Zuck vs Dillon: there’s only room for one tech dawg in this town

Our friend Chris Dillon, who famously hates social media, steps into the PastMaster time machine on Monday to meet the Meta boss back when Facebook was still just a load of old code on Zuckerberg’s hard drive.

Chris has a plan, but how tight is security at Harvard in 2003? How vigilant is Mark Zuckerberg against people stealing his work? And what would he do if a stranger literally ate the food off his fork?

Tune in to find out - episode drops on Monday 10 February.

Zuck the time traveller

‘PLEASE DON’T USE AI’

Robots: getting better at applying for jobs

Anthropic, the company behind AI chatbot Claude, has begged job applicants not to use large language model AIs when they write their covering letters.

In its report on this story the Financial Times team tried getting Claude to write a few different job applications and it seemed to get better with a bit of guidance - starting out ‘pretty turgid’ but eventually landing a ‘surreptitious acrostic flourish’.

It’s ironic that in an article about how even AI companies are getting tired of ‘generic AI slop’, the FT’s correspondent Robin Wigglesworth can’t resist playing with Claude, tweaking and poking it and delighting at the results.

AI IN THE NEWS

AI is already being used in autonomous weapons

In a depressing move Google’s parent company Alphabet has rewritten its guidelines on how it will use AI, dropping a section which previously ruled out applications that were “likely to cause harm”.

In effect this lifts a ban on AI being used for developing weapons and surveillance tools. Human rights groups condemned the move, while Alphabet defended it, saying business and governments need to work together on AI to support national security.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that AI will become increasingly commonplace in conflicts, but it seems nihilistic to cede life and death moral decisions to a computer programme.

AI is a thrilling technological frontier that could potentially transform medicine and climate science, but this seems like a step in the wrong direction.

PLAY YOUR OWN GAME OF PASTMASTER

Are you ready to step through the time travel portal?

As a thank you for your support, we'd like to invite you to play your own game of PastMaster.

Follow the link here to get the actual prompt we designed to launch the game.
We'd love to hear what adventures you go on so please do send us your funniest explorations!

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Tan and the PastMaster crew.

PS if you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to see the PastMaster team try next, get in touch:

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Email: pastmasterpod@gmail.com