🧙🏼‍♂️ OpenAI and upcoming elections

Welcome to the 349 new subscribers who joined last week. I’m thrilled that you are here to learn with me.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI this week:

OpenAI’s safety measures for the upcoming elections
Anthropic trains LLMs to act malicious in an experiment
The 10 most popular GPTs right now
Other AI news this week you don’t want to miss

This week’s issue is brought to you by: agent.ai

If you want to understand AI development from a bit more technical side, but something still easy to read… this newsletter is for you. The only bad thing is I wish it were published more frequently.

Dario’s Picks

I. OpenAI’s measures to prevent fake news with the upcoming elections this year

OpenAI just published a blog post on how they, in relation to the worldwide elections happening this year, are working to safeguard their systems and preventing abuse of their tools.

Already implemented:

Not allowing building apps on top of the OpenAI API that impersonates politicians, nor instructing ChatGPT to impersonate them. It’s also not possible to build apps for political campaigning or lobbying.
Prohibiting GPTs that do any of the things mentioned in the previous point. GPTs now also have a reporting system for violations.
DALL-E doesn’t generate images of political candidates.
If asked about certain election questions, ChatGPT will refer users to CanIVote.org.

Upcoming:

A digital signature on DALL-E generated images to improve transparency of AI generated imagery.
An early version of a tool that can classify images generated by DALL-E to a group of testers (journalists, platforms, and researchers).
ChatGPT will increasingly be integrated with real-time, globals news reporting from existing publications, including attribution and links.

Why it matters: We really want AI systems trained with good intent, and that limit the spread of false information, even if comes at the cost of a degree of censorship sometimes. AIs trained with wrong intent can be really quite scary (check out the summary of Anthropic’s new paper below), so I’m glad to see the biggest companies out there focusing on transparency and preventing misuse of their systems, also because it establishes a precedent for everyone else.

II. Anthropic trained some LLMs to act secretly malicious

In a new paper, AI company Anthropic (makers of Claude), did an experiment in which they trained LLMs to act deceptive. After alignment/safety training, the LLMs were still able to act maliciously.

You can read the full thread here.

Why it matters: Current AI safety measures could give a sense of false security if the AI is trained to be deceptive. The conclusion here is basically that once the model has been poisoned (in the experiment they use a sleeper phrase to make the model act in a certain way), the current safety alignment approach could not eliminate the bad behaviour.

GPTs

The top GPTs people are using right now

I’ve compiled the 10 most popular GPTs by number of conversations (number of chats in parenthesis). The data is from today, Jan 16.

🥇 Consensus (600k+)

Serves as an AI research assistant, capable of searching through millions of academic papers, providing science-based answers, and assisting in content drafting with accurate citations.

Used to be a popular ChatGPT plugin, and it’s now a very popular GPT! I use it frequently – it makes the experience of ChatGPT a bit closer to using Perplexity.

🥈 Grimoire (300k+)

Create a website (or anything) with a sentence. Learn Prompt-gramming! 20+ Hotkeys for coding flows. 27 Starter projects to learn Prompt-1st Code & Art. or Build Anything! Ask any Question? or upload a photo!

This one has gone viral on X and Reddit. It targets mainly developers, and gives you a series of coding focused hotkeys to help you build things easier.

🥉 AI PDF (300k+)

Handles PDF documents up to 2GB each, allows thousands of PDF uploads on myaidrive.com with a free account, and eliminates the need for repeated file uploads. The PRO version can search across thousands of PDFs and OCR documents, providing superior summaries for lengthy documents.

I mostly just use ChatGPT’s native file uploads to work with PDFs as it’s a very occasional task for me, but this one is convenient if you work a lot with PDFs.

…rapid fire places 4-10:

Canva (200k+) - Enables effortless design of various items such as presentations, logos, and social media posts.
Logo Creator (200k+) - Generates logo designs based on user input.
AskYourPDF Research Assistant (200k+) - Enhances research by interacting with multiple files, generating articles with citations, analyzing and creating references, and building a knowledge base.
DesignerGPT (100k+) - Designs and hosts aesthetically pleasing websites effortlessly.
VideoGPT by VEED (100k+) - Generates stunning videos effortlessly, helping users grow their audience with AI (beta).
ScholarAI (100k+) - Aids in navigating through a vast collection of over 200 million articles, journals, and books for research purposes.
21.700+ Best Custom GPTs (100k+) - Provides a searchable database of over 21,700 public GPTs, offering a wide range of custom ChatGPTs suited to various needs and constantly updated with new additions.

I’ve just started tracking the number of conversations for GPTs in whatplugin. Soon, I’ll dig into which GPTs are gaining popularity fast – so stay tuned for that!

Top 3 categories by number of GPTs

🖼️ Image Generation - 199 GPTs

📣 Marketing & SEO - 186 GPTs

🎓 Learning - 175 GPTs

*refers to categories in whatplugin.ai, which differs from OpenAI’s GPT store.

Bytes

Alexa gets AI functionality.
The latest edition of Bill Gates’ podcast features Sam Altman.
Google lays off 1,000 people in its voice-activated Google Assistant as part of a restructuring.
How AI replaced the Metaverse as Zuckerberg’s top priority.
Microsoft launches Copilot Pro. It’s 20$/month and gives you AI features inside Microsoft 365 apps.
OpenAI changes policy to allow military applications.
Swarovski AX Visio: $4,799 smart binoculars that identify birds 🐦‍⬛

That’s a wrap for this week!

Fellow wizards – join me on LinkedIn.

Until next time,

Dario Chincha 🧙🏼‍♂️

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