We begin this episode with Paul Rosenzweig describing major progress in teaching AI models to do text-to-speech conversions. Amazon flagged its new model as having "emergent" capabilities in handling what had been serious problems – things like speaking with emotion, or conveying foreign phrases. The key is the size of the training set, but Amazon was able to spot the point at which more data led to unexpected skills. This leads Paul and me to speculate that training AI models to perform certain tasks eventually leads the model to learn "generalization" of its skills. If so, the more we train AI on a variety of tasks – chat, text to speech, text to video, and the like – the better AI will get at learning new tasks, as generalization becomes part of its core skill set. We're lawyers holding forth on the frontiers of technology, so take it with a grain of salt.
Cristin Flynn Goodwin and Paul Stephan join Paul Rosenzweig to provide an update on Volt Typhoon, the Chinese APT that is littering Western networks with the equivalent of logical land mines. Actually, it's not so much an update on Volt Typhoon, which seems to be aggressively pursuing its strategy, as on the hyperventilating Western reaction to Volt Typhoon. There's no doubt that China is playing with fire, and that the United States and other cyber powers should be liberally sowing similar weapons in Chinese networks. Unfortunately, for all the heavy breathing, the public measures adopted by the West do not seem likely to defeat or deter China's strategy.
The group is not impressed by the New York Times' claim that China is pursuing a dangerous electoral influence campaign on U.S. social media platforms. The Russians do it better, Paul Stephan says, and even they don't do it well, I argue.
