Gosh, do you mean that THIS generation of AI can also only regurgitate its training database according to a statistical fit, and not infer any new about the data whatsoever?

The oldest problem in AI? That people literally try to pretend is solved by calling one part of the training "inference" now? Even though it doesn't infer a damn thing that's not in the data?

Gosh. Who'd've thunk?

>"Also, you also don't have evidence of what you think is happening. Then, the difference between us is that I'll only believe it once I have evidence and you believe it without evidence."

Did you READ what I wrote? I never wrote or claimed I had any evidence. I never wrote that I thought they were able to break into messages or that I believed they were.

I wrote that it is POSSIBLE and we CAN'T KNOW FOR SURE because the platform and code is not open (it is closed).

People regularly pay $1000 or more for a single screen flagship. 2 screens is double, $2000. Three screens is triple, $3000. Seems like they are just doing simple math here. Of course, we know the price shouldn't scale that way, but whatever.... if it doesn't sell enough, they will lower the price or discontinue it.

I admit, it sounds neat. But it also looks overly thick and heavy/bulky. I don't need a "super thin" phone, but I also am kinda used to not having a brick. I don't use/obsess over a stupid phone anywhere near enough to spend even $1000 on it, which is why I buy midgrades for $300 to $400. And usually keep them for 5+ years. So $3000 for a phone does seem insane to me.

>"Could youn please define "closed"? As far as I understand, WhatsApp is based on The Signal Protocol."

It can be based on anything they like. But if you are running a binary blob on your phone, you have no idea what the actual code is doing ALL the time. And you certainly don't know what their servers are doing. That is "closed".

>"Also, there are no known remote vulnerabilities to The Signal Protocol (that I'm aware of). The FBI has broken encryption on the protocol but this was done physically. This is unlike the remote access that's described in the article."

The encryption can be rock solid and unbreakable. But if their app will send them the keys if requested in some manner, then you are done.

>"Also, do you have any evidence"

Nope. I have no idea. Like I said, it is unlikely there are any shenanigans going on. But it is plausible.

>"or a conceptual idea of how WhatsApp would have "master keys present at the start"?

Yes, that is easy. Your local machine creates the private key it is going to use and the app transmits that to their servers and it is stored. Or, requested later under certain communication and it is sent at that point. Do you know their code doesn't have that ability? How would you know? Especially if it never does it unless requested in some secret way....

If you train it on the internet, it will be almost as reliable as the internet. (Almost. Not quite.) And if you train it to always give a responsive answer (and not say "I don't know") then it's going to generate hallucinations even when the internet doesn't lead it astray.

OK. Basically an AI can be trained to do anything that a person can do **IF THERE IS A WAY TO CHECK THE ANSWER**. If the AI can't get good feedback, it can't learn to handle the problem correctly.

This is why I think that AGI is going to require embodiment, and LOTS of sensors. And it still often won't reach the same conclusions people reach. (Consider the arguments that even men and women have, and their goals/sensoria/brains are extremely similar.)

Marking the value of these companies to market, is that it? For decades the idea for all of these 'businesses' was to collect as many free users as possible (which is why they could get hundreds of thousands if not millions of subscribers per day) and then get paid by the 'investors' (gamblers) for this. Their best business propositions were to sell advertisements and to sell user data. By introducing paid subscriptions AFAIC they are actually marking the value of their businesses to market, as in they are going to find out what their business models are actually worth. What will this do to their share prices you ask? I don't know, I wonder if they do.

Yep. Weather radar is already the found money channel for meteors and reentry junk, so squeezing a little more truth out of existing signals is always a win.
What made me grin about this article is how old-school the core idea is -- the Mach cone hitting the ground looks like a hyperbola if you plot the difference in arrival times of the signal at any sensors in the debris path. All it takes is some high school level algebra (conic sections ftw!) and a little creative thinking. I once caught a public talk at the Pima Air & Space Museum where an electrical engineer walked us through using USGS seismic stations to suss out a hypersonic track of something flying very fast across the desert southwest. He basically used sonic boom footprints based on this same idea about signal arrival times. His slide deck strongly suggested something doing Mach 6+ between Groom Lake in Nevada and Deer Island in southern California every couple of weeks. The punchline: he gave the whole talk standing under the wing of the museum’s SR-71. I asked during Q&A if that was a coincidence. He smiled: “Nope, not a coincidence.” (Crowd laughed, because of course they did -- Aurora and the X-39 were open secrets at the time.)

>"Otherwise it would be end-to-middle-to-end encryption, wouldn't it?"

Nope, that would imply it is being decrypted and then re-encrypted in the middle. That doesn't have to happen. It would still have stayed encrypted from one end (sender) to the other end (receiver). The middle can just store the message and decrypt it later, if needed, if they have access to the keys (now or later) or a weakness/backdoor.

>"The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims."

That is an inherent problem with closed code and closed platforms. They can claim anything they want and there isn't much way we can verify their claims. I admit, this story seems really sensational (a little hard to believe), but it is plausible.

Also, there can be word-trickery here. It is possible things can be claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" and yet still have ways for the mothership to decrypt anything at will (by having intentional secret holes/weaknesses, by storing your or another key, or a method they can pull the key from your device through their own control over the app, or by having master keys present at the start). I think that would be a misuse of the term "end-to-end encryption", yet term use/definitions mutate all the time. Anyway this can backfire spectacularly if discovered and lead to a lot of legal issues- if they had denied law enforcement/courts access in the past with the excuse that they can't decrypt it and then it is discovered they could.

and mandate Batmobiles with twin gas turbines for all!

Better or worse than hallucination rate if political appointees in charge of present rulemaking process?

The thing is, LLM is only one type of AI. All it does is try to handle language. Train it differently and it's not a LLM, but it can do quite well at, say, protein folding. (Note it's guessing how the protein would fold, but that used to be the domain of experts. After you get the guess, then you go and check, and the AI is doing as well, or possibly better, than the experts were doing.)

I normally find most of the check out lines unmanned. Perhaps it depends on the time of day.

They originally thought she was 25 to 35, and she's 58. They originally thought it was an accident, and now think it is murder... by a guy who is basically a retiree.

Murder for hire, I could maybe believe, but in the absence of a lot more detail, this is kind of stretching credibility here.