have conducted personal negotiations via text message — thumbed his nose at the committee more than once, and sent one of his employees instead.

Even when the Parliament does reel in a big name, the performance can be lackluster — like in the case of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who agreed to show up but then avoided answering most questions. That’s a far cry from how the U.S. Senate’s commerce and judiciary committees grilled the tech titan for hours. 

And the Commission president has already shown a penchant for being evasive when it comes the Pfizer negotiations, earning the Commission a verdict of maladministration from the European Ombudsman for its lack of transparency.

However, the fact that von der Leyen is an inter-institutional figure gives the Parliament more bite than with external guests — and may help tip the balance in the committee’s favour.

First, there’s precedent. While the Commission President usually appears in front of all MEPs at a plenary session such as in the annual State of the European Union speech, Commission presidents have appeared in front of committees in the past. Von der Leyen’s predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker, for example, appeared in front of a special committee to answer uncomfortable questions over his role in making Luxembourg a tax haven. 

Secondly, the European Parliament is tasked with overseeing the EU’s budget. With billions of euros spent in the joint purchase of the vaccines, and part of those funds coming straight from the EU’s pockets, it’s hard to argue that there aren’t important financial considerations at play, and ones that the elected representatives of the EU should be allowed to scrutinize.

Then there’s Article 13 of the EU’s founding treaty, which calls for “mutual sincere cooperation” between the EU’s institutions. It’s a point that’s repeated in an inter-institutional agreement between the Parliament and the Commission, which states that the EU’s executive should also provide lawmakers with confidential information when it’s requested — like, for example, the contents of certain text messages.

The Commission has so far been tight-lipped. When asked last week about Ursula von der Leyen’s upcoming invite to the COVID-19 committee, a Commission spokesperson said “No such invitation has been received.”

Don’t shoot the messenger 

And, in fact, it’s now up to European Parliament president Roberta Metsola to decide whether the invite will ever reach von der Leyen’s hands. The request is on her desk and, per protocol, any invitation to appear must come from the president’s office.

Metsola, who belongs to the same political group as von der Leyen (the center-right European People’s Party), confirmed to POLITICO that she has received a letter from the COVI committee and “will look at it.” “I cannot pre-empt what my reply will be to that committee,” she said.

As long as proper form is followed, Metsola should “pass on the message,” said Emilio De Capitani, a former civil servant who for 14 years was secretary of the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee (LIBE).

“The question isn’t abusive,” said De Capitani.  

In theory, von der Leyen, who was elected to her role by the Parliament, relies on its mandate to stay there.

“There’s nothing strange about meeting with an organ of the Parliament,” the former Parliamentary official added. “Then it will be up to von der Leyen to ask whether the hearing is in public or, behind closed doors. She could also choose to address it in plenary.” 

For political operatives such as Metsola and von der Leyen, the optics of their actions are likely to play a major role in any decision. And this invite comes at the same time as the biggest scandal in the European Parliament’s history.

An assistant for one of the MEPs in the COVI committee said the drive for transparency produced by the unfolding “Qatargate” influence scandal gave extra force to the invite.

“It wouldn’t have had the same result without Qatargate,” said the assistant. “If she says no, it will only make the problem worse.” 

Not everyone agrees. Detractors say the Parliament has lost its moral standing. And that even if none of the MEPs in the COVID-19 committee are implicated, the institution is still weakened on the whole.

“I think this [Qatargate] will make it less likely for von der Leyen to cooperate with the Parliament,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, head of the Brussels office at the think tank Centre for European Reform. She said the Commission president is riding high after weathering a pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine.

“The European Parliament in theory could force von der Leyen to appear by threatening to dismiss her — but how can they do that in the current climate?”

This article was updated Friday morning to include comment from Roberta Metsola.

Eddy Wax contributed reporting.



Source link

#Von #der #Leyens #COVID #committee #dilemma