What I Read This Week...

Fake studies have flooded academic journals, TV advertising is in secular decline, and OpenAI loses key team members over 'superintelligent' AI safeguarding

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Caught My Eye…

• Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. Where do these studies come from? Scientists are paying 'paper mills’ hundreds and even thousands of dollars to list fabricated papers in scientific journals to keep up with the frequent publishing demands required to win grants and promotions. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, which is closing 19 journals and has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised.

• TV advertising is in secular decline as brands turn to social media sites and large online retailers to deploy advertising dollars instead of linear TV. Excluding political advertising, brands are expected to spend $60 billion on traditional and digital TV advertising, down from $64 billion 5 years earlier. What does this mean? The rise of streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus aren’t enough to replace linear TV advertising due to their high ad prices and limited ad slots. Instead, companies are turning to social media sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok - in part because users on these platforms directly engage with ads and content online.

• OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI. Then, they let it wither, according to a person on that team. As part of the company’s mission to develop AGI in a safe and controlled way, OpenAI created the ‘superalignment’ team and committed 20% of the company’s compute resources to develop ways to govern and steer ‘superintelligent’ AI systems. However, requests for a fraction of that compute were frequently denied. This issue, among others, pushed several OpenAI team members to resign this week, including Superalignment Team co-lead Jan Leike. The team’s other co-lead and OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever also left the company earlier this week.

Other Reading…

• We Are About to Hear Echoes in the Fabric of Space for the First Time (New Scientist)

• Senators Urge $32 Billion in Emergency Spending on AI After Finishing Yearlong Review (AP)

• Volodymyr Zelensky’s Five-Year Term Ends on May 20th (Economist)

• VCs and the Military are Fueling Self-Driving Startups that Don’t Need Roads (TechCrunch)

• TikTok, DOJ Request Prompt Decision on Potential App Ban (Axios)

• Reddit Announces Another Big Data-Sharing AI Deal - This Time With OpenAI (BI)

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