This Week I Learned - Week #17 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GPT-4, is approaching human levels of intelligence—what is labeled “artificial general intelligence.” GPT-4 already exhibits test-taking abilities generally well above the average human, scoring in the 99th percentile on the SAT Verbal and the 90th percentile on the LSAT. A primary concern is that the chatbots, as smart as they are, display erratic and autonomous behaviors. Risks abound when the internet becomes a playpen for thousands, perhaps millions, of artificial intelligence systems.Artificial Intelligence needs guardrails and global cooperation. - WSJ

* Online tool to convert a video's VTT file to a transcript without any time codes, metadata, and extra lines. 

* Skype wasn’t really founded by Estonians but it was four Estonians (Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn, and Toivo Annus) who turned the founders' (Niklas Zennström from Sweden and Janus Friis from Denmark) vision into reality. Skype was first released in August 2003. In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion. In September 2009, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board bought 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, valuing the business at $2.92 billion. In May 2011, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion and used it to replace their Windows Live Messenger. As of 2011, most of the development team and 44% of all the division's employees were in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia. Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. It became entirely powered by Microsoft-operated supernodes in May 2012; in 2017, it changed from a peer-to-peer service to a centralized Azure-based service.

* Shortly after a long-running breach of SolarWinds Corp. software was disclosed by cybersecurity company FireEye Inc. in December 2020, the U.S. government moved quickly. The U.S. military deployed teams of hackers to foreign networks in 2020, in the days after a major cyberattack on federal agencies. They hunted for intruders to study their behavior before shutting down their access. The Cyber National Mission Force or CNMF, a little-known mixed unit of military and civilian cybersecurity specialists that operates in foreign networks to hunt threats, reconstructed the server in a training environment and, in the days following, began to analyze how the attackers had infiltrated. Other engagements for the CNMF include deployments following the compromise of Microsoft Corp.’s Exchange Server email product in March 2021. - WSJ

* In Google Drive all files will undergo a malware scan prior to any file download or file sharing attempt.

* The Forbes 30 Under 30 have collectively raised more than $9B in funding over the last 4 years. The Forbes 30 Under 30 have also been arrested for frauds and scams worth over $18.5B. This list includes:

• Charlie Javice, founder of the startup called Frank, which was described as “Amazon for higher education” was accused of fraud relating to the sale of her company to JPMorgan Chase for $175 million.
• Sam Bankman-Fried & Caroline Ellison who were associated with the crypto exchange FTX
• Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud in 2017 for mismanaging two investments funds. Shkreli infamously raised prices for the life-saving medication Daraprim by 4,000% while he was head of Turing Pharmaceuticals.

* Others lauded by Forbes include founder and former CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes & founder, former chairman and CEO of Nikola Corporation, Trevor Milton.

* The problem here isn’t Forbes, of course; the problem is the vision of success that we’ve been sold and the fetishizing of youth. 30 Under 30 isn’t just a list, it’s a mentality: a pressure to achieve great things before youth slips away from you. The pressure can lead certain ambitious people to take shortcuts. And, in fact, shortcuts are encouraged: millennials, after all, grew up being told to “fake it till you make it”, cash in now until you become a withered, irrelevant, 30-year-old prune. - The Guardian

* Autarky refers to the state of self-sufficiency and is typically used to describe nations or economies that have the goal of reducing their dependence on international trade. There are no fully-autarkic nations in the modern world, as even the most isolated have some level of participation in international trade and receive outside support or aid. North Korea and Nazi Germany are two examples of nations that have pursued a policy of autarky. - Investopedia