22min chapter

OpenAI’s New Model, Jensen’s Bold Claim, Alexa+ Is Here

Big Technology Podcast

CHAPTER

Incremental Innovations in AI Models

This chapter examines the recent trend of incremental updates in AI models like GPT-4.5 and Claude 3.7, expressing fatigue over the lack of groundbreaking changes compared to past releases. The discussion highlights the challenges of marketing these updates and the need for clear, compelling use cases that demonstrate tangible benefits to users. Additionally, it explores the balance between advancements in emotional intelligence and reasoning within AI models, questioning their real-world effectiveness in areas such as creative writing and financial analysis.

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Transcript

Episode notes

Speaker 2

Hello and welcome to the latest Science Insights from New Scientist. I'm Rowan Hooper, joined today by Penny Sarchet, as always.

Speaker 3

Hello, how are you?

Speaker 2

Well, I'm good, except I'm sort of wishing I was in Svalbard. You've

Speaker 3

got that itch of you. It's a yearly thing for me now. Yeah, because you did go last year, didn't you? Svalbard

Speaker 2

in the high Arctic. And the reason I'm bringing it up rather awkwardly at the beginning is that New Scientist are going again this year in June. We've got the whole ship. We've chartered the whole ship. It's this really lovely expedition vessel. It goes through the sea ice. Richard Dawkins is coming. And there are just 14 cabins left on this cruise. Wow,

Speaker 3

that sounds really amazing.

Speaker 2

It was amazing. Polar bears, walruses were my favourite animal. Saw them up close. Amazing. So anyone interested, go to newscientist.com/tours and you'll see the Arctic trip.

Speaker 3

Okay, on with the show. We've been reporting on some really interesting stories this week. Coming up, we're going to discuss the phenomenon of climate whiplash, what it is and its role in the LA wildfires and how we're seeing it more and more. And we're also going way back to the 1960s and hearing from the world's first chatbot. Let's

Speaker 2

start, though, with a paper out this week in Nature. It's a really nice example of what modern archaeology does. In other words, it's genetic archaeology. And it shows that in the Iron Age, Celtic tribes revolved around women.

Speaker 3

Yes, this is so interesting. So this comes from a study from excavations of the remains of the Juro Trigas tribe at Winterbourne Kingston in Dorset. It's an Iron Age burial site, basically just a 2000 year old cemetery, essentially. And so then genetic analysis of the remains there suggests that in this society, married women stayed in their ancestral homes, while it was husbands, it was the men who sort of moved in from other communities and that this practice lasted centuries.

Speaker 2

Yeah.