This is 2023's last and probably longest episode. To lead off, Megan Stifel takes us through a batch of stories about ways that AI, and especially AI "alignment" efforts, manage to look remarkably fallible. Anthropic has released a paper showing that race, gender, and age discrimination by AI models is real but could be dramatically reduced simply by instructing the model to "really, really, really" avoid such discrimination. (The Techcrunch headline writers had fun snarking on the idea that "racist" AI could be cured by asking nicely, but in fact the discrimination identified by Anthropic was severe bias against older white men, and so was the residual bias that asking nicely didn't eliminate.) The bottom line from Anthropic seems to be, "Our technology is a really cool toy, but it can't be used for for anything that matters.") In keeping with that theme, Google's highly touted OpenAI competitor Gemini was released to mixed reviews; the model couldn't correctly identify recent Oscar winners or a French word with six letters (it offered "amour"). There was good news for people who hate AI's ham-handed political correctness; it turns out you can ask another AI model how to jailbreak your model, a request that can make the task go 25 times faster.
This could be the week that determines the fate of FISA section 702, David Kris reported. When we recorded, it looked as though two bills would go to the House floor, and only one would survive. (Since then, that plan has been dropped, at least for now, in favor of a short-term extension of 702 into April.) The two bills reflect a split between the two committees overseeing the program. Judiciary's bill is a grudging renewal of 702 for a mere three years, full of procedures designed to cripple the program. The intelligence committee's bill also harries the FBI for its past failures but preserves the core of 702.
Gus Hurwitz looks at the FTC's last-ditch appeal to stop the Microsoft-Activision merger. The best case for the Commission, he suspects, is that the appeal will be rejected without actually repudiating the pet theories of the FTC's hipster antitrust lawyers.
