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Technology and Development Redux
AI Disinformation – II
AI’s astounding evolution in the last decade has been nothing less than spectacular, pace doomers. It has undoubtedly exceeded most expectations, bringing numerous benefits and generating new challenges and risks. The latter is crucial to understand as AI has a
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AI Disinformation – I
The idea of a technological singularity has been around for over 60 years. While initially confined to closed circles of experts, it has been gaining a lot of ground in the race to the future, which, according to its core
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Disinformation Misinformation
The rainy season had already begun but, as usual, did not provide any relief from that sweltering heat that never abandoned the small rural town. It was a regular Thursday morning, and Cesar planned to head back to the farm
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Data Analysis with ChatGPT
A few days ago, OpenAI launched its Code Interpreter, capable of handling Python programming chores. The interpreter can read files uploaded by users, perform tasks described in the input prompts and, if requested, allow downloads of outputs produced. One can
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Are LLMs Fully Multilingual?
When I first started to play with ChatGPT in December of last year, I was pleasantly surprised to discover it could handle multiple languages. Needless to say, the LLM can handle translation from and into multiple languages. But it can
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More on AI Programming
In the coldhearted realm of disinformation, deepfakes seem to reign supreme, bullying all others around along the way. The fact that they have multiple personalities makes them even more insidious. Voice, text, images and video content are some of the
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AI and Open Source – II
Linux Freedom I first heard about Linux a couple of months after returning from the 1992 UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. I was working part-time as a Research Associate in one of the social research centers of my
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AI and Open Source – I
By all accounts, the ChatGPT “revolution” has triggered a well-deserved resurgence of free software or Open Source free/Open Source software (FOSS) that, some argue, will allegedly challenge the dominance of Big Tech over LLMs. While I disagree with such a
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ChatGPT Productivity and Hallucinations Mix
Undoubtedly, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Few will dare deny such a non-violent takeover. And, as expected, the now familiar digital innovation hype factory is holding yet another massive and seemingly endless ball, including reluctant doomsayers. OpenAI’s March
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Programming – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (maybe) – II
Today Expert systems, an integral part of AI from the onset, are one of the best examples of rules-based programming. The core idea is to have a computer system that can provide the same depth of knowledge as top-notch human
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Programming – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (maybe) – I
Yesterday I accidentally learned how to master computer programming. I was finishing high school and faced the daunting decision of choosing a study field. As my father was an engineer, I leaned toward the same area. But my passion for
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The Real Structures Sustaining the Cyberspace Imaginary – II
History Matters Following the historical evolution of the Internet and Cyberspace sheds light on the origins of the “superhighway” and “virtual” metaphors, depicted in the first part of this post. Useful summaries from a pure infrastructural perspective are available from
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The Real Structures Sustaining the Cyberspace Imaginary – I
Recreating the Imaginary If I were to ask another human being (not ChatGPT) for directions on how to get to Cyberspace, most would probably think I am joking. Others might consider me an imbecile or conclude I must be flying
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AI’s Seemingly Elusive Infrastructure – II
Undoubtedly, the infrastructural requirements used to produce the 2020 175 billion GPT-3 model are hefty by most standards. But, of course, that just means that competitors now striving to generate their own creatures on the same genre must have access
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AI’s Seemingly Elusive Infrastructure – I
ChatGTP’s sudden and arguably premature success has yet again exposed the usually overlooked link between so-called “virtual” digital technologies and very tangible infrastructure. Indeed, early adopters of the latest incarnation of GTP-3-based bots directly experienced repeated network and login failures.
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ChatGPT’s New Version
Yesterday, OpenAI released a new iteration of ChatGPT, version 3.5. To quickly check, I decided to ask some of the same questions I did back in December. The table below compares the results. ChatGPT November 2022 v3.0 January 30 2023,
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Chatting with ChatGPT
OpenAI’s new shiny chatbot, with the not-so-brilliant name of ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm, surprising most, company staff included. Evidence of the latter stems from the fact that whenever one tries to access the platform, a message announcing
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How Green is AI?
Playing Games My father taught me how to play chess when I was nine years old or thereabouts. He played his fair share of games while he was studying engineering. He told me that a few of his classmates quit
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RegTech is Here!
Modern FinTech saw the light of day with the launching of ATM machines in the late 60s. A few years later, NASDAQ was born, credit cards exploded and banks started to deploy mainframes and minicomputer computers to support their operations.
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Hacking Public Policy Making with AI
Modern Evidence-based Policy Making (EBPC) has been around for 25 years, imported into the mainstream from the health sector and its success with randomized controlled trials. The latter has now spread to many other sectors and research areas. A few
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AI National Policies – III
Policy Evolution Comparatively speaking, AI national policies and strategies have evolved much slower than other digital strategies such as ICT, Digital Government, and Open Data. That might seem paradoxical given the systemic benefits and risks of the revived and now
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AI National Policies – II
As mentioned in the previous post, policymakers should skip over the dominant technology-centered AI perspective and instead position AI as a multi-dimensional structure cutting across all sectors. Indeed, national AI policy effectiveness depends to a large extent on the AI
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AI National Policies – I
National policy development on new digital technologies has become a staple since the emergence of the Internet in the early 1990s. It has certainly not been limited to most advanced countries. Nations in the Global South have also climbed the
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AI Topography
For the last 30 years, the seemingly endless number of so-called technology revolutions invading our expansive yet decaying landscape has been accompanied by a proliferation of wide-ranging publications, usually playing catch-up while trying to predict the future on the spot.
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Waiting for yet another Industrial Revolution
The PC revolution. The Internet revolution. The mobile revolution. The social media revolution. The blockchain revolution. And the AI re-revolution. We seem to be living in times of Permanent Revolution. Also reminds me of the Age of Revolution that thrived
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AI and Development Policies
Strongly supported by behemoth tech companies, the “ethical and responsible” AI discourse has almost completely overshadowed the relevant conversation on the potential socio-economic impact the resurgent technology might have in developing countries. While such discourse’s subtle agenda, apparently now failing,
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Greater “AI for Good”
The proliferation of top, best, fails and prediction posts on almost any topic is now a staple of the annual transition from one year to the next. As the new year starts seeing the light of day, we seem compelled
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Better “AI for Good”
While the dystopian camp perceives digital technologies as a formidable, perhaps even unsurmountable threat to society, those on the other, much more optimistic side do not seem to get tired of repeating its almost countless benefits. The latter camp apparently
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Contentious Politics in the AI Age
Initially touted as revolutionary and progressive in the 1990s, the lightening evolution of digital technologies, running on the coattails of continuous innovation, has been accompanied by the rise of both extreme socio-economic inequalities and loud and widespread populism, nationalism and
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Deep Learning and Breast Cancer: Improving Detection?
A recent paper published under the auspices of Google Health makes a case for using deep learning algorithms to improve breast cancer detection. The research has been positively received by most and widely publicized as yet another victory of smart
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Yet Another Global AI Index
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) seemingly continues to permeate all interstices of society, measuring its undaunted progress in the age of data is more than a priority. In a previous post, I share some insights on the Global AI Readiness Index
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Blockchains and Food Safety
Trade is one of the main trademarks of the globalization process. Nowadays, most countries exchange products and services regularly and use local comparative advantages to specialize in specific trade sectors and/or commodities. Food and agricultural products are important components of
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Measuring Artificial Intelligence Development
In the last decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI), including siblings machine learning and deep learning, has been growing by leaps and bounds. More importantly, the technology has been deployed effectively in a wide range of traditional sectors bringing real transformational change
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Biased Artificial Intelligence
A recent piece in MIT’s Technology Review nicely summarizes the issue of bias in AI/ML (AI) algorithms used in production to make decisions or predictions. The usual suspects make a cameo appearance, including data, design and implicit fairness assumptions. But
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Algorithms and Algocracy – II
In the previous post, I provided a simple definition of an algorithm to then explore its use in the digital world. While algorithms live from the inputs they are feed, digital programs such as mobile apps and web platforms are
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Algorithms and Algocracy – I
While the concept of algorithms has been around for centuries, the same cannot be said about algocracy. The latter has recently gained notoriety thanks partly to the renaissance of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) and is frequently used to
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Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence
In a world where perfect information supposedly rules across the board, uncertainty certainly challenges mainstream economists. While some of the tenets of such assumption have already been addressed – via the theory of information asymmetries and the development of the
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Learning about Machine Learning
A few months ago, as I was finishing a paper on blockchain technology, I received an unexpected comment on Artificial Intelligence (AI from here on in) from one of the peer reviewers. While addressing the overall topic of innovation in
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