Camelot Newsletter

When the line between “fun story” and “existentially terrifying” is smaller than a needle in a haystack…

This week Anthropic’s LM named Claude 3 Opus was able to successfully, to a somewhat frightening degree, pass the “needle in a haystack” evaluation.

The term "needle-in-the-haystack evaluation" refers to a specific type of test designed to assess a model's ability to find and retrieve a singular, highly relevant piece of information from within a large and potentially overwhelming collection of unrelated or irrelevant data.

Opus not only found the needle, it recognized that the inserted needle was so out of place in the haystack that this had to be an artificial test constructed by the user to test its attention abilities. So, not only was Opus able to extract the correct information it also communicated that it was aware that the query was a test. After identifying the needle in the haystack, Opus said “I suspect this fact was inserted as a joke or to see if I was paying attention.” 😨 

This level of meta-awareness is very cool to see but it also highlights the need to move past artificial tests to more realistic evaluations that can accurately assess models true capabilities and limitations as well as create guardrails and oversight to ensure existential harmony.

Have fun with ai - make friends - here are some apps to try

Pi - Pi stands for Personal Intelligence. Pi is engaging, empathetic and humorous. Pi was designed with emotional intelligence to be supportive and motivating. Because sometimes you just need an unbiased place to vent or share your feelings, Pi is a great way to safely express your feelings and receive support.

MyMap.ai - Transforms ideas into visual stories. Type in any description and this text-to-image transformer model will generate a visual story based on your input. It’s a lot of fun!

In other news…

• Elon’s childlike rage continues to escalate. Apparently, now suffering boredom since sufficiently mangling his new toy Twitter (now stupidly known as X), he has decided to pick a fight with an old friend to keep himself entertained. Musk filed suit against OpenAI for “breach of contract.” In essence because they wouldn’t let him take full control of OpenAI back in 2018 and merge it with Tesla and because they are now the coolest kids on the playground, and he is not.

• Open AI did not hesitate to call BS by publishing a blog post complete with screenshots of emails from Musk to various Open AI leaders clearly agreeing to things he claimed he never agreed to in his lawsuit filing. Whoops. Forgot about that paper trail!

• For added measure an Open Letter to “Build AI For a Better Future” was published and signed by industry leaders including Meta, Google, Y Combinator, Hugging Face and others. But one name that was conspicuously absent was Mr. Musk. They could have saved themselves the trouble and just published a simple two column page with list of good guys (see above) and list of bad guys with Musk’s name at the top.

  Similarly, I remember something like this from elementary school. When one friend from our little clique was acting up, we would unceremoniously strike her name from our Lisa Frank “Best Friends Folder” where we kept all of our secret notes and scented marker drawings. Just crossed her name right out and covered it with masking tape. Ice. Cold.

• Old Joe’s State of The Union speech aired Thursday night and while my expectations were low, I was dare I say inspired! “Many of you in this chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom,” Biden said. “My God, what freedoms will you take away next?” Chills. Absolute chills. 👏 

Turkeys and Angels

Every week brings new and exciting antics! Here I nominate one Turkey; a squawky or nefarious critter deserving of the “You are a Turkey” moniker. Because we must always bring balance to the force, an Angel will additionally be recognized for bringing laughter, love or all around goodness to the world.

This week’s Angel: The guy who said:

 “Women are not without electoral power.”

👏 

This week’s Second Angel: (That’s right folks it’s my newsletter and I make the rules) The world lost one of the all time greatest earth angels this week; Iris Apfel. At 102 years old Iris is a fashion icon and a personal inspiration.

Queen of confidence and style, Iris inspired us all with her celebration of color, joy and unique point of view.

"Fashion you can buy, but style you possess. The key to style is learning who you are, which takes years. There's no how-to road map to style."

When asked about her rules for style she replied “I don’t have rules because I would only be breaking them.”

Words I live by daily: “If your hair is done and you’re wearing good shoes, you can get away with anything.”

The inspiration she bestowed upon the world will be with us forever. 👠