Financial Times (June 12)
“After years of false dawns, many of the world’s leading tech companies are now betting that quantum computers will start to outperform their conventional counterparts by 2030—with a potentially huge impact on fields ranging from cryptocurrencies and financial services to drug discovery.” Opinions vary widely. “Some scientists worry that the sheer power of the technology could endanger privacy and national security while others still doubt that useful machines can be made at all.”
Tags: 2030, Conventional, Cryptocurrencies, Drug discovery, Endanger, False dawns, Financial services, National security, Outperform, Privacy, Quantum computers, Scientists, Tech companies
Washington Post (October 20)
“President Donald Trump says he beat inflation. But several conventional measures of rising prices paint a different picture. Most experts agree inflation has picked up in recent months, in part because of Trump’s tariffs. Economists expect more tariff-driven price increases in the months to come.”
Tags: Beat, Conventional, Economists, Experts, Inflation, Measures, Rising prices, Tariffs, Trump
Futurism (September 14)
AI hallucinations are “a major problem plaguing the entire industry, greatly undercutting the usefulness of the tech.” The problem appears to be “getting worse as AI models get more capable.” Some experts argue there is no way around the problem as “hallucinations are intrinsic to the tech itself” and that large language models (LLMs) have hit their limits. However, OpenAI believes it has stumbled on the problem and a relatively easy fix. Its researchers posit that LLMs “hallucinate because when they’re being created, they’re incentivized to guess rather than admit they simply don’t know the answer,” as conventional scoring is binary, which rewards correct guesses and penalizes honest admissions of uncertainty. Instead, they believe you can “penalize confident errors more than you penalize uncertainty, and give partial credit for appropriate expressions of uncertainty.”
Tags: AI, AI models, Binary, Capable, Conventional, Experts, Guess, Hallucinations, Incentivized, Intrinsic, LLMs, Researchers, Rewards, Scoring, Tech, Undercutting, Usefulness
Bloomberg (May 7)
“The conventional wisdom that the Fed’s next move would be down and the trade spat with China would end just got dealt a one-two punch…. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell pushed back against calls for a near-term rate cut and U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to ratchet up tariffs on imported Chinese goods.”
Tags: China, Conventional, Fed, Powell, Tariffs, Trade spat, Trump, U.S.
The Economist (November 29)
Regin, the latest computer virus for cyber spying, appears “to have been designed by a Western government. Due to its ease over conventional methods, cyber espionage is attractive to governments, but they should remember that it’s a slippery slope. “Cyber-warfare is an unruly business, where rules will be flouted. But it needs them. Cyber-warriors should remember that what they do to others will be done in turn to them.”
Tags: Computer, Conventional, Cyber-espionage, Governments, Regin, Rules, Slippery slope, Spying, Virus, Warfare
