Tech Links for May: The End of the iPhone, ScarJo, and More

• Internet, Imaginative, Individual — Irrelevant? Apple’s “i” brand is old and stale, according to the guy who came up with it in the first place, and Apple might agree.
  
  “If Apple did drop the ‘i,’ it would hardly be the company’s most significant makeover. Segall points out that the company is familiar with overhauls, and he believes Apple CEO Tim Cook wouldn’t lose any sleep over dropping the Jobs-era prefix. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on this article.”

• OpenAI’s superalignment team (in charge of AI safety) is not aligned. Its top leaders exited the company, and one of them, Jan Leike, had some critical things to say… which, it turns out, may cost him his vested equity.
  
  “If a departing employee declines to sign [an ‘extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement’], or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars.”

I joined because I thought OpenAI would be the best place in the world to do this research.

However, I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company's core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.

— Jan Leike (@janleike) May 17, 2024

• What’s the bigger OpenAI scandal: Possibly abandoning a commitment to AI safety and crushing dissenters or tweeting “her” and using an AI voice that sounds like Scarlett Johansson?
  
  “Johansson said she had been contacted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in September 2023 about the company hiring her to provide the voice for ChatGPT 4.0. She said she declined for ‘personal reasons.'”

her

— Sam Altman (@sama) May 13, 2024

• Speaking of AI safety, will California’s new AI bill force everyone working on AI to play it too safe?
  
  “The bill’s basic mechanism is to require developers to guarantee, with extensive documentation and under penalty of perjury, that their models do not have a ‘hazardous capability,’ either autonomously or at the behest of humans. The problem is that it is very hard to guarantee that a general-purpose tool won’t be used for nefarious purposes, especially because it’s hard to define what ‘used’ means in this context. If I use GPT-4 to write a phishing email against an urban wastewater treatment plan, does that count? Under this bill, quite possibly so.”

• Buried alive in the Google Graveyard: “Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’”
  
  “More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a ‘one-of-a-kind’ Google Cloud ‘misconfiguration’ led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.”

• Onymos can’t accidentally delete your data due to unprecedented misconfiguration or any other reason. Our unique architecture is why we just won the 2024 Fortress Cybersecurity Award!
  
  “The ever-expanding reliance on networks underscores the critical importance of cybersecurity,” said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer at Business Intelligence Group. “We are proud to recognize our winners and finalists – the pioneers who are shaping the future of data security and defense against ever-evolving threats.”

• Google’s Flutter layoffs are making people nervous.
  
  “It might be a tricky situation if Google decides to pull the plug completely on Flutter someday. It’s not that I am saying that they will, but the graveyard of Google products is almost 300 strong. They do not hesitate.”

• What do drug dealers, murderers, Elizabeth Holmes, and lab-grown meat sellers have in common in Alabama?
  
  “[The new bill] proposed by Sen. Jack Williams, vice chair of the Senate Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry Committee, and signed into law on May 7 by Gov. Kay Ivy, prohibits ‘the manufacture, sale, or distribution of food products made from cultured animal cells.'”
  
  The bill makes doing so a Class C misdemeanor that can net you as much as three months of jail time.

• Pharma researcher Trevor Klee thinks Lumina’s anticavity probiotic might be dangerous (to the public). Lumina CEO Aaron Silverbook thinks Trevor might be dangerous (to Lumina). Lumina threatened a lawsuit. Should they have?
  
  “I believe your post was made in good faith. Or rather—I didn’t, really, but after talking with Elizabeth, she vouched for your character and convinced me that it probably was, comments about my friends aside. So, I appreciate the efforts you’ve gone through out of a desire to keep people safe. As such, it’s probably for the best if we talk,” begins Aaron in response to Trevor’s blog.