What Would Hayek Think of AI?
The International Monetary Fund promises that 'AI can enhance democratic institutions by ensuring citizens' voices are truly heard.' Power wielded by a few experts can enhance democracy? Isn't that what the early 20th-century Progressive movement promised? For that matter, isn't that the thinking behind Soviet 'scientific socialism'?
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Los Angeles Times
3 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Samsung to make Tesla AI chips in multiyear Texas deal
Samsung Electronics Co. will produce AI semiconductors for Tesla Inc. in a new $16.5 billion pact that marks a win for its underperforming foundry division. South Korea's largest company announced on Monday that it secured the 22.8 trillion won chipmaking agreement, which will run through the end of 2033. The plan is for an upcoming plant in Taylor, Texas, to produce Tesla's next-generation AI6 chip, Tesla chief Elon Musk said on X, confirming a Bloomberg News report. Samsung's Seoul-traded shares rose 6.8% to their highest since September, while its suppliers like Soulbrain Co. jumped 16%. A Samsung spokesperson declined to comment, citing confidentiality terms in its contract. 'The strategic importance of this is hard to overstate,' Musk, 54, wrote on X. He described the value of the deal announced by Samsung as 'just the bare minimum. Actual output is likely to be several times higher.' The Tesla chief executive officer and X owner will walk the chip fabrication line himself and has been authorized by Samsung to assist in optimizing production, he said. The AI6 component will form the foundation of Tesla's driving hardware suite for cars in coming years. Samsung produces the current AI4 system, according to Musk. The contract win, the first after Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee was cleared of all outstanding legal charges, comes as Samsung has been steadily losing ground in chip manufacturing. The company, which makes its own memory chips and also fabricates semiconductors on behalf of clients, has had difficulty bringing in enough orders to fully utilize its foundry capacity. It has postponed completion of construction and operational ramp-up of its new Texas fab to 2026. 'Their foundry business has been loss-making and struggling with under-utilization, so this will help a lot,' said Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privee in Singapore. 'Tesla's business may also help them to attract other customers.' That's in contrast to leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which still cannot meet all demand. TSMC held a dominant share of 67.6% of the global foundry market in the first quarter this year, according to Taipei-based TrendForce. Samsung's share slipped to 7.7% from 8.1% in the previous quarter. Samsung and TSMC are both on pace to deliver the next generation of semiconductor advancement — moving to 2-nanometer fabrication — and the new deal is seen as a signal of confidence for the company's upcoming fabrication technology. While the contract may represent a small share of foundry revenue annually, it holds greater value as a catalyst for technological refinement and innovation over the long run, according to Ryu Young-ho, an analyst at NH Investment & Securities Co. It also helps burnish Samsung's reputation as the strongest TSMC alternative at a time when Intel Corp. is struggling to win over investors skeptical about its long-term strategy and road map. At Tesla, Musk has said the company's future will depend on delivering the long-elusive goal of true self-driving technology. Last week, after a disappointing earnings report, he said the automaker will face 'a few rough quarters' until it can deliver autonomous vehicles at scale — which he predicted for the second half of 2026 or by the end of the year. Yet there is still skepticism about that target. Musk's X posts following the Samsung deal imply that Tesla will adopt two different next-generation chips in short order that are crucial to its automated-driving systems. He wrote that the carmaker will go from currently sourcing AI4 chips from Samsung, to using AI5 chips from TSMC that have just been designed, to then using AI6 chips from Samsung. The rapid-fire changes risk opening Tesla up to more blowback from car owners who were told back in 2016 that all the vehicles the company was making from then on had the hardware necessary to eventually drive autonomously. In early 2023, Musk said on an earnings call that Tesla was going to stop offering retrofits to customers whose cars were equipped with older-generation chips, citing the cost and difficulty of offering upgrades. Tesla has made some progress in recent months toward competing with Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo by starting to offer a driverless taxi service in Austin. But the carmaker has yet to offer rides without any safety staff in its vehicles, and early users posted videos of the robotaxis appearing to violate traffic laws. The suite of features Tesla markets as Full Self-Driving still requires customers to supervise the system at all times. Lee and Kang write for Bloomberg.
The Verge
3 minutes ago
- The Verge
The US could soon get a new private uranium enrichment facility.
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Gizmodo
3 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
The Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor
Mark Massaro has taught English Composition at Florida Southwestern State College for years, but his job became significantly more difficult in 2023. Not long after AI apps like ChatGPT became freely available, higher education throughout the U.S. was hit with a tsunami of automated cheating. Students have been using AI to write essays—and the trend appears to be worsening as time passes. Massaro said that, out of 25 students in his classes, it isn't unusual for as many as five to turn in papers that appear to be written by AI. When ChatGPT first launched, and it became apparent that students were using it to cheat, Massaro says he used to run papers through multiple AI scanners a day. If a majority of them labeled the prose as generated by AI, he believed them. Now, however, the school doesn't allow them to upload students' work to such applications because it could be considered a breach of their privacy. It also doesn't help that the accuracy of AI detectors is unreliable. Instead, Massaro says he must depend on his own wits to assess whether a paper was illegitimately conjured or not. To do this, he's put together a checklist of tell-tale signs that a paper is AI. Whenever a paper is handed in, he consults that list. He shared some of those red flags with Gizmodo, creating a clearer picture of the hellish conditions that AI has imposed on America's educators. One hint that a paper may be generated is a plethora of em dashes. For whatever reason, apps like ChatGPT like to include plenty of these little. Now, Massaro has a test that he does. If he suspects a student of having generated their essay with AI, he will call them up to his desk and ask them to produce an em-dash on the computer. Frequently, the student doesn't even know how to do it, he said. 'I'll be like, your paper is full of em-dashes, just show me how you did it,' he said. If the student struggles, it's obvious what has happened. Massaro says, contrary to the style stipulations of the traditional college essay, it's common for text that was copied and pasted from a chatbot to have no paragraph indentations. The output from ChatGPT and its ilk notably doesn't have any need for indents. If a student's paper is defined by big blocky chunks of text, there's a good chance that a robot wrote it. If a student hands in a perfectly worded paper that doesn't have much to say, this could be another tell-tale sign of algorithmic generation, Massaro said. While there are plenty of students who may be good writers but may not have a lot of original thoughts, auto-generated writing has several tells that become obvious over time. Massaro describes the AI style as featuring 'uniform sentence and paragraph length,' in which every 'paragraph is about the same size, with a rhythmic, mechanical feel.' The writing may also have a 'hyper-formal tone,' he said, which is often characterized by an 'overly polished academic voice not typical of student work.' Another red flag is a total absence of any participation in the in-class drafting process, Massaro said. As part of his composition classes, Massaro hosts peer reviews and conferences. A student may also claim that they met with the school's Writing Center to put the essay together, but, in reality, did not do this either. When students turn in these essays, they may also include 'unusual vocabulary for the student' that is characterized by 'sudden jumps in sophistication not seen in previous work or class discussions.' Massaro said he occasionally hands out personal reflection papers. A student who actually writes the paper based on, say, their experiences working at the local 7-Eleven, will include all sorts of weird personal details that an AI would never think to invent, Massaro said. On the other hand, if the paper is auto-generated, it may wax on in a very abstract way about the importance of 'friendship' to humanity, he chuckled. Shockingly, some students have been so sloppy with their cheating that they've actually left prompt inputs from their interactions with a chatbot in the final essay that they turned in, Massaro says. It's well known that AI has a habit of 'hallucinating' information. In a student's paper, these AI-spawned references will manifest themselves in many different forms, including plainly incorrect or invented information and fake citations. This can create hours of additional work for Massaro, as he's forced to hunt down whether an obscure fact in an essay is real or not. This sometimes includes poring over real academic journals and books that were cited in the student's papers, but that may not feature the citations included in the student's bibliography (because they're fake). Confronting a student about cheating can be awkward and difficult, Massaro said, although it is usually easy to tell what has happened right off the bat, he added. Frequently, a guilty student will admit that they used AI, or will simply not respond to Massaro's email (many of his students are remote). Innocent students often protest, and Massaro said he tends to believe them. The biggest disappointment about the rise of AI-writing is that it is robbing students of their ability to cultivate their own intellectual and creative identity, he said. 'This is the time when they're supposed to be finding their voice,' he said. Instead, AI is doing the talking (and the thinking) for them.
