Fluid & Crystallized Intelligence

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British psychologist Raymond Cattell in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s. Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom. Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life. Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

AI Supervision

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One coding team spent 3 days fixing what should have been a 2-hour problem. They had "saved" time by having AI generate the initial implementation. But when it broke, they lost 70 hours trying to understand code they had never built themselves. The time you save upfront gets charged back with interest later. The best teams avoid this because the human engineer actually understands the code. They shaped it. They made the key decisions. The AI just handled the mechanical work of typing it out. The new constraint is: "Can we understand the code we're writing fast enough to keep moving?" Treat code review as a comprehension verification step, not just a bug-catching exercise. - Paul Sangle-Ferriere

22 Articles about AI & Legal Issues

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Agentic AI: From statistical patterns to strategic partners – Reuters  

Stability AI largely wins landmark UK intellectual property lawsuit brought by Getty Images – Associated Press  

AI startup Perplexity launches tool to speed up patent research – The Verge

Federal judges using AI filed court orders with false quotes, fake names – Washington Post

AI Works Do Not “Compete” with Works of Authorship – Illusion of More

Activist Robby Starbuck Sues Google Over Claims of False AI Info – Wall Street Journal  

These people ditched lawyers for ChatGPT in court – NBC News

A novelist’s books were used to train A.I. chatbots. So she sued and won the largest copyright settlement ever. – New York Times

Disney sends cease and desist letter to Character.AI – Axios  

Record labels claim AI generator Suno illegally ripped their songs from YouTube – The Verge

California’s New AI Regulations Take Effect Oct. 1: Here’s Your Compliance Checklist – Jackson Lewis  

Rolling Stone Publisher Sues Google Over AI Summaries - Wall Street Journal 

A federal judge blasted the $1.5 billion AI copyright settlement in the Anthropic case – Bloomberg

Anthropic tells US judge it will pay $1.5 billion to settle author class action - CNN

Almost Every State Has Its Own Deepfakes Law Now – 404 Media

AI Does Little to Reduce Law Firm Billable Hours, Survey Shows - Bloomberg 

Texas attorney general accuses Meta, Character.AI of misleading kids with mental health claims – Tech Crunch

Anthropic Settles Major AI Copyright Suit Brought by Authors – Bloomberg

Large US law firm apologizes for AI errors in bankruptcy court filing – Reuters

10 FAQs About California’s New Algorithmic Discrimination Rules – National Law Review

California’s landmark frontier AI law to bring transparency – AL Jazeera

“Future of Professionals” report analysis: Why AI will flip law firm economics – Reuters

12 Articles about AI & Data Privacy

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AI takes the creativity out of cheating

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Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.  But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had done the writing. -More in the New York Times

AI Misrepresentation of News

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New research has found that AI assistants routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. Key findings:

45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.

31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.

20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.

More at BBC News

24 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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Common Crawl: The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work – The Atlantic  

Anthropic says its Claude models show signs of introspection - Axios

xAI’s Wikipedia-like website is racist, transphobic, and loves Elon Musk – The Verge 

Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid – The New Yorker

Saudi Arabia’s New Power Play Is Exporting A.I. to the World - The New York Times

OpenAI sees chance to reindustrialize U.S. - Axios 

Meta Cuts 600 Jobs at A.I. Superintelligence Labs - The New York Times

What happens when AI consumes too much clickbait.- Gizmodo  

The hottest term in AI is completely made up - The Washington Post

OpenAI launches Atlas browser to compete with Google Chrome – Associated Press

OpenAI's metamorphosis from chat app to tech giant - Axios

Is the Flurry of Circular AI Deals a Win-Win—or Sign of a Bubble? – Wall Street Journal

OpenEvidence, the ChatGPT for doctors, raises $200M at $6B valuation – Tech Crunch

As tech companies build A.I. data centers worldwide, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages. - The New York Times

The Fight Over Whose AI Monster Is Scariest - Wall Street Journal

Got a Windows 11 PC? Get ready to talk to it. - The Washington Post

Silicon Valley Is Investing in the Wrong A.I. - The New York Times

AI Data Centers, Desperate for Electricity, Are Building Their Own Power Plants - Wall Street Journal

Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be? – The Atlantic

China now leads the U.S. in this key part of the AI race - The Washington Post

'Very troubling': AI's self-investment spree sets off bubble alarms on Wall Street - Yahoo

Reflection AI, an A.I. Model Start-Up, Raises $2 Billion - The New York Times

How Google Is Walking the AI Tightrope - Wall Street Journal 

New AI battle: White House vs. Anthropic - Axois

The shift in the creative arts brought on by AI

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Pixar is an analogy to explain the potential benefits of the shift in the creative arts brought on by AI. Before Pixar, there were these folks who were really high-end in terms of their craft. Animators put a lot of energy into the drawings in each frame. But once computers could automate that work, the role of the animators shifted. They were able to spend a lot more time — and, for that matter, put a lot more resources toward — thinking about storytelling and plot development.” -New York Times

AI Prompts & Verbalized Sampling

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A team of researchers have come up with an ingenuously simple method to get language and image models to generate a wider variety of creative responses to nearly any user prompt by adding a single, simple sentence: "Generate 5 responses with their corresponding probabilities, sampled from the full distribution."  The method, called Verbalized Sampling (VS), helps models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini produce more diverse and human-like outputs—without retraining or access to internal parameters. -VentureBeat 

Encouragement

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We appreciate what a person does, but we affirm who a person is. Appreciation comes and goes because it is usually related to something someone accomplishes. Affirmation goes deeper. It is directed to the person himself or herself. While encouragement would encompass both, the rarer of the two is affirmation. To be appreciated, we get the distinct impression that we must earn it by some accomplishment. But affirmation requires no such prerequisite. This mean that even when we don’t earn the right to be appreciated (because we failed to succeed or because we lacked the accomplishment of some goal), we can still be affirmed – indeed, we need it then more than ever. I do not care how influential or secure or mature a person may appear to be, genuine encouragement never fails to help. Most of us need massive doses as we slug it out in the trenches. 

Charles Swindoll, Strengthening Your Grip

AI Definitions: Facial recognition

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Facial recognition - This AI technology uses statistical measurements of a person’s face to identify them against a digital database of other faces. For instance, Clearview AI was trained on billions of images. These AI-powered systems are used to unlock phones, verify passports, and scan crowds at events for malicious actors. It’s used by many US agencies including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. It has a serious problem with false positives and a history of unintended harms and intentional misuse based on racial and gender bias.

More AI definitions here