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"Word of the layoffs comes over a year after the company made a big hiring push, doubling its size to over 500 people. Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom that has stuffed chatbots into every corner of the tech industry, including coding. That presents clear challenges for a personal coding help forum, as developers get comfortable with AI coding assistance and the very tools that do that are blended into products they use. AI-generated coding answers have also posed problems for the company over the past year. The company issued a temporary ban on users generating answers with the help of an AI chatbot in December last year, but its alleged under-enforcement led to a months-long strike among moderators that was resolved in August; the ban is still in place today. Stack Overflow also announced it would start charging AI companies to train on its site. "

"Analyst Brian Nowak estimates that the AI technology will have a $4.1 trillion economic effect on the labor force - or affect about 44% of labor - over the next few years by changing input costs, automating tasks and shifting the ways companies obtain, process and analyze information. Today, Morgan Stanley pegs the AI effect at $2.1 trillion, affecting 25% of labor. "We see generative AI expanding the scope of business processes that can be automated," he wrote in a Sunday note. "At the same time, the input costs supporting GenAI functionality are rapidly falling, enabling a strongly expansionary impact to software production. As a result, Generative AI is set to impact the labor markets, expand the enterprise software TAM, and drive incremental spend for Public Cloud services.""

"A boarding prep school in West Sussex, Cottesmore School, has made history by appointing an AI robot, Abigail Bailey, as its "principal headteacher". Created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence developer, the robot is designed to support the school's headmaster, Tom Rogerson, by providing advice on various issues such as supporting staff members and helping pupils with ADHD. Abigail Bailey functions similarly to the AI service ChatGPT, where users ask questions and receive answers from the chatbot's algorithms. The AI principal has been developed with extensive knowledge in machine learning and educational management, allowing it to analyze vast amounts of data. According to Mr. Rogerson, having the AI robot to assist him is calming and reassuring. He considers the role of a school leader to be lonely and believes that having an entity to rely on is invaluable. He also intends to make the publicly-available online robot accessible to state school headteachers."

"This type of approach can speed up learning times and improve the efficiency of algorithms, says Max Jaderberg at Google's AI company DeepMind. The company used a similar technique last year to teach an AI to explore a virtual maze. Its algorithm learned much more quickly than conventional reinforcement learning approaches. "Our agent is far quicker and requires a lot less experience from the world to train, making it much more data efficient," he says."

"A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care. That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study. "If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model," Green said. "That personal data could be generated and revealed to somebody else." She said carers might act on faulty or biased information and inadvertently cause harm, and an AI-generated care plan might be substandard."

"How that effects systems of governance has yet to be fully explored, but there are cautions. "Algorithms are only as good as the data on which they are based, and the problem with current AI is that it was trained on data that was incomplete or unrepresentative and the risk of bias or unfairness is quite substantial," says West. The fairness and equity of algorithms are only as good as the data-programming that underlie them. "For the last few decades we've allowed the tech companies to decide, so we need better guardrails and to make sure the algorithms respect human values," West says. "We need more oversight.""

"On inbuilt bias in algorithms, Sharkey said: "There are so many biases happening now, from job interviews to welfare to determining who should get bail and who should go to jail. It is quite clear that we really have to stop using decision algorithms, and I am someone who has always been very light on regulation and always believed that it stifles innovation."

"It forecast 14 earthquakes within a 200-mile area of the estimated epicenter and also made a very accurate forecast regarding their intensity, a report on the university's website said. It failed to warn of just one earthquake and gave eight false predictions. The research team trained the AI to detect statistical bumps in real-time seismic data that the research team had paired with previous earthquakes, the report explained. Once trained, the AI monitored for signs of approaching earthquakes. "Predicting earthquakes is the holy grail," said Sergey Fomel, a professor at UT's Bureau of Economic Geology and a member of the research team, adding: "What we achieved tells us that what we thought was an impossible problem is solvable in principle.""

"Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)"

"Most AI programs function like a "black box." "We know exactly what a model does but not why it has now specifically recognized that a picture shows a cat," said computer scientist Kristian Kersting of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany to the German-language newspaper Handelsblatt. That dilemma prompted Kersting-along with computer scientists Patrick Schramowski of the Technical University of Darmstadt and Björn Deiseroth, Mayukh Deb and Samuel Weinbach, all at the Heidelberg, Germany-based AI company Aleph Alpha-to introduce an algorithm called AtMan earlier this year. AtMan allows large AI systems such as ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney to finally explain their outputs."

"Researchers have shown that given access to only an API, a way to remotely use software without having it on your computer, it's possible to reverse-engineer machine learning algorithms with up to 99% accuracy. In the real world, this would mean being able to steal AI products from companies like Microsoft and IBM, and use them for free. Small companies built around a single machine learning API could lose any competitive advantage."

"In October 2016, algorithms reacted to negative news headlines about Brexit negotiations by sending the pound down 6% against the dollar in under two minutes, before recovering almost immediately. Knowing which particular headline, or which particular algorithm, caused the crash is next to impossible. When one haywire algorithm started placing and cancelling orders that ate up 4% of all traffic in US stocks in October 2012, one commentator was moved to comment wryly that "the motive of the algorithm is still unclear"."

"More algorithmic decision making and decision augmenting systems will be used in the coming years. Unlike the approach taken for A-levels, future systems may include opaque AI-led decision making. Despite such risks there remain no clear picture of how public sector bodies - government, local councils, police forces and more - are using algorithmic systems for decision making."

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."

"Physicist creates AI algorithm that may prove reality is a simulation"

"But with all of the successes of AI, it's also important to pay attention to when, and how, it can go wrong, in order to prevent future errors. A recent paper by Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville, outlines a history of AI failures which are "directly related to the mistakes produced by the intelligence such systems are designed to exhibit." According to Yampolskiy, these types of failures can be attributed to mistakes during the learning phase or mistakes in the performance phase of the AI system."

"I have been working with generative AI and, even though I have been warning that these tools are improving rapidly, I did not expect them to really be improving that rapidly. On every dimension, Bing's AI, which does not actually represent a technological leap over ChatGPT, far outpaces the earlier AI - which is less than three months old! There are many larger, more capable models on their way in the coming months, and we are not really ready."

"Universities don't merely face essays or assignments entirely generated by algorithms: they must also adjudicate a myriad of more subtle problems. For instance, AI-powered word processors habitually suggest alternatives to our ungrammatical phrases. But if software can algorithmically rewrite a student's sentence, why shouldn't it do the same with a paragraph - and if a paragraph, why not a page? At what point does the intrusion of AI constitute cheating?"

"Indeed, a recent working paper in the area of machine learning suggests that the simpler the algorithm, the more likely its outcome will further disadvantage already disadvantaged groups. In other words, our social relationships are complex, and our algorithms should be, too. But in the quest to streamline processes, they aren't always, and that can be a huge problem."

"But the answer to how he was chosen is actually an algorithm, a computer program that crunched through reams of data, looking at how much each passenger had paid for their ticket, what time they checked in, how often they flew on United, and whether they were part of a rewards program. The algorithm likely determined that Dr. Dao was one of the least valuable customers on the flight at the time."