Daily Digest: The end of AGI

PLUS: Recall is risky.

June 05, 2024

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Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

  1. All the AI babies went for a nap yesterday. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity all went offline for a few hours, leaving us humans to fend for ourselves. I even tried asking the twins (my human ones) a few coding questions, but they just started crying. Thankfully, the AI crew is back online, but they're tight-lipped about the cause of it.

  2. Remember Microsoft's shiny new AI tool, "Recall"? It remembers your browsing history and laptop activity and allows you to search/ask questions over it. Recall does that by taking screenshots every 5 seconds and that’s where it gets problematic. The way Recall stores your data is a potential security nightmare.🍿Our Summary (also below).

  3. ex-OpenAI researcher Leopold Ashenbrenner was on Dwarkesh’s podcast. He talked about CCP espionage, his firing from OpenAI, and the future of AGI—the latter of which is interesting. He claims AGI is easily possible by 2027 and we need to understand the timelines better. He’s written a series of essays titled "Situational Awareness” on the topic. AGI timelines.

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NEWS

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QUICK BITES

Remember Microsoft's shiny new AI tool, "Recall"? It's like your personal time machine, answering questions about your browsing history and laptop activity by taking screenshots every 5 seconds. Sounds cool, right? Well, it gets problematic.

What’s going on here?

Security researchers have found a potential privacy nightmare lurking within this seemingly convenient tool.

What does this mean?

Recall stores all those screenshots in an unencrypted database on your laptop. This means anyone with access to your device could potentially see everything you've been doing. Cybersecurity experts are already comparing it to spyware, and one ethical hacker even built a tool called "TotalRecall" (yes, like the movie) that can pull all the information Recall saves. Yikes.

Apparently, Recall captures everything - even messages from encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp, including those "disappearing" ones. And it doesn't stop there; websites you've visited, text on your screen—it's all fair game.

Why should I care?

Well, if you value your privacy, this is a big deal. Imagine a disgruntled employee walking away with sensitive company data or a malicious actor getting their hands on your personal information. Not to mention the potential for abuse in personal relationships.

Microsoft claims you can disable the screenshot feature and delete the data, but the fact that it's stored unencrypted in the first place is raising eyebrows. They haven't responded to these concerns yet, but researchers are urging them to reconsider Recall's design before it's officially released.

Stay tuned for updates on this one, folks. In the meantime, maybe think twice before using Recall. After all, do you really want your laptop to remember everything?

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