Episode Details

Tech Bro Nonsense

Former Google CEO Tells Congress That 99 Percent of All Electricity Will Be Used to Power Superintelligent AI

billionaire tech tycoon and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt comments to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce: "What we need from you is we need the energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly."

"Many people project demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation... an additional 29 gigawatts by 2027 and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. If [China] comes to superintelligence first, it changes the dynamic of power globally, in ways that we have no way of understanding or predicting.”

Meta Says It's Okay to Feed Copyrighted Books Into Its AI Model Because They Have No "Economic Value"

In the ongoing suit Richard Kadrey et al v. Meta Platforms, led by a group of authors including Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has argued that its alleged scraping of over seven million books from the pirated library LibGen constituted "fair use" of the material, and was therefore not illegal.

Meta's attorneys are also arguing that the countless books that the company used to train its multibillion-dollar language models and springboard itself into the headspinningly buzzy AI race are actually worthless. Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books' individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM's performance "by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise." 

Thus there's no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says, because "for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange," as quoted by Vanity Fair — "but none of [the authors'] works has economic value, individually, as training data." Other communications showed that Meta employees stripped the copyright pages from the downloaded books.

Tellingly, the unofficial policy seems to be to not speak about it at all: "In no case would we disclose publicly that we had trained on LibGen, however there is practical risk external parties could deduce our use of this dataset," an internal Meta slide deck read. The deck noted that "if there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues."

Lauren Sánchez in Space Was Marie Antoinette in a Penis-Shaped Rocket

Katy Perry Boasts About Ridiculous Rocket Launch While NASA Is Scrubbing History of Women in Sp