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Dave and Chris discuss Designer Gustavo Bonzanini creating the Air SNES, a shoe with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System inside, Paramount launching a hostile bid following Netflix’s acquisition bid on Warner Brothers/Discovery, , and more.
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Since its invention in the 1960s, Kevlar has saved thousands of lives, especially police officers, due to its lightweight yet strong properties. This week our science and technology news reporter, Bond, Ralph Bond, says there’s a new protective material that is much stronger and thinner than Kevlar.
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JJ in Simpsonville, South Carolina asked: “I watch a lot of movies about the future and I was just wondering… What’s the best case scenario for Ai in your opinion?”
JJ, honestly Ai is overhyped at the moment, so realistically the best case for Ai is that it becomes somewhat useful without costing too many jobs, using too many resources, or being used for too many scams and manipulation.
The current version of these Ai bots is not super useful, a good piece of advice is: before asking them about something you dont know, ask them about something youre an expert in. Youll see pretty quickly that a very large percentage of the responses are just wrong.
The best case is for that to improve so it can become a more reliable tool, but at the moment its hindered by the fact that it doesnt have context, so it doesnt know what it doesnt know.
You know that dipping a scalpel in drain cleaner probably doesnt improve the outcomes of a surgery because drain cleaner is corrosive, it just knows that drain cleaner and surgery appeared together in a number of articles so they must be linked.
What is called RAG in Ai, or retrieval-augmented generation, addresses that to an extent. Thats where you tell the model read these documents and give me answers only from these carefully vetted documents.
In theory that should mean that you give it a history book and ask it about the American Revolution, and it doesnt end up conflating it with the plot of a movie and telling you about the continental armys stealth bomber. In the real world results vary, but it gives the models less of a chance to hallucinate, and that makes them more useful at least.
Well have to see how things evolve. Today theres a good deal of hype and not a lot of genuinely useful functionality beyond write a blurb, summarize this, and make a generic image.
In time things may improve.
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