Category: AI Week

AGI vs AI

One of my newsletter readers was asking me about the difference between “AGI” and “AI”.

In one issue of my newsletter last year, I put it this way:

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the term for, well, “actual” artificial intelligence: systems that can respond intelligently to a variety of situations, as humans do. We’re already using the term “AI” to refer to text generation, image generation, etc., so we need another term for actual intelligence. OpenAI’s stated mission is to develop AGI responsibly.

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A cartoon man holds a robot that's holding a gun.

How the bad guys are using AI

This week’s AI Week highlighted some of the ways that bad actors are already using AI, and ways they’re expected to use it more.

  1. Bad guys using AI: Cybercrime, Nazis, deepfakes, and the military
  2. AI application of the week: Scientific fraud detection
  3. Davos, plus Google layoffs
  4. Longreads

This week’s issue is about a 10-minute read. Read the full issue here.




AI week, New Year’s edition

Happy New Year! I took yesterday off, so this week’s AI Week comes on the first non-holiday day of 2024.

If you don’t read anything else in this blog post, read the first and last items: the NYT is suing OpenAI, and my 10 predictions for AI and society in 2024. (But if you do that, you’ll miss the chocolate cake.)

  1. NYT sues OpenAI over training data (plus: US mulls forced disclosure of training data; recap of 2023 lawsuits; meanwhile, Apple explores deals)
  2. Longreads and not-so-long-reads
  3. AI generates all the things, recipe edition
  4. 10 predictions for 2024

I’d love to hear your comments about anything in this post, but especially the predictions. Please leave your comments below!

Read the rest on ButtonDown, or continue below.
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Happy Holidays from AI Week!

Happy holidays to everyone who celebrates anything at this time of year! In between the solstice and Christmas, I sent out a holiday edition of AI Week. I hadn’t actually intended to do a newsletter, but there was so much interesting news that I couldn’t resist sharing it. I hope you’ll enjoy this Winter Holiday Edition of AI Week.

In this week’s AI Week:

  1. Blizen the Red-Nosed Pegasus
  2. Winter Holiday Headlines: No patents for AI in UK; how to break chatbots’ inhibitions; and oh there’s CSAM in the training dataset
  3. Winter Holiday Linkdump: AI-generated everything
  4. Followups: Chevrolet of Watsonville, Twitter/X, more creepy marketers claiming to spy on your devices
  5. Winter Holiday Longreads

The full newsletter is below, or you can read it on Buttondown. And if you’d like to get AI Week in your inbox, sign up here:



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AI week

I started an AI newsletter just in time for OpenAI to implode

Last week, I decided to soft-launch a weekly newsletter to highlight three or four recent news stories in AI. When I started it, I had no idea this would be one of the biggest weeks in AI news all year. There was one giant story: OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, fired their CEO, Sam Altman. And then it got messy.

You can read the rest of this week’s newsletter here.

Why a newsletter: I spend several hours a week reading about AI/machine learning. I get frustrated when I see overly-simple takes on AI in the media, on social media, etc. I figured that the best thing I could do about that would be to share what I’m learning every week.

What the newsletter is: A weekly email about some of the past week’s most interesting stories in AI, plus the occasional backgrounder.

What it’s not: Business-focused, highly technical, or comprehensive.

What you’ll get from AI Week:

  • An interesting email about AI in your inbox every week.
  • Background knowledge to contextualize all the breathless media stories about the powers, or dangers, of AI.
  • A feeling for where the field is going, why it’s going there, and who’s powering it.

Where do I sign up? Right here:



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