Rachel Metz
@rachelmetz
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i write about AI for Bloomberg @Technology. rachelmetz.11 on signal. she/her. opinions my own. [email protected] (tips yes, pitches nono).
the city of the city
Joined April 2007
hello! if you ever want to reach out to me *confidentially* about anything AI startup-related, please find me on signal at rachelmetz.11. i'm always happy to chat!
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i was laid off from @CNN today (and i'm not the only one). i'm devastated; i loved my job. i was CNN's only AI reporter, and the *last remaining* CNN Digital reporter in the San Francisco Bay Area. i'm taking a beat to breathe, but i'll be looking for a new reporting job ASAP.
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hey, east coast friends, i'm so sorry you're dealing with awful wildfire smoke. here are a few reasonably inexpensive things my family has used in our home over the past few years to help us cope with west-coast fires (and they can be useful year round). š§µ.
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New from me: Google's emissions shot up *almost 50%* since 2019 due to its massive focus on AI. This makes it the second huge tech company (see Microsoft in May) that has said AI is threatening its ability to meet key environmental goals. Who'll be next?.
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i asked SARAH, the World Health Organization's new AI chatbot, for medical help near me, and it provided an entirely fabricated list of clinics/hospitals in SF. fake addresses, fake phone numbers. check out @jessicanix_'s take on SARAH here:.via @business.
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this is not true, according to the @Lemonade_Inc inc. s-1, filed with the SEC, which says on page 128, "AI Jim handles the entire claim through resolution in approximately a third of cases, paying the claimant or declining the claim without human intervention".
We never let AI auto-decline claims (2/4).
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Elon Musk announced a new AI company today, xAI. all the team members listed on the website appear to be men. via @technology.
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I am beyond thrilled to join the Bloomberg @technology team as an AI reporter! This is a journalism dream job for me and I can't wait to get started. Keep an eye out for my byline starting in early March!.
Welcome @rachelmetz to the Bloomberg @technology team! Excited to have you aboard to wrestle with #ChatGPT and other harbingers of our AI future.
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šØScoop from me and @BrodyFord_: Adobe has touted Firefly as a safe and ethical alternative to competitors like Midjourneyā¦ but it also quietly trained Firefly on Midjourney images. Adobeās āEthicalā Firefly AI Was Trained on Midjourney Images
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Iām starting at Bloomberg @technology today! Itās my first day back on the AI beat in three months ā whatād I miss?.
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@lisafleisher that's amazing! my daughter, who's a little younger than yours, gets so excited when we turn on the faucet; this is like 10x that, lol.
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we have one of these levoit hepa filters for every room (and our pediatrician uses them in exam rooms too). also great to eliminate yucky smells.
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last week, meta unveiled its project to generate an entire video from a short text prompt. this week, google is doing the same thing. h/t @_akhaliq.
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we really like this temtop indoor air-quality monitor (sleek, fairly inexpensive, super easy to use). we lied and told our then-toddler it was a unicorn detector and that was a fun game for a while, lol.
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i'm starting as an AI reporter at Bloomberg .@technology in march. for now, i'm organizing/ updating source contact info. if we've spoken for a story (or you think we should speak for a future story), please DM me your best contact info! (i'll also reach out privately!) tysm!.
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when i started at CNN in late 2018, it was with the promise of a massive expansion of the tech reporting team, particularly in the Bay Area. instead, the opposite has happened, and it's been awful to see a great team shrink. i'm going to miss working with you all so much.
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a scoop from me: @StabilityAI's head of research, David Ha (better known on twitter as @hardmaru) resigned this month, as did its COO, Ren Ito.
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consider using MERV 14 filters in your furnace intake, and replace them often. we go through them a lot faster during wildfire season.
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Do other journalists wake up in the middle of the night and send themselves emails about things they want to make sure they add to a story draft? You guys do it too, right? šµāš«.
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@DrJimFan i disagree. it's so important people understand, repeatedly, that they're interacting w/ a computer program, not some sort of being that can/should help them (unless it's a product that has been developed for that, which this isn't). this seems like an appropriate response, imho.
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This week I learned ā¦@VentureBeatā© is using AI to help write and edit articles, and has decided not to disclose this on stories to readers. It bothers me ā not just bc Iām a journalist, but bc Iām a reader, too. Curious how others feel about this.
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(also, i figured if i was going to get laid off i should at least be wearing cozy pants, so yes, i changed into my cashmere pants before getting the official news.).
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Itās been a really shitty week for journalism. I donāt have anything smart or insightful to say about it so Iām just going to leave this here.
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i just think it's really interesting to observe the contrast between mark zuckerberg's vision of himself in the metaverse and the current reality.
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i feel really lucky to have worked with many wonderful folks over the past four years, some who have moved on and some who are still at CNN. thank you @sfiegerman @MattQuinn16 @kyurieff @donie @saraashleyo @heatherkelly @AlexKoppelman @richbarbieri @JasonFarkas @claresduffy.
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A big deal: @IEEEorg will stop accepting papers containing the Lena image ā a photo published in Playboy & used for decades in image-processing research. It's a fascinating tale about how women are deeply embedded in the history of technology, whether we consent or not.
Just FYI, computer vision papers submitted to IEEE that include this image of Ms. ForsƩn will no longer be considered for publication
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just wanted to add another thank you to everyone who has reached out so quickly in support of me and my work. i appreciate it immensely.
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I'm *still* at WWDC and during an on-stage chat just now Apple's SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, said the company plans to integrate with AI models such as Google's Gemini "in the future", and that different people will be able to use different models. interesting.
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As a journalist, you never know where an important story will come from, or where it will lead. This one started as a conversation I had with @cherthedev about facial recognition, and turned into a horrifying discovery about her past. š§µ.
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That time I accidentally helped @reddit get acquired. š¤·š»āāļø.
In 2005, I went to NY and emailed a few reporters to try to get some press for Reddit. A few interviewed me, but none ended up writing a story. One reporter, @rachelmetz, told me right off the bat she wasn't going to write anything, but we had a great conversation anyways.
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new from me: an in-depth look at months of chaos in google's ethical ai group, and how it has reverberated throughout the AI industry. thank you so much @timnitGebru, @alexhanna, @mmitchell_ai, and @emilymbender for helping me tell this story.
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@cathythorbecke @HeySamantha @AnnalynKurtz @b_fung @Ballaban @dwbronner @annabahney @jonsarlin @kellybourdet and a lot of other people, too (honestly, my brain is a bit scrambled/numb at the moment). it's been a pleasure.
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you're not allowed to take screenshots of online district court proceedings in california, so i used stable diffusion to give you a sense of what elizabeth holmes looked like during today's brief zoom hearing.
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I told my 6yo I had a bad week and she jumped up and grabbed a bear that used to be mine when I was her age and told me I should sleep with it tonight and ā if I need it ā tomorrow night. š„ŗ.
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I've spent weeks looking at how Sam Altman concentrated his power at OpenAI, particularly over the past year, as the company barreled toward its $157B valuation. Step back from the frenzy and see how we got here by reading my piece; here's a gift link!.
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IDK why this is (again) trending but it's important: masks w exhalation valves don't work. i had no idea when this whole thing started! and i keep seeing people wearing them. Experts advise against the use of N95 respirator masks with exhalation valves
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SCOOP: OpenAI has come up with 5 levels to track its progress toward its goal of building AI that can do things that only humans can currently do. at an all-hands meeting this week, company execs told employees they believe they're nearing level 2.
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Wait but if like half of Twitter no longer works at Twitterā¦ couldnāt they get together and make a new, better Twitter? š¤.
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i was laid off from @CNN a year ago today. i was devastated (it still hurts!). it's been a wild ride since then āĀ hard but unexpectedly awesome. if you've been laid off from media this week, i'm so fucking sorry. lmk if i can help w contacts, coffee, or just a friendly ear.
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@RachelTobac @jessicanix_ @business to be fair, one of the fake hospital addresses was around the block from a real pet hospital. but still. .
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Iām totally obsessed with understanding the 2008 financial crisis (at the time I was a young tech journalist at @AP, in NYC, but it still felt somehow mysterious and far away). Iām reading āThe Big Shortā and watched the new Madoff doc on Netflix. What else should I watch/read?.
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@JMBooyah I am so sorry. Thatās unacceptable. Thank you for pointing it out publicly; I hope it is seen and called out more widely.
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so if i have this straight: CNN laid off 100 humans (i'm so sorry, friends) and is planning to use AI to get back to its roots.
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New from me: OpenAI Nears Release of āStrawberryā Model, With Reasoning Capabilities
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Is there a cookbook that includes clean-up time estimates? Thatās the cookbook I want.
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Dua Lipa hallucinates; AI does not. My latest, on the rapid rise of one big word:.ChatGPT, Bing and Bard Donāt Hallucinate. They Fabricate - Bloomberg
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NIST is absolutely not playing around with its efforts to take on a bigger role in AI and just dropped a giant (106 pages, including footnotes, glossary, etc) report all about how people can get AI to do bad things (IE adversarial ML).
Adversaries can deliberately manipulate AI systems to make them malfunction ā and thereās no foolproof defense. Check out NISTās new guide to the types of attacks developers and users can expect, along with approaches to mitigate them:
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Sometimes I feel like thereās a disconnect between what we are told people will do with AI and what people actually do with AI.
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AI Jim= Lemonade claims bot. Full quote is: "AI Jim handles the entire claim through resolution in approximately a third of cases, paying the claimant or declining the claim without human intervention (and with zero claims overhead, known as loss adjustment expense, or LAE).".
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@BrodyFord_ i really want you to be able to read this piece in its entirety, so here is a gift link. please check it out!.
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My latest: a deep dive into PimEyes, a mysterious facial-recognition website that may be even scarier than Clearview AI, since anyone with internet access can use it.
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hi, hello, you can order more free covid tests if you live in the US. and you definitely should. here's a link:
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Itās Saturday, which means itās time for a reminder that papers published to the arxiv are *not* peer reviewed and should be approached with caution (if not skepticism), particularly if youāre a journalist (or anyone interested in sharing research with a large audience).
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please, someone open up a futuristic butcher shop called the meataverse.
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@annehelen @britnidlc i was going through the court documents (help) and in one of them from this year larson says that kolker (from nyt) contacted her for an interview and told her that he had been contacted in january 2021 by dorland.
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my latest: openai is working on a search product to rival perplexity and google.
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i spent the last month diving into the world of art and datasets, talking to artists whose work is included in the dataset behind stable diffusion. it's fascinating, and complicated, and i learned a lot. (short thread).
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This is big: we learned 3 of the hottest AI companies ā OpenAI, Google and Anthropic ā are all struggling to build their next frontier AI models. Read @shiringhaffary, @dinabass, @byJuliaLove and I on whatās happening and whatās next. Hereās a gift link!.
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my latest, and my first piece ever for @BW (which is really exciting!), is about people who are dabbling in ChatGPT for therapy.
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People really have been trying to make VR happen for decades. Check out these amazing images from the first issue of Virtual Reality Special Report from 1994. š„“
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Oh my god, ācooking with Parisā is the show I did not know I needed. Itās amazing. So funny. So good. So @ParisHilton. I think I need sliving gloves now.
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last week i explained how @iRobot is using AI to stop roombas from tracking dog poop all over the house. this week, i bring you another tricky problem it has yet to solve: striped carpets that act as a virtual prison, lol.
@hardmaru I wish they had also created a diverse dataset of rugs so that it didnāt confuse black stripes with cliffs and I could finally get my entire house cleaned š
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My friend @anicknack was healthy enough to fight the virus, but he still died. This sickness doesnāt care how well you are at the start, and it can overwhelm anyoneās immune system. These are simple, devastating facts of the current pandemic.
Jax Weaver and her 7-year-old daughter at the Austin rally: āIām not worried about catching the virus. If we did catch the virus, I feel that weāre healthy enough to fight it.ā
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i've said it before and i'll say it again: the @internetarchive's @waybackmachine is a national treasure and should be treated as such (by which i mean used as much as possible).
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Say it with me: āAI is not magic.ā.
The Gemini era is here ā helping you do more with the magic of Google AI.
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A lot of people are mentioning masks so just wanted to suggest N95 masks from Bona Fide Masks ā awesome supplier that is run by the worldās largest maker of ball chain (lol seriously; they explain in an extensive order-confirmation email).
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hello! did you have to fill out a captcha to make a vaccine appointment? if so, what kind of captcha was it, and which vax appointment website/which state? it's for a story.
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hey everyone in media, who are we kidding with these datelines? it should just say, like, "corner of living room" or "my bed" or "bathroom the size of a closet so i can hide from the children".
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šØExclusive!šØ@shiringhaffary and I got @OpenAI's Sora team to generate some videos from our prompts, including a parrot flying through the jungle and eating fruit with monkeys ā a clip that shows off the project's strengths and weaknesses. gift link:.
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@mobileraj @BrodyFord_ This is not about data contaminationā itās about the company making a deliberate choice to include AI-generated images from Adobe Stock in its dataset while publicly positioning itself as very different from the companies whose tools were used to make those AI-generated images.
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if you only read one take about LaMDA, google's not-actually-sentient AI system, it should be this post by the inimitable @JanelleCShane, where she interviews another large language model (GPT-3), which claims to be a squirrel.
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Do you want to work with me? (Yeah, of course you do!) šš»āāļø.This is an amazing opportunity at a wild time in AI; join us!. AI Ethics and Policy Reporter | New York, NY | Bloomberg Careers
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Iāve taken off the last couple Fridays (family/personal stuff to attend to) and Iāve come to the conclusion that nobody should ever work on a Friday. Thursday is the best day to end the work week!.
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Tonight at NeurIPS Ilya Sutskever was announced one of the winners of the ātest of timeā award, given to authors of NeurIPS work from 10 years ago deemed most impactful over time. The work: A 2013 paper introducing word2vec. Sutskever was then at Google.
We are excited to announce the #NeurIPS2023 paper awards:.
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A hot one at the intersection of music and AI from me and @ashleyrcarman: record labels including Sony, Warner, and UMG are suing music-generating startups Suno and Udio for training their AI models on the labelsā songs. Gift link!.
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surely i'm not alone in feeling constantly overwhelmed and paralyzed by the never-ending crush of terrible news. how do you deal with it?.
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my first @technology byline!!.Claude, a rival chatbot to ChatGPT from AI startup Anthropic, will be available to businesses that want to add it to their products via @technology.
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today is my 40th (!!) birthday. i didn't get the one thing i really wanted (a vaccine), but hopefully someday soon. i *did* get a really cute card from my older kid, though, and a bouquet of balloons for both children to destroy later on, which will suffice. :D.
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X is automatically opting users in to sharing data w/ the Grok chatbot for training and fine-tuning. Historically this is the kind of thing that pisses people off, particularly if they're not aware of it in advance. You can turn it off here:.
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šØMy latest: a deep dive into what was going on behind the scenes leading up to Sam Altmanās firing/rehiring at OpenAI. Hereās a gift link; happy holidays!šØ.OpenAIās Altman Ouster Was Result of Drawn-Out Tensions.
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i can't stand people minimizing the stress i feel as a vaccinated parent with 2 young, unvaccinated children. i do understand the risk, thanks! i am also freaked out at a level i haven't ever been as a parent, and that won't change until my children have their shots.
If you are a vaccinated adult and living a relatively normal life, but find waiting for a pediatric vax "intolerable," please understand that your unvaccinated child is at a significantly lower risk than you
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this is an example of a bunch of things but it is NOT an example of self-awareness or anything approaching AGI. c'mon people.
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does anyone else, like, lightly gaslight their toddler to get them to do what you want with less drama? (example: this am we hid the 2-yr-old's too-small sneakers and pretended we had no idea what/where so she'd finally give in and wear the newer, better-fitting sneakers.).
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