Casey Tonkin, Information Age, Author at Startup Daily

Book review: Toby Walsh’s Faking It Faking unpacks how we’re being tricked into thinking AI is human.

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - November 17, 2023 3 MIN READ

Toby Walsh is one of Australia’s most well-known experts on artificial intelligence and his latest book Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World aims to dispel the common illusion that machine intelligence is comparable to human intelligence. It’s an illusion deeply embedded in the history of AI that could have disastrous consequences, Walsh believes, unless… Read more »

Politics

Australia wants to regulate Apple and Google Pay, and digital wallets like it does credit cards

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - October 12, 2023 2 MIN READ

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) would be given expanded regulatory powers over bring digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) companies, and crypto assets under proposed reforms to national payments systems legislation published this week. In a statement, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the reforms “[address] the risks posed by new digital payments services, which are currently unregulated, to… Read more »

AI/Machine Learning

AI is stealing from Australian authors to make its owners even richer

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - October 5, 2023 2 MIN READ

Australian authors have been caught up in a major controversy around the data used to train large language models after an investigation uncovered 183,000 pirated books were included in a commonly used dataset called Books3. Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan was among the Australian writers whose works were in the dataset that was reportedly… Read more »

Data

Microsoft’s having a shocker with two self-inflicted data leaks in a week

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - September 21, 2023 3 MIN READ

Microsoft has been its own worst enemy this week as the tech giant suffered two unrelated data leak incidents where masses of internal documents, trade secrets, and backups of employee computers were released on the internet. On Tuesday, researchers at security company Wiz went public about a 38TB trove of data that Microsoft’s AI team had accidentally… Read more »

Advanced facial recognition technology identifies the face of woman in bustling crowd, utilizing the power of big data analysis scanning for enhanced authentication through face. generative ai

Politics

The Australian government has revived facial recognition as part of a national ID plan

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - September 14, 2023 3 MIN READ

The Australian government will continue to authorise a one-to-many facial recognition system connected to the national ID database but is limiting its use to helping identify “shielded persons” like undercover police and protected witnesses. Once referred to as ‘the Capability’, the Department of Home Affairs built a system for the public and private sector to verify people’s… Read more »

Marvin the Paranoid Android and Arthur Dent, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

AI/Machine Learning

Machine unlearning: Just 8 months after its launch, ChatGPT is getting worse at writing code and other tasks

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - July 21, 2023 2 MIN READ

ChatGPT’s ability to write code has been getting worse over the last few months with the percentage of prompts that produce working code results dropping severely between March and June, a new study has found. A team of researchers from Stanford and the University of California Berkely set out to test how the large language… Read more »

Politics

Everyone’s on board for an Australian national ID using biometrics

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - June 30, 2023 2 MIN READ

State and territory governments have agreed, with the Commonwealth, to increase their use of biometrics for identification in a bid to make the federated ID scheme more resilient to fraud and identity theft. Identification services are spread across the states and territories, that are in charge of driver licences and birth certificates, and the Commonwealth… Read more »

AI/Machine Learning

Sam Altman, the guy behind ChatGPT, reckons AI won’t take ALL our jobs – and lead to working at higher levels

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - June 22, 2023 2 MIN READ

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman downplayed the potential for the technology to take over jobs at an event in Melbourne last week, saying instead the technology will instead put “higher expectations” on human beings. Altman has an unsurprisingly optimistic view about human nature will respond to the rise of AI, saying he doesn’t think people will… Read more »

Fintech

The Australian government will apply responsible lending rules to buy now pay later fintechs

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - May 23, 2023 2 MIN READ

The government is moving to regulate buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services under the Credit Act and force companies like AfterPay, to follow a set of responsible lending obligations. Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones on Monday that he wanted to maintain innovation and competition in the market but stop the “harmful effects of poor marketing practices and poor… Read more »

Quantum Computing

Quantum of Straya: founders praise Australia’s new Quantum Strategy

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - May 4, 2023 3 MIN READ

Australia’s long-awaited first National Quantum Strategy launched on Wednesday as the government looks to cement the country’s position as a world leader in quantum technologies which are forecast to create 19,400 jobs by 2045. The strategy focuses on five critical themes relating to the development, investment, and use of quantum technologies; securing the industry’s supply… Read more »

AI/Machine Learning

AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton pulls the pin with Google over artificial intelligence dangers

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - May 3, 2023 2 MIN READ

Turing Award winner and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has resigned from his position with Google in order to speak more openly about the dangers of artificial intelligence, raising questions about whether tech giants have silenced the people most qualified to inform the public about the emerging technology’s effects. In 2012, Hinton and two of his students, Ilya Sutskever… Read more »

Social Media

How Elon Musk crashed Twitter

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - April 19, 2023 3 MIN READ

When Elon Musk closed the deal to buy Twitter late last year, the company suddenly found itself facing a US$3 billion yearly deficit and was four months away from bankruptcy, the billionaire told the BBC in an interview last week. Why was Twitter in trouble? Because Musk bought it. “In rough numbers, in a normal… Read more »

Cryptocurrency

US regulators launch legal action against crypto giant Binance alleging they broke US money laundering laws

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - March 28, 2023 2 MIN READ

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has launched a suit against the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, claiming the company was deliberately skirting local regulation and knowingly facilitated the illicit flow of money. In a complaint against Binance, its founder Changpeng Zhao, and chief compliance officer Samuel Lim, the CFTC alleged the Binance team… Read more »

Business

Amazon axes again, sacking another 9,000 staff at AWS and Twitch

Casey Tonkin, Information Age - March 21, 2023 2 MIN READ

Amazon is laying off another 9,000 employees, with senior management citing “the uncertain economy in which we reside”. The cuts will come from its cloud business Amazon Web Services (AWS), streaming platform Twitch, and its advertising department. This latest round of layoffs comes just two months after Amazon said it would cut more than 18,000… Read more »

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