The hours spent choosing the right word and rearranging sentences to better follow one another are what teach you how meaning is conveyed by prose.

If the output of ChatGPT isn’t good enough for GPT-4, we might take that as an indicator that it’s not good enough for us, either.

the more that text generated by large language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself.

the re-stating of information in different words.

there’s still the matter of blurriness

When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material.

Is it possible that, in areas outside addition and subtraction, statistical regularities in text actually do correspond to genuine knowledge of the real world?

Large language models identify statistical regularities in text.

Hutter believes that better text compression will be instrumental in the creation of human-level artificial intelligence, in part because the greatest degree of compression can be achieved by understanding the text.

ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence

it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average.

that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.

It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone.

But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable.

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web.

Reading off of a teleprompter or script? No stress.You can adjust your video after recording and create natural eye contact with your audience.

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In addition to the countries mentioned above, other credible co-guarantors include Turkey (which has skilfully mediated Russia-Ukraine talks); Austria, which is proud of its enduring neutrality; and Hungary, which holds this year’s presidency of the UN General Assembly and has repeatedly called for negotiations to end the war.

According to the IMF’s estimates of GDP at purchasing-power parity, the combined output of Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa ($51.7trn, or almost 32% of world output) in 2022 was larger than that of the G7 nations, America, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

These countries are neither Russia-haters nor Ukraine-haters. They neither want Russia to conquer Ukraine, nor the West to expand NATO eastward, which many see as a dangerous provocation not only to Russia but perhaps to other countries as well. Their opposition to NATO enlargement has sharpened as American hardliners have urged the alliance to take on China. Neutral countries were taken aback by the participation of Asia-Pacific leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand in a summit last year of supposedly “North Atlantic” countries.

Neutral nations including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa have repeatedly called for a negotiated end to the conflict.

it includes the phased elimination of sanctions on Russia and an agreement by both Russia and the West to contribute to the rebuilding of war-torn areas.

Some compromises would need to be found regarding Crimea and the Donbas region, perhaps freezing and de-militarising those conflicts for a period of time

to make a peace agreement acceptable, credible and enforceable

Russian leaders believes that NATO would use any pause in fighting to expand Ukraine’s arsenal. They choose to fight now, rather than face a stronger foe later.

Ukraine and its Western allies have little chance of ousting Russia from Crimea and the Donbas region, while Russia has little chance of forcing Ukraine to surrender.

In a peace agreement, Ukraine would need to be assured of its sovereignty and security, while NATO would need to promise not to enlarge eastward.

Weil and Cioran left their writings. Mishima achieved not only literary greatness but also the spectacular, violent death that had been his erotic obsession throughout his adult life. Gandhi liberated India.

Emil Cioran

the likes of Vladimir Lenin and Maximilien Robespierre, whose utopian dreams were realised as nightmares.

“alarmingly imperfect behaviour” (mainly egotism and undue fixation with chastity).

Suffering was unequally shared, she thought, and much of it due to the power of the strong to abuse the weak.

offer “lessons in humility”.

Some failures are serious and some are trivial.

Failure may be “brutal and nasty and devastating”, Mr Bradatan writes, but it is also “essential to what we are as human beings”.

These have hobbled the trading of Russian oil in Geneva and frozen piles of oligarch cash stashed in Zurich. But populists have criticised even this as drifting away from non-alignment.

The Chinese and others have also made it clear to the Kremlin that they object to Russia using a nuclear weapon. In fact, Russia’s nuclear weapons are most effective when it doesn’t actually use them.

But I think it is very unlikely it would deploy a nuclear weapon of any type, even for Crimea.

If the West moves quickly, Ukraine could liberate Crimea by the end of August. If not, Crimea will remain a sanctuary for Russian supplies and weaponry.

It is home to the Black Sea Fleet, a launchpad for drones and other weapons, a logistics hub and a trading port for Russian merchant shipping. Because Crimea is decisive, and because it is becoming clearer that Ukrainian forces can liberate Crimea, Ukraine must not negotiate now. Russia would never agree to trade Crimea away.

And while Russia has it, Ukraine cannot rebuild its economy. That is because the Russians are able to interfere with activity in all of Ukraine’s ports from Crimea, disrupt shipping from places such as Odessa and block access to the Sea of Azov.

As recently as the summer of 2021, 41% of Ukrainians agreed with the notion that Ukraine and Russia were one people, according to one study. By the spring of last year, after Russia invaded, the number had plummeted to 8%.

Millions of Ukrainians continue to speak Russian without suffering discrimination. But local authorities in many parts of the country are changing street names and pulling down Russian and Soviet statues.

President Joe Biden hosted 12 Pacific leaders (including Mr Bainimarama) at the White House in September. They agreed to work together to build a region in which “democracy will be able to flourish”. America also pledged to provide an additional $810m in aid to the region.

Worse still for China, Mr Rabuka said that police officers from Australia and New Zealand could continue to work in Fiji because their political systems were similar to the Pacific-island country’s.

a timely rebuttal to those who would sacrifice the vital legacy of Western science—and the progress that comes with it—on the altar of cultural sensitivity or by retreating to the safety of metaphysical revelation.

“Its provisional nature and the underlying void do not make life meaningless; they make it more precious.”

He is eager to defend this anti-traditionalist tradition against both extreme relativists, who believe there is no truth outside a particular time and culture, and absolutists who believe there is only one incontrovertible truth.

Among the ancient Greeks, this capacity to assimilate a variety of traditions led not only to the birth of science, but of democracy—a translation of Anaximander’s irreverence for established ways of thinking into the realm of politics.

“Civilisations flourish when they mingle,” Mr Rovelli says. “They decline in isolation.”

For Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, all citizens of Miletus, a Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, doubt was a birthright.

by knowing what it is you do not know.

They replaced revelation with observation and faith and scripture with reason.

“The reliability of science is based not on certainty but on a radical lack of certainty.”

In the past Lula has used foreign policy as a tool to burnish his popularity at home, says Rubens Ricupero, who was Brazil’s ambassador in Washington in the 1990s. Lula is now planning to do one international trip a month; indeed, he is off to China in March. The trick might not work as well this time.

His administration has also signalled that it will support Brazil’s attempt to join the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, once its environmental policy is back on track.

Lula also faces a tricky balancing act. Brazilian diplomacy is typically neutral. Governments of both the left and the right have tried to stay out of big disputes. During his first two terms Lula tried to expand Brazil’s global influence while remaining in America’s good books.

DARPA plans to select the best subsystems this summer, and hopes to have a prototype ready for testing in LEO before 2025. If all goes well, the network could then be extended to geosynchronous orbits. Allies, Dr Root reckons, might be invited to join. America’s adversaries will no doubt be watching closely.

He reckons that if they were used, the result would be as large as a pizza and consume 400W. His team are “trying to shrink the pizza size into a matchbox” using what they call “chiplets”, in lieu of bigger semiconductors.

Using a different wavelength, to prevent interference, the receiver will then fire a laser back along the same path to confirm the connection.

Mynaric, a firm based near Munich that is designing heads for Space Bacon, can adjust a laser’s trajectory by just 57.2 millionths of a degree. At a distance of 1,000km, this translates into a beam displacement of less than a metre.

Satellites in low Earth orbits (LEOs, those below an altitude of 2,000km, and the sort which Space Bacon will use to start with) travel at about 7.8km a second, often tumbling as they go. Connecting the optical heads on two of these will be an epic task

Individual satellites can download data only when in range of a terrestrial antenna belonging to their particular network

until a suitable ground antenna is within reach.

far higher data rates than radio waves.

hard to intercept and almost impossible to jam.

The plan is to fit as many newly launched satellites as possibly with laser transceivers that will be able to communicate with counterparts as far away as 5,000km.

The Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node (Space-BACN, or “Space Bacon”, to its friends) will, if successful, create a laser-enabled military internet in orbit around Earth by piggybacking on a number of satellites that would have been launched anyway.

Moroccan politicians castigate European ones, especially the French, for colonial meddling.

Morocco seems to be turning its back on what it calls “old Europe”. Instead, it is looking increasingly to Israel and America for its defence.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was recently in Algeria and Libya to discuss investments in energy. Italy now depends on Algeria for 40% of its gas, up from 30% before the Ukrainian war. The share of Russian gas in Italy fell from 40% to 10%.

One way to get on the radar, she says, is to appoint tech types to the board, which helps spread the word. “Once you get into that circle a bit, people talk,” she adds. “They talk at their cocktail parties.”

“Sometimes it is easier to get these guys to give away $100m than $1m.”

to market itself as a “moonshot” project

“There is a blurring between entrepreneurship and philanthropy,” says Mr Soskis.

the venture-capital arm has made investments in the Atlantic, a magazine, and Stripe, a payments-processor.

Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, a former Apple boss, both use LLCs for their do-goodery.

Donors can get deductions on their tax bills, too.

Silicon Valley Community Foundation,

for donor-advised funds (DAFs),

He takes grant applications from anyone via a short online form.

The gifts were mostly given without conditions, with the charities trusted to make the best use of the money. Ms Scott has called her approach “seeding by ceding”.

by which offered the most charitable bang for each buck.

Tech has spent the past two decades disrupting everything from shopping to television. Charitable giving, it seems, is next.

26 of the 100 richest people in the world in 2022 made their money leading technology firms of various sorts, including seven of the top ten.

He told Founders Pledge he would like the cash to go to education and poverty relief in poor countries, then left its researchers to sort out the details.

MARSS, a defence startup based in Monaco, is sending its drone interceptors: their networked sensors detect incoming enemy drones and launch counter-attack drones from the ground that use artificial intelligence to identify, track and attack targets without human assistance.

Ukraine’s allies have good reasons for wanting to wash their hands of Russian oil. But that will not prevent debris from nearby wreckages floating to their shores.

One will be to further split the oil trade along sharp geopolitical lines.

All this suggests Russia will be unable to sell much of its refined oil, and will instead try to push as much crude as it can to the grey market.

Therefore Russia’s best bets may be the smaller markets of Brazil and Mexico, which will see their supplies dwindle as America exports more to Europe.

Insurance experts suspect some ports serving countries gorging on Russian crude—notably India—have lowered the level of coverage they require incoming tankers to have.

The liabilities from an oil spill can be so big that 90% of global p&i coverage is provided by clubs of shipowners, mostly in London, which pool premiums. Outside the West, no private market has the muscle to extend similar safety-nets, says Ulrich Kadow of Allianz, a German insurer.

Instead, the shadow trade appears to be fuelled by credit from the Russian state, with the middlemen only paying for the cargo once they have collected the proceeds. Increasingly, banks in the Gulf are signing cheques too. Locals think they decided to step in when adnoc, the uae’s state-owned energy giant, started receiving Russian crude in November.

The fleet Russia can use to dodge the price cap now counts 360-odd ships, equivalent to 16% of the global crude tanker inventory.

Most were “Aframax” and “Suezmax” tankers: with a maximum capacity of 1m barrels, these are the only ships small enough to dock at Russian ports. Demand for Aframaxes has been so strong that a few recently sold for $35m—the average price China paid last year to buy much larger vlccs, which can carry up to 2m barrels.

the trading arms of Russian producers, those of Western oil majors and Swiss commodity merchants. These were mostly based in Geneva

Some trade still uses the same Greek shippers, British insurers, and Dutch and Japanese banks that have long ruled the industry.

the new “shadow” shipping and financing infrastructure is robust and extensive. Rather than fade away, the grey market stands ready to expand when the next set of sanctions is enforced.

They are based not in Geneva, but in Hong Kong or Dubai

Democracy depends on citizens who can find compromises. Liberalism depends on taking an opponent’s argument seriously and learning from it. America needs institutions that can have these debates, rather than monocultural incubators of mutually exclusive ideologies

Yet if they are used as a filter for hiring, they will filter out anyone who fails to toe the campus-progressive line, and anyone who objects on principle to ideological litmus tests.

to remake institutions according to their preferences.

Students sometimes object to being exposed to ideas they deem troubling.

they are attempts to win arguments by controlling the institutions where those arguments take place.

those generated by the immigration debate (though, surprisingly, not by the policing debate) clearly divided them.

Both used functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which measures changes in blood flow as a proxy for neural activity, to look at groups of 44 and 34 volunteers respectively, from across the political spectrum.

to produce a single-crystalline membrane

At present, LEDs are made like silicon chips. The red, green and blue versions required for a full range of colours are grown on different wafers, then cut out and placed side by side, with microscopic precision, to form pixels.

To generate displays with higher and higher resolution, LED pixels have been getting smaller and smaller. But this makes them ever harder to manufacture reliably. Some in the industry think a practical limit will soon be reached.

“You could have a completely immersive experience and wouldn’t be able to distinguish virtual from reality,”

One reason is climate change. Almost one in 20 Britons said they experienced climate anxiety in 2022: shamanism places all things in nature on an equal footing. Paganism, another religion rooted in nature, is also on the rise. “It gives people a spiritual outlet for their political beliefs [about climate change],” says Mr Buxton.

Shamanism is rooted in animism, the idea that every entity in nature, whether plant, animal or rock, is alive. Trance is the core shared practice. Shamans (who are traditionally trained by other shamans) learn to enter trances—aided by drumming, singing, dancing or, occasionally, psychotropic drugs—to commune with spirits. Such beliefs date back to hunter-gatherer societies. “We talk about [prostitution being] the oldest profession but really, it’s shamanism,” says Simon Buxton of the Sacred Trust, a shamanic training centre.

Should your partner enjoin you to eat less salt, you can push the salad they have placed before you away. Salad, you can declare, comes after all from herba salata, Latin for salted vegetables. Alas, you will also have to swear off salsa (from the Latin for salted seasonings), and, for that matter, any sauce (which is just the French adaptation of salsa). You will further have to forgo sausage and salami (both descended from Latin’s salcisus, applied to salted meat).

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the gradual changes in a word’s form and meaning, buttressed by literary citations over centuries.

In English, the great majority of them descend from a stock of roots shared among the Indo-European family of languages. Some reached English as part of its Germanic Anglo-Saxon bedrock. Others arrived with the French of the Norman conquest, or were coined from Latin and Greek in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Roman soldiers were given an allowance of salt, or paid in it entirely.

They prompted a tremendous scramble to invent new ideas and institutions, to make sure that radical economic change translated into broad-based prosperity rather than chaos.

ai will break the historic mould

If ai boosts productivity and lowers costs in medicine, for example, that might lead to much higher demand for medical services and professionals.

And in the 1980s and 1990s, automation of routine work on factory floors and in offices displaced many workers of modest means, while boosting employment for both high- and low-skilled workers.

despite epochal technological and economic change, fears of mass technological unemployment have never before been realised.

Measured productivity growth may actually decline in the years or decades after a new technology appears, as firms and workers divert time and resources to studying the tech and designing business processes around it.

The gap between innovation and economic impact is in part because of fine-tuning.

It must be used in many industries, have an inherent potential for continued improvement and give rise to “innovational complementarities”

The gpt in its name stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”

As in the 1990s, when search engines first appeared, a hugely valuable prize—to become the front door to the internet—may once again be up for grabs.

If chatbots’ main value is as a layer on top of other digital services, though, that will favour incumbents which provide such services already.

But it is unclear whether chatbots are a competitor to search engines, or a complement.

But will people use them if their objectivity has been compromised by advertisers? Will they be able to tell? Behold, another can of worms.

Running a chatbot requires more processing power than serving up search results, and therefore costs more, reducing margins.

As tech firms decide which topics are too sensitive, they will have to choose where to draw the line. All this will raise questions about censorship, objectivity and the nature of truth.

how to build a bomb

for medical advice

Chatbots must also grapple with bias, prejudice and misinformation as they scan the internet.

Unlike search engines, which mostly direct people to other pages and make no claims for their veracity, chatbots present their answers as gospel truth.

moral choices, monetisation and monopoly economics.

called Ernie,

in Anthropic, a startup founded by ex-OpenAI employees, which has built a chatbot called Claude.

Google has announced Bard, its own chatbot, as a “companion” to its search engine.

Many things that people use search engines for today, in short, can be done better with chatbots.

ChatGPT can write essays in various styles, explain complex concepts, summarise text and answer trivia questions. It can even (narrowly) pass legal and medical exams.

By the end of January, two months after its launch, ChatGPT was being used by more than 100m people, making it the “fastest-growing consumer application in history”, according to UBS, a bank.

Google is not merely a household name; it is a verb.

he should answer Mr Biden’s calls for a relationship with guardrails.

two-way trade between China and America runs at about $2bn a day

“Both in China and the US, there are still some people working for stable bilateral relations, but they are in a minority,” he worries.

Mr Da sees this year as a window of opportunity for talks, before American elections in 2024. He pins cautious hopes on “reasonable” officials, business bosses and academics on each side who still seek co-operation.

Mr Russel sees the two countries in “uncharted” territory as they feel their way towards a new equilibrium, balancing often-incompatible goals and worldviews with deep economic integration.

For good measure, it accused America of “hyping up” the story, as if a free society could cover up a house-sized enemy balloon visible from the ground.

mid-air crash in 2001 between an American EP3 spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet

When an American missile burst the balloon, the main injury was to China’s pride.

Its App Store policies protect its users from fraudsters, hackers and the like, it has said. Its ad-tracking restrictions protect privacy.

to innovate in order to “keep on their feet, on ground that is slipping away from under them”

It is Apple’s vast, and vitally important, supply chains in China, from which it will struggle to extricate itself as Sino-American relations deteriorate.

Even ChatGPT, Microsoft’s weapon in the fight, could not describe creative destruction with more Schumpeterian eloquence.

That left no one safe from disruption. As he put it, even a monopoly was “no cushion to sleep on”.

he believed that creative destruction blew through the economy like a perennial gale, destroying old structures and building new ones.

Though Facebook and Google get most of the antitrust attention, so much of their content depends on Apple’s platforms that some describe it as the 800-pound gorilla in the background.

Apple has become just the sort of big-business innovation engine that late-in-life Schumpeter admired and perceived as best-placed to produce revolutionary change.

Such developments, says Mr Dediu, are not about “eureka moments”. They are about turning new technologies into products that eventually will be accessible to millions.

Schumpeter drew up a checklist of ways to create new “combinations”, as he called entrepreneurial firms; Jobs used many of them. He created new goods (Macs, iPods, etc), a new method of production (the Cupertino-to-China supply chain) and new markets (the app economy).

his famous term “creative destruction”,

unless Mr Macron can persuade the French of its merits, he could end up with a successful reform to his name, but a bitterly resentful country.

French workers actually on average these days put in a longer week (37 hours) than Germans (35 hours), and are nearly as productive per hour worked.

In 1880 Paul Lafargue, a socialist thinker, published “Le Droit à la Paresse” (“The Right to be Lazy”), arguing for a three-hour working day and denouncing the “madness of the love of work”.

A 2% tax on the assets of French billionaires, suggested a report from Oxfam France, would wipe out the pension deficit overnight.

This was highlighted by his rejection of the distinction between discovery and justification (denying that we can distinguish between the psychological process of thinking up an idea and the logical process of justifying its claim to truth) and his emphasis on incommensurability (the claim that certain kinds of comparison between theories are impossible

A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’

European space officials like the Artemis program and are seeking areas for greater involvement. This is drawing them closer to NASA.

However, the more significant reason is probably a political one

anuary, Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, said his focus remains on the International Space Station Partnership with NASA, Russia, Canada, and Japan. "For the moment we have neither the budgetary nor the political, let’s say, green light or intention to engage in a second space station—that is participating on the Chinese space station,"

Nearly six years ago the European Space Agency surprised its longtime spaceflight partners at NASA, as well as diplomatic officials at the White House, with an announcement that some of its astronauts were training alongside Chinese astronauts. The goal was to send European astronauts to China's Tiangong space station by 2022.

A new study argues that the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space—known as the Kármán line—is 20 kilometers, or about 20%, closer than scientists thought

Until now, most scientists have said that outer space is 100 kilometers away.

World Air Sports Federation (FAI) in Lausanne, Switzerland, the keeper of outer space records

A country’s sovereign airspace theoretically extends to the (disputed) boundary with space.

More serious challenges for balloons might be regulatory and political.

This kind of technology could eventually be a threat—or a complement—to existing space data businesses.

The benefits include higher resolution imagery: World View’s investor presentation claims sensor resolutions of 3 to 5 centimeters per pixel, compared to the 50 cm per pixel resolution that is top of line in space-based Earth observation. The balloons also offer more persistent monitoring by floating above one location for weeks at a time, whereas Earth observation satellites can typically gather data a few times a day at most. World View already has a partnership with Maxar, a leading satellite firm with an extensive remote-sensing business.

it wafted through US skies before