Hackers expose leading chatbots

Due to technical issues, yesterday’s newsletter was not emailed to subscribers. The web version was still published and you can find it here. I’m working with beehiiv to resolve the issue and ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

Welcome back to The Daily Update — Here’s today’s menu:

🗞️ The Latest in AI: Hackers uncover flaws in leading AI chatbots

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: MindPal — Chat with all of your files

📸 Business Spotlight: Humane will share more about mysterious ‘Ai Pin’ in October

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

Read time: 2 minutes

🗞️ The Latest in AI: Hackers uncover flaws in leading AI chatbots

Over 2,000 participants spent this past weekend competing to uncover vulnerabilities in leading AI chatbot models at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas. Although findings won’t be made public until February, the insights we have now are concerning to say the least.

What you need to know:

• Research shows that security wasn’t a priority at launch.

• Current models can be easily manipulated to produce racist, biased and harmful content.

• Hackers have already tricked leading models with poisoned data. This causes large language models to pollute themselves by retraining on junk data.

• One researcher had ChatGPT create phishing emails and a recipe to violently eliminate humanity.

• Big tech companies have pledged to audit their models, but smaller AI startups may launch unsecured, vulnerable products.

• Fixing flaws will take lots of time and millions of dollars.

The bottom line: AI is advancing at a rapid pace, but security is not keeping up. Big risks are coming.

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: MindPal — Chat with all of your files

MindPal is the ultimate time saver. It allows you to upload all of your files and chat with them to find important information in seconds.

Acceptable file types:

• PDF

• Word

• PowerPoint

• Excel

• Audio

• Video

• YouTube

• Website

You’ll need an OpenAI API Key to activate a free trial with MindPal. This will give you three free uploads. Upgrading to a pro account requires a one-time fee of $69.

Click here to try MindPal.

📸 Business Spotlight: Humane will share more about mysterious ‘Ai Pin’ in October

Humane was in the spotlight last month with an ambitious AI project that aims to replace smartphones. Yesterday the startup announced that it will share more details about its mysterious product on October 14, the same day as a solar eclipse.

What we know already:

• The product is a wearable mini projector with AI-powered features.

• Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri used the device to answer a phone call from his wife in a demo at this year’s TED conference.

• The Ai Pin is designed to clip to a breast pocket and can perform many tasks that a smartphone can with fewer gestures and voice commands.

• The startup was launched by ex-Apple duo Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno in 2018. Humane has brought on dozens of other ex-Apple employees since.

Why it matters: The Ai Pin is the first wearable AI product to be revealed to the public. Humane’s founders believe their product will unlock a new era of screenless mobile computing. Only time will tell if the Ai Pin will actually replace smartphones, but it’s an interesting development nonetheless.

Click here to learn more.

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

• The cost of ChatGPT: Experts think that OpenAI could go bankrupt by the end of 2024. ChatGPT reportedly costs the company ~$700k per day.

• AI regulation: A nonprofit group released policy proposals that seek to limit the power of big AI companies and expand the power of government agencies. The Zero Trust AI Governance would require companies to prove that their AI is safe.

• AI shopping: Amazon is rolling out AI-generated review summaries so you don’t have to read the comments on a product.

• Access denied: The New York Times prohibits using its content to train AI models.

Have questions or thoughts on today’s newsletter? Reply to this email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for reading The Daily Update!

Jack

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