Hey, y'all, Marty here. I wanted to invite you to our live call every Tuesday, 01:00 p.m. East, 10:00 a.m west in the ACB community.
If you want to listen live, you can tune in on ACB Media Five or bring your questions live, check us out in clubhouse or visit ACB community to get more information about how you can join the Zoom calls. The replays are also shared on your favorite podcast platform. Search for unmute presents. Hey, everyone, and welcome to a Friday Finds episode.
I know I'm not the voice you're used to hearing, but we got a familiar voice to you. Hey, Lynn, how's it going today?
It's going great. I don't know if Michael can handle me today. Sometimes it takes a special skill to be able to do that, but we'll see what happens.
I think we'll manage well. Hey, let's jump into it. Let me know what's the first story you got to chat about today?
All right, so I wanted to talk about Chat GPT and for people who may not know what it is, just quickly, I don't know how you could not know, but it is the Chat system, Chat bot AI that everybody says is going to take over humanity or whatever. And a lot of people are using it for work. I used it for quite a while before I switched to another bot. But the problem with Chat TPT is that Stanford scientists have found that Chat GPT has gotten less, it performs less, it has been performing less well over the past few months and we're not exactly sure why. We know that the people who run the OpenAI OpenAI, which is the company that runs Chat TPT, has been tweaking it and making changes to it, and that's what people are saying, maybe the reason. But then there are also people that just are not really sure that that's what's happening. But apparently there's an article in a publication called Futurism and they say that Chat GPT is getting stupider. Over the past few months, they did math problems with it, or they did prime number things, and apparently a while back it was able to do those very well and now it's not doing them well at all. But that's the Chat GPT four model, they say, has degraded in performance. The 3.5 model, they say, is actually getting better at math. I don't really know how or why, but we know that, again, OpenAI has done a lot of tinkering with the model to try to make it, quote, unquote, safer. And they think people are saying that in doing that, in tinkering with it, they've sort of messed it up a little bit. This really brings up the point that if we are so reliant on these systems, it's sort of disconcerting to think that a few modifications to the models can render them less useful.
I think we're really interesting with this is often, and I've been listening to a lot of podcasts about this. The developers of these chat programs don't even understand how they come up with some of the results that they come up with. And I don't know if you found that in your research and that's scary to me.
Right. The tinkering with the model thing is I just find it really amazing because can the people behind the scenes, can they actually influence the performance of these models by just doing stuff to them?
Of course. How is that going to alter the way that the model itself influences itself? Because as we all know, it's always learning.
Yes. Okay, people, we have talked about this many times, but subscription fever and if you subscribe to YouTube Premium, you are going to be paying an extra $2 a month. So my issue with that is I want them to stop feeding me YouTube shorts. I hate them with a passion and I am aggressive about trying to tell the algorithm that I do not like these shorts. And I feel like as a paying customer, I should have that ability. But no, they keep trying to force these things down my throat, which irritates me so much. I don't know, I just feel like this is a really tough situation because we have talked about this on this program and others, but when you have a whole bunch of subscriptions, you really have to at some point make tough decisions and you have to decide, is this worth it? For me, YouTube is worth it because I love YouTube and I get tons and tons of entertainment and education from it. But it's tough. I mean, $2 a month, that's $24 a year more. And apparently when they made this change, they did it very quietly, but it's been uncovered now by some tech journalists. So it's bad news. I mean, everything is going up, but by $2.
So I've never paid for YouTube premium and $2 to me seems like quite a steep increase. What was it, $10 a month or was it more than that?
I think it was like eleven. It started out at ten, then it crept up to eleven and now it's going to be 13.
Yeah, I won't pay for that. Yeah, but I get the value in it though, for sure, because like you, I go to YouTube whenever I need to learn something or whenever I want to research something, the first place I go is YouTube, followed by Google, which I think is interesting when you put those two together. I go to YouTube because I'm more of an auditorial learner. And that's interesting though, price increases, I.
Kind of feel like, okay, with the extra $2, what am I getting for that extra $2?
The ability to disable shorts.
Right? Well, you can't, that's the problem. And also, I think better video quality, which I don't care about because when I'm just looking at something, I don't really care about the video or audio quality. I'm half asleep usually anyway, so that's just me. Okay. So we are saying goodbye, rest in peace, to somebody that really did have an impact on computing history, especially Internet history and online history. And that's Kevin mitnick. He passed away. He died at a very young age. He's like 59, and he died from pancreatic cancer. But if you remember, Kevin Mitnick was really pursued, hotly pursued by the FBI for a long time. He had broken into several big company systems. And at the Pretty, it was a new thing, right, to have all these I mean, we've always had hackers and we've always had viruses and stuff, but this is a guy that broke into institutions that economic institutions. I'm trying to think of some of the ones that he broke into, but he had wire fraud charges, and then he became a security consultant in the end. Then, of course, some people had a problem with that because they said, why should this guy be allowed to do this? He's sort of getting rewarded for his infiltration of corporate systems. And I know there was a movie made about him as well that was popular. And I have a feeling that people will probably look at that movie again soon. We'll probably see it get popular on Netflix now that this guy has passed away. So what do you think?
Yeah, he was the author of Ghost in the Wires, and that's a really good book if you haven't read it yet. It'll really make you think about how connected we are and how people didn't understand even 1015 years ago. Of course, his Ghost in the Wires book was a little bit older than that, but how people didn't understand the basics of what can be done with these and because people didn't understand, the initial thing was jail him. Put him in jail. Put him in jail. And really, he's coming to you saying, hey, here are some security things you need to look at because I'm able to do this, and you shouldn't punish me because I'm able to do this. You should take these into consideration and make changes to make it more difficult for people like myself who may be more nefarious than what I am. And I being Kevin. So, definitely a tragic loss to the technology community, for sure.
Yeah. He was on the FBI's Most wanted list. He died at the age of 59. Yeah, that was from Fortune magazine. There's been a couple of books written about him that I know are in the talking book program. So I should have looked those up for you guys, but I just didn't.
Search for Kevin Mitnick. You'll come up with Ghost in the Wires because that was a book he wrote. But you'll also find some additional biographies.
So he definitely made his mark on the online or the early Internet part of computing history. So rest in peace, Kevin.
Well, Lynn, that was short and sweet and we appreciate it today. Hopefully listeners had a great time and thanks for joining me.
And hopefully next week I will have good news. I'm trying, guys. I really am trying.
Two bad news stories, I know, but.
I hope you all have a great weekend, whatever you're doing, and we will see you next weekend.