TV's streaming model is broken. It's also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show. From a report: Across the town, there's despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn't be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework. The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood's labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming's busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetizes its biggest hits: It doesn't.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer's latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix's history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent's success might be reflected in his compensation. "I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl -- it's like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, 'What does that mean?'" recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. "In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I'll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I'm going out and buying a private jet, you're way, way off."

Ryan says he'll probably make less money from The Night Agent than he did from The Shield, the cop drama he created in 2002, even though the latter ran on the then-nascent cable channel FX and never delivered Super Bowl numbers. "The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions," he says. "That promise has gone away." Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn't want them to. ("I'm not complaining!" he says. "I'm not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.") But he has a point. Once, in a more rational time, there was a direct relationship between the number of people who watched a show and the number of jets its creator could buy. More viewers meant higher ad rates, and the biggest hits could be sold to syndication and international markets. The people behind those hits got a cut, which is why the duo who invented Friends probably haven't flown commercial since the 1990s. Streaming shows, in contrast, have fewer ads (or none at all) and are typically confined to their original platforms forever. For the people who make TV, the connection between ratings and reward has been severed.

At its annual Google I/O developers conference on Wednesday, Google is planning to announce a number of generative AI updates, including launching a general-use large language model (LLM) called PaLM 2. CNBC reports: According to internal documents about Google I/O viewed by CNBC, the company will unveil PaLM 2, its most recent and advanced LLM. PaLM 2 includes more than 100 languages and has been operating under the internal codename "Unified Language Model." It's also performed a broad range of coding and math tests as well as creative writing tests and analysis. At the event, Google will make announcements on the theme of how AI is "helping people reach their full potential," including "generative experiences" to Bard and Search, the documents show. Pichai will be speaking to a live crowd of developers as he pitches his company's AI advancements.

Google first announced the PaLM language model in April of 2022. In March of this year, the company launched an API for PaLM alongside a number of AI enterprise tools it says will help businesses "generate text, images, code, videos, audio, and more from simple natural language prompts." Last month, Google said its medical LLM called "Med-PaLM 2" can answer medical exam questions at an "expert doctor level" and is accurate 85% of the time.

Sal Khan, founder and CEO of online learning nonprofit Khan Academy, wants to turn GPT into a tutor. From a report: Khan Academy is testing a carefully managed version of OpenAI's GPT that can help guide students in their studies, not enable them to cheat. A pilot is currently running with a handful of schools and districts to test the software, and Khan hopes to open a wider beta this summer. "I strive to be at the cutting edge of how AI, especially large language models, can be integrated to actually solve real problems in education," Khan says.

Many students are already using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to assist with their homework -- sometimes against their teachers' wishes. Khan Academy's approach stands out because it's designed to answer students' questions without giving away the answers, and to integrate with the organization's existing videos and exercises. In a demonstration for Fast Company, Khan showed how the chatbot, dubbed Khanmigo, can guide students through math problems, help debug code, serve as a debate partner, and even engage in conversation in the voices of literary characters like Hamlet and Jay Gatsby. The project began last June, when Khan received an introductory email from Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI's CEO and president, respectively. The two offered a private demo of the AI software, and Khan was impressed with the program's ability to answer questions intelligently about various academic materials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: The Mayan calendar's 819-day cycle has confounded scholars for decades, but new research shows how it matches up to planetary cycles over a 45-year span. That's a much broader view of the tricky calendar than anyone previously tried to take. In a study published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, two Tulane University scholars highlighted how researchers never could quite explain the 819-day count calendar until they broadened their view.

"Although prior research has sought to show planetary connections for the 819-day count, its four-part, color-directional scheme is too short to fit well with the synodic periods of visible planets," the study authors write. "By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar." That means the Mayans took a 45-year view of planetary alignment and coded it into a calendar that has left modern scholars scratching their heads in wonder.

Mercury was always the starting point for the tricky timeline because its synodic period -- 117 days -- matches nicely into 819. From there, though, we need to start extrapolating out the 819 number, and if you chart 20 cycles of 819, you can fit every key planet into the mix. And Mars may be the kicker for the overall length. With a 780-day synodic period, 21 periods match exactly to 16,380, or 20 cycles of 819. Venus needs seven periods to match five 819-day counts, Saturn has 13 periods to fit with six 819-day counts, and Jupiter 39 periods to hit 19 819-counts. "Rather than limit their focus to any one planet," the authors write, "the Maya astronomers who created the 819-day count envisioned it as a larger calendar system that could be used for predictions of all the visible planet's synod periods, as well as commensuration points with their cycles in the Tzolk'in and Calendar Round."

Utah's Great Salt Lake had shrunk by two thirds its original size, the New York Times reported last June. And "It was only three months ago that nearly three dozen scientists and conservationists sounded the alarm that the Great Salt Lake in Utah faces 'unprecedented danger'," CNN reports. "Unless the state's lawmakers fast-tracked 'emergency measures' to dramatically increase the lake's inflow by 2024, it would likely disappear in the next five years." Now, after an incredible winter full of rain and snow, there is a glimmer of hope on North America's largest terminal lake, where water levels had fallen to a record-low last fall amid a historic, climate change-fueled drought across the West. As of Thursday, the snowpack in the Great Salt Lake basin was more than double the average for this time of year. All of this winter's rain and snow that fell directly into the Great Salt Lake increased the water level there by three feet...

In reality, the precipitation only made up for what was lost to last year's drought and evaporation... To reverse the decline, the Great Salt Lake needs an additional 1 million acre-feet of water — roughly 326 billion gallons — per year, according to the January assessment. Bonnie Baxter, the director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College and one of the authors of the January report, said the state would "need another five years like this in order to get the system healthy again."

"If I do the math, we got about three feet of direct precipitation that fell into the lake this year, that is fantastic," Baxter told CNN. "But the last two years, we also lost 2.8 feet in the summer, and we expect to lose that three feet in the desiccating summer. So now, we're pretty much even, and that's not a good place to be."
Baxter says the rainfall "buys us some time" to work on long-term issues like water rights and metering the water used in agriculture — maybe a year or two — but "We're not going to be bailed out by excess snow."

There's hope melting snow could add more water, but Baxter warns that it might not. "If it melts really quickly, which is probably going to happen because we have these late snows and now we're right up against warm temperatures, then you get the water just rushing over the land and not taking time to charge the aquifers and just evaporating off the surface."

The New York Times added a new daily puzzle game to its library in the form of Digits. GameSpot reports: This collection of math conundrums tasks you with reaching a designated number by using six numbers that you're free to multiply, divide, subtract, or add up to reach the final result, so long as your process doesn't create any fractions or negative numbers.

Currently in beta and only available for this week, there'll be five of these math puzzles to solve every day. These aren't one-and-done puzzles like Wordle, and depending on the path you choose to solve one of these math mysteries, you'll be awarded 1-3 star ratings. If Digits proves to be popular with its readers, the New York Times will then start work on the further development of the game.

For all the high-profile examples of ChatGPT getting facts and even basic math wrong, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan says the latest version of the generative AI engine makes a pretty good tutor. From a report: "This technology is very powerful," Khan told Axios in a recent interview. "It's getting better." Khan Academy was among the early users of GPT-4 that OpenAI touted when it released the updated engine. This week, two more school districts (Newark, N.J. and Hobart, Indiana) are joining the pilot of Khanmigo, the AI-assisted tutor. With the two new districts, a total of 425 teachers and students are testing Khanmigo.

The chatbot works much like a real-life or online tutor, looking at students' work and helping them when they get stuck. In a math problem, for example, Khanmigo can detect not just whether a student got an answer right or wrong, but also where they may have gone astray in their reasoning. ChatGPT and its brethren have been highly controversial -- especially in education, where some schools are banning the use of the technology. Concerns range from the engines' propensity to be confidently wrong (or "hallucinate") to worries about students using the systems to write their papers. Khan said he understands these fears, but also notes that many of those criticizing the technology are also using it themselves and even letting their kids make use of it. And, for all its flaws, he says today's AI offers the opportunity for more kids -- in both rich and developing countries -- to get personalized learning. "The time you need tutoring is right when you are doing the work, often when you are in class," Khan said.

One of mathematics' most intriguing visual mysteries has finally been solved -- thanks to a hobbyist in England. From a report: The conundrum: is there a shape that can be arranged in a tile formation, interlocking with itself ad infinitum, without the resulting pattern repeating over and over again? In nature and on our bathroom walls, we typically see tile patterns that repeat in "a very predictable, regular way," says Dr Craig Kaplan, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. What mathematicians were interested in were shapes that "guaranteed non-periodicity" -- in other words, there was no way to tile them so that the overall pattern created a repeating grid. Such a shape would be known as an aperiodic monotile, or "einstein" shape, meaning, in roughly translated German, "one shape" (and conveniently echoing the name of a certain theoretical physicist).

"There's been a thread of beautiful mathematics over the last 60 years or so searching for ever smaller sets of shapes that do this," Kaplan says. "The first example of an aperiodic set of shapes had over 20,000 shapes in it. And of course, mathematicians worked to get that number down over time. And the furthest we got was in the 1970s," when the Nobel-prize winning physicist Roger Penrose found pairs of shapes that fit the bill. Now, mathematicians appear to have found what they were looking for: a 13-sided shape they call "the hat." The discovery was largely the work of David Smith of the East Riding of Yorkshire, who had a longstanding interest in the question and investigated the problem using an online geometry platform. Once he'd found an intriguing shape, he told the New York Times, he would cut it out of cardstock and see how he could fit the first 32 pieces together. "I am quite persistent but I suppose I did have a bit of luck," Smith told the Guardian in an email.

IHTFISP shares a report from Phys.Org: A quartet of mathematicians from Yorkshire University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Waterloo and the University of Arkansas has discovered a 2D geometric shape that does not repeat itself when tiled. David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig Kaplan and Chaim Goodman-Strauss have written a paper describing how they discovered the unique shape and possible uses for it. Their full paper is available on the arXiv preprint server. [...]

The shape has 13 sides and the team refers to it simply as "the hat." They found it by first paring down possibilities using a computer and then by studying the resulting smaller sets by hand. Once they had what they believed was a good possibility, they tested it using a combinatorial software program -- and followed that up by proving the shape was aperiodic using a geometric incommensurability argument. The researchers close by suggesting that the most likely application of the hat is in the arts.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has now sided with Microsoft over concerns the software giant could remove Call of Duty from PlayStation if its proposed Activision Blizzard deal is approved. From a report: The regulator still has concerns about the deal's impact on the cloud gaming market and will complete its investigation by the end of April. "Having considered the additional evidence provided, we have now provisionally concluded that the merger will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in console gaming services because the cost to Microsoft of withholding Call of Duty from PlayStation would outweigh any gains from taking such action," says Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel of experts conducting the CMA's investigation. The CMA had originally provisionally concluded that a Microsoft strategy to withhold Call of Duty from PlayStation would be profitable. Microsoft wasn't happy with that conclusion and publicly criticized the regulator's math earlier this month, arguing that the CMA's financial modeling was flawed.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its ability to give solutions to complex problems almost instantly and with nothing more than a text prompt. Up until yesterday, ChatGPT was based on GPT-3.5, a deep learning language model that was trained on an impressive 175 billion parameters. Now, it's based on GPT-4 (available for ChatGPT+ subscribers), capable of solving even more complex problems with greater accuracy (40% percent more likely to give factual responses). It's also capable of receiving images as a basis for interaction, instead of just text. While the company has chosen not to reveal how large GPT-4 is, they claim it scored in the 88th percentile on a number of tests, including the Uniform Bar Exam, LSAT, SAT Math and SAT Evidence-Based Reading & Writing exams.

ChatGPT is extremely capable but its responses largely depend on the questions or prompts you enter. In other words, the better you describe and phrase the problem/question, the better the results. We're already starting to see companies require that new hires know not only how to use ChatGPT but how to extract the most out of it.

That being said, we'd like to know how Slashdotters are using the chatbot. What are some of your favorite prompts? Have you used it to become more efficient at work? What about for coding? Please share specific prompts too to help us get similar results.

After months of rumors and speculation, OpenAI has announced GPT-4: the latest in its line of AI language models that power applications like ChatGPT and the new Bing. From a report: The company claims the model is "more creative and collaborative than ever before," and "can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem solving abilities." OpenAI says it's already partnered with a number of companies to integrate GPT-4 into their products, including Duolingo, Stripe, and Khan Academy. The new model will also be available on ChatGPT Plus and as an API.

In a research blog post, OpenAI said the distinction between GPT-4 and its predecessor GPT-3.5 is "subtle" in casual conversation (GPT-3.5 is the model that powers ChatGPT), but that the differences between the systems are clear when faced with more complex tasks. The company says these improvements can be seen on GPT-4's performance on a number of tests and benchmarks, including the Uniform Bar Exam, LSAT, SAT Math and SAT Evidence-Based Reading & Writing exams. In the exams mentioned GPT-4 scored in the 88th percentile and above, with a full list of exams and scores seen here. Speculation about GPT-4 and its capabilities have been rife over the past year, with many suggesting it would be a huge leap over previous systems. "People are begging to be disappointed and they will be," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview in January. "The hype is just like... We don't have an actual AGI and that's sort of what's expected of us."

The oceans soak up enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, and MIT researchers say they've developed a way of releasing and capturing it that uses far less energy than direct air capture -- with some other environmental benefits to boot. New Atlas reports: According to IEA figures from 2022, even the more efficient air capture technologies require about 6.6 gigajoules of energy, or 1.83 megawatt-hours per ton of carbon dioxide captured. Most of that energy isn't used to directly separate the CO2 from the air, it's in heat energy to keep the absorbers at operating temperatures, or electrical energy used to compress large amounts of air to the point where the capture operation can be done efficiently. But either way, the costs are out of control, with 2030 price estimates per ton ranging between US$300-$1,000. According to Statista, there's not a nation on Earth currently willing to tax carbon emitters even half of the lower estimate; first-placed Uruguay taxes it at US$137/ton. Direct air capture is not going to work as a business unless its costs come way down.

It turns out there's another option: seawater. As atmospheric carbon concentrations rise, carbon dioxide begins to dissolve into seawater. The ocean currently soaks up some 30-40% of all humanity's annual carbon emissions, and maintains a constant free exchange with the air. Suck the carbon out of the seawater, and it'll suck more out of the air to re-balance the concentrations. Best of all, the concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater is more than 100 times greater than in air. Previous research teams have managed to release CO2 from seawater and capture it, but their methods have required expensive membranes and a constant supply of chemicals to keep the reactions going. MIT's team, on the other hand, has announced the successful testing of a system that uses neither, and requires vastly less energy than air capture methods.

In the new system, seawater is passed through two chambers. The first uses reactive electrodes to release protons into the seawater, which acidifies the water, turning dissolved inorganic bicarbonates into carbon dioxide gas, which bubbles out and is collected using a vacuum. Then the water's pushed through to a second set of cells with a reversed voltage, calling those protons back in and turning the acidic water back to alkaline before releasing it back into the sea. Periodically, when the active electrode is depleted of protons, the polarity of the voltage is reversed, and the same reaction continues with water flowing in the opposite direction. In a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science, the team says its technique requires an energy input of 122 kJ/mol, equating by our math to 0.77 mWh per ton. And the team is confident it can do even better: "Though our base energy consumption of 122 kJ/mol-CO2 is a record-low," reads the study, "it may still be substantially decreased towards the thermodynamic limit of 32 kJ/mol-CO2."

A new report (PDF) from the Data Science 4 Everyone coalition reveals that data literacy skills among fourth and eighth-grade students have declined significantly over the last decade even as these skills have become increasingly essential in our modern, data-driven society. Phys.Org reports: Based on data from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results, the report uncovered several trends that raise concerns about whether the nation's educational system is sufficiently preparing young people for a world reshaped by the rise of big data and artificial intelligence. Key findings include:

- The pandemic decline is part of a much longer-term trend. Between 2019 and 2022, scores in the data analysis, statistics, and probability section of the NAEP math exam fell by 10 points for eighth-graders and by four points for fourth-graders. Declining scores are part of a longer-term trend, with scores down 17 points for eighth-graders and down 10 points for fourth-graders over the last decade. That means today's eighth-graders have the data literacy of sixth-graders from a decade ago, and today's fourth-graders have the data literacy of third-graders from a decade ago.

- There are large racial gaps in scores. These gaps exist across all grade levels but are at times most dramatic in the middle and high school levels. For instance, fourth-grade Black students scored 28 points lower -- the equivalent of nearly three grade levels -- than their white peers in data analysis, statistics, and probability.

- Data-related instruction is in decline. Every state except Alabama reported a decline or stagnant trend in data-related instruction, with some states -- like Maryland and Iowa -- seeing double-digit drops. The national share of fourth-grade math teachers reporting "moderate" or "heavy" emphasis on data analysis dropped five percentage points between 2019 and 2022.

How the irrational mathematics of measuring, ranking, and rating distort the value of stuff, work, people -- everything. From a report: More irrational even than pi, assessing people amounts to quantifying a relationship between unknown, usually unknowable things. Every measurement, the mathematician Paul Lockhart reminds us in his book Measurement, is a comparison: "We are comparing the thing we are measuring to the thing we are measuring it with." What thing do we use to measure undergraduates? What aspects can be compared? Quality or quantity? Originality or effort? Participation or progress? Apples and oranges at best. Closer to bananas and elephants. Even quantitative tests mark, at most, a comparison between what the test-maker thought the student should know and the effectiveness of instruction. Grades become the permanent records of these passing encounters.

And how do we grade the grader? When a physicist friend found out that a first-year Harvard student he knew -- a math star in high school -- got an F in physics, he said: "Harvard should be ashamed of itself." A Harvard grad himself, he believed that schools fail students far more often than students fail schools. Some STEM profs, I'm told, tell the class at the outset that half of them will fail. I give that teacher an F. I'm not alone in my discomfort with the irrational business of ranking, rating, and grading. The deans of Yale's and Harvard's law schools recently removed themselves from the rankings of US News & World Report, followed by Harvard Medical School and scores of others. "Rankings cannot meaningfully reflect ... educational excellence," Harvard dean George O. Daley explained. Rankings lead schools to falsify data and make policies designed to raise rankings rather than "nobler objectives." The very thing that's been eating education is now devouring everything else. My doctor recently urged me to get an expensive diagnostic test because it "makes our numbers look good." Her nurse asked me to rank my pain on a totem pole of emojis. Then after the visit, to rate my experience. The numbers are all irrational. And rather like the never-ending digits of pi, there seems to be no end to them.

Google is rushing to release its own artificial intelligence products in the wake of OpenAI's ChatGPT. From a report: The search engine pioneer is working hard and fast on a "code red" effort to respond to ChatGPT with a large language chatbot and testing new ways to incorporate that AI-powered bot into search, according to a report from CNBC. The new report backs up earlier news from the New York Times and elsewhere, which outlined a rapid re-alignment in Google's priorities in direct response to the rise of ChatGPT. CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly re-assigned employees and "upended" meetings to boost the amount of resources going towards the company's AI development.

CNBC's Tuesday account offers further details. Google's new chatbot, reportedly named "Apprentice Bard," is based on the company's pre-existing LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) technology. The application looks and functions similarly to ChatGPT: Users input a question in natural language and receive a generated text response as an answer. But Apprentice Bard seemingly has a couple of important skills beyond what ChatGPT can do. For one, it can draw on recent events and information, according to CNBC, unlike ChatGPT which is limited to online information from before 2021. And it may be better at achieving that elusive AI accuracy. For instance, LaMDA correctly responded to a math riddle that ChatGPT failed to grasp, as recorded in company documents viewed by CNBC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Ethan Mollick has a message for the humans and the machines: can't we all just get along? After all, we are now officially in an A.I. world and we're going to have to share it, reasons the associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School. "This was a sudden change, right? There is a lot of good stuff that we are going to have to do differently, but I think we could solve the problems of how we teach people to write in a world with ChatGPT," Mollick told NPR. [...] This year, Mollick is not only allowing his students to use ChatGPT, they are required to. And he has formally adopted an A.I. policy into his syllabus for the first time.

He teaches classes in entrepreneurship and innovation, and said the early indications were the move was going great. "The truth is, I probably couldn't have stopped them even if I didn't require it," Mollick said. This week he ran a session where students were asked to come up with ideas for their class project. Almost everyone had ChatGPT running and were asking it to generate projects, and then they interrogated the bot's ideas with further prompts. "And the ideas so far are great, partially as a result of that set of interactions," Mollick said. He readily admits he alternates between enthusiasm and anxiety about how artificial intelligence can change assessments in the classroom, but he believes educators need to move with the times. "We taught people how to do math in a world with calculators," he said. Now the challenge is for educators to teach students how the world has changed again, and how they can adapt to that.

Mollick's new policy states that using A.I. is an "emerging skill"; that it can be wrong and students should check its results against other sources; and that they will be responsible for any errors or omissions provided by the tool. And, perhaps most importantly, students need to acknowledge when and how they have used it. "Failure to do so is in violation of academic honesty policies," the policy reads. [...] "I think everybody is cheating ... I mean, it's happening. So what I'm asking students to do is just be honest with me," he said. "Tell me what they use ChatGPT for, tell me what they used as prompts to get it to do what they want, and that's all I'm asking from them. We're in a world where this is happening, but now it's just going to be at an even grander scale." "I don't think human nature changes as a result of ChatGPT. I think capability did."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: New research (PDF) conducted by a professor at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School found that the artificial intelligence-driven chatbot GPT-3 was able to pass the final exam for the school's Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. Professor Christian Terwiesch, who authored the research paper "Would Chat GPT3 Get a Wharton MBA? A Prediction Based on Its Performance in the Operations Management Course," said that the bot scored between a B- and B on the exam.

The bot's score, Terwiesch wrote, shows its "remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and consultants." The bot did an "amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies," Terwiesch wrote in the paper, which was published on Jan. 17. He also said the bot's explanations were "excellent." The bot is also "remarkably good at modifying its answers in response to human hints," he concluded.

While Chat GPT3's results were impressive, Terwiesch noted that Chat GPT3 "at times makes surprising mistakes in relatively simple calculations at the level of 6th grade Math." The present version of Chat GPT is "not capable of handling more advanced process analysis questions, even when they are based on fairly standard templates," Terwiesch added. "This includes process flows with multiple products and problems with stochastic effects such as demand variability." Still, Terwiesch said ChatGPT3's performance on the test has "important implications for business school education, including the need for exam policies, curriculum design focusing on collaboration between human and AI, opportunities to simulate real world decision making processes, the need to teach creative problem solving, improved teaching productivity, and more." The latest findings come as educators become increasingly concerned that AI chatbots like ChatGPT could inspire cheating. Earlier this month, New York City's education department banned access to ChatGPT. While the education department cited "safety and accuracy" as reasons for the decision, the Washington Post notes how some teachers are "in a near-panic" about the technology enabling students to cheat on assignments.

Yesterday, for example, The Stanford Daily reported that a large number of Stanford students have already used ChatGPT on their final exams. It's prompting anti-plagiarism software Turnitin to build a tool to detect text generated by AI.

Bill Gates took his 11th turn answering questions in Reddit's "Ask My Anything" forum this week — and occasionally looked back on his time at Microsoft: Is technology only functional for you nowadays, or is there a still hobby aspect to it? Do you for instance still do nerdy or geeky things in your spare time; e.g. write code?

Yes. I like to play around and code. The last time my code shipped in a Microsoft product was 1985 — so a long time ago. I can no longer threaten when I think a schedule is too long that "I will come in and code it over the weekend."


Mr Gates, with the benefit of hindsight regarding your years of involvement with Microsoft, what is the single biggest thing you wish you had done differently?

I was CEO until 2000. I certainly know a lot now that I didn't back then. Two areas I would change would be our work in phone Operating systems (Android won) and trying to settle the antitrust lawsuit sooner.
Gates posted all of his responses on his personal web site Gates Notes — and there were also some discussion about AI's coming role in our future. Asked for his opinion about generative AI, and how it will impact the world, Gates said "I am quite impressed with the rate of improvement in these AIs" I think they will have a huge impact. Thinking of it in the Gates Foundation context we want to have tutors that help kids learn math and stay interested. We want medical help for people in Africa who can't access a doctor. I still work with Microsoft some, so I am following this very closely.

Do you think that using technology to push teachers and doctors out of jobs will have a positive impact on our world? What about, instead, we use AI to give equitable access to education and training for more human teachers and doctors, without the $500,000 price tag. Do you think that might have a more positive impact on, ya know, humans?

I think we need more teachers and doctors, not less. In the Foundation's work, the shortage of doctors means that most people never see a doctor and they suffer because of that. We want class sizes to be smaller. Digital tools can help although their impact so far has been modest.


[W]hat are your views on OpenAI's ChatGPT?

It gives a glimpse of what is to come. I am impressed with this whole approach and the rate of innovation....


Many years ago, I think around 2000, I heard you say something on TV like, "people are vastly overestimating what the internet will be like in 5 years, and vastly underestimating what it will be like in 10 years." Is any mammoth technology shift at a similar stage right now? Any tech shift — not necessarily the Internet

AI is the big one. I don't think Web3 was that big or that metaverse stuff alone was revolutionary, but AI is quite revolutionary....


What are you excited about in the year ahead?

First being a grandfather. Second being a good friend and father. Third progress in health and climate innovation. Fourth helping to shape the AI advances in a positive way.
Gates also offered an update on the Terrapower molten salt Thorium reactors, shared his thoughts on veganism, and made predictions about climate change. "I still believe we can avoid a terrible outcome. The pace of innovation is really picking up even though we won't make the current timelines or avoid going over 1.5.... The key on climate is making the clean products as cheap as the dirty products in every area of emission — planes, concrete, meat etc."

Gates also revealed what kind of smartphone he uses (a foldable Samsung Fold 4), what he thought of the latest Avatar ("good"), and that his favorite bands include U2. "I loved Bono's recent book and he is a good friend."

And he said he believes that the very rich "should pay a lot more in taxes." But in addition, Gates said, "they should give away their wealth over time. It has been very fulfilling for me and is my full-time job."

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will on Wednesday announce plans to force school pupils in England to study math up to the age of 18, according to a Downing Street briefing. The initiative attempts to tackle innumeracy and better equip young people for the workplace. CNBC reports: In his first speech of 2023, Sunak is expected to outline plans for math to be offered through alternative qualification routes. Comparatively, traditional A-Levels subject-based qualifications allow high school students in England to elect academic subjects to study between the ages of 16 and 18. [...] Sunak's education proposals would only affect pupils in England. Education is a devolved issue, with Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish authorities managing their own systems.

School-based education in England is only compulsory up to the age of 16, after which children can choose to pursue further academic qualifications such as A-Levels or alternative qualifications, or vocational training. The prime minister is expected to say in his Wednesday speech that the issue of mandatory math is "personal" for him. "Every opportunity I've had in life began with the education I was so fortunate to receive. And it's the single most important reason why I came into politics: to give every child the highest possible standard of education," he will say.

Sunak attended prestigious fee-paying institutions -- the Stroud School and Winchester College -- before studying at Oxford University. He is expected to acknowledge that the planned overhaul will be challenging and time consuming, with work beginning during the current parliamentary term and finishing in the next.