The Format #032
A digital pandemic, open-source vs OpenAI, tail eaters, gamified smilers and personalised price increases.
Happy Friday!
Here’s what you’re going to be getting in today’s edition:
The problem with letting AI eat it’s own tail 🐍
Japanese workers being trained to smile
Meta with an open-source gamechanger
Mastercard turning the customer into the product
A digital summertime pandemic
Let’s dive in…
CrowdStrike: the massive companies you’ve never heard of with a hidden grip on our lives
Last week 8.5 million computers around the world were hit with a blue screen of doom. This left them unusable, caused flights to be grounded and resulted in over $5 billion in direct losses. It was caused because of a cybersecurity software called CrowdStrike (you can find details about what happened here).
The alarming problem here is that there are clear centralised risks and single points of failure which can have a huge impact on the world, and can be caused by companies that most people have never heard of. Is there a need for more decentralised infrastructure? 👀
The ‘Linux Moment’ in AI Has Finally Arrived
Earlier this week Meta released their Llama 3.1 models and it was a huge win for open-source, with their model being comparable to the top closed models. This points to a future where everyone owns their own fine-tuned model and team of AI agents, rather than just tapping into the commoditised intelligence of companies like OpenAI. Whilst Meta’s model isn’t completely open-source (they don’t share the training data), it’s a huge step towards an open AI ecosystem.
‘Model collapse’: Scientists warn against letting AI eat its own tail
It’s no secret that useful training data for foundational AI models is now in short supply. Unfortunately this has meant that these large language models are starting to be trained on content generated by AI. The problem with that? The models only produce the most likely output, and this means that as this training continues the models will become increasingly less diverse in their outputs and become too far removed from the initial ‘human’ data.
This could be prevented if it was possible to identify or fingerprint content created by AI, potentially a problem for blockchain to solve…
Mastercard's AI spies on you, jacks up prices: FTC finally investigates "surveillance pricing"
Companies trying to squeeze as much money out of users? Hardly a surprise. But using consumer data such as shopping habbits and financial capacity to increase prices for specific individuals… that’s slightly different. It’s good to see some effort from the FTC to try and stop this behaviour, but this shadowy ecosystem seems in desperate need of a transparent payment system.
Japanese supermarkets begin tracking and optimizing workers' smiles
“Mr Smile”: the smile-rating AI system that aims to gamify and optimise employees attitude and facial expressions…
Whilst employee attitude is obviously very important, introducing a system that monitors almost every nuance in every employee interaction feels like it may be a step too close to a dystopian future. That being said it did improve employee attitude by 1.6x. Maybe it pays to smile.
OPENFORMAT
Over the past two weeks, we've been digesting our learnings from our recent no-code competition and of course letting the winners know they’ve won…
No-code Competition Winners
To help decide who would win the different prizes we had an incredible line up of judges and after a lot of consideration they decided that the winners were:
You can read a bit more about the winners and what they built here…
That’s all for this week.
Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
Join our community
Join our Telegram group, The Format, for relevant news and conversations.
Check out our website
Join our Discord for product updates
Subscribe to our YouTube for tutorials and demos
Prompt (Generated by DALLE-2): “A traditional Japanese style illustration of an ouroboros, a snake eating its tail. The snake forms a perfect circle with its mouth biting down on its tail, creating an unbroken loop. The snake has intricate scales and traditional Japanese patterns on its body. The background features subtle elements of Japanese art such as cherry blossoms and waves. The colors are rich and earthy, with shades of red, gold, and green.”