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Elon Musk launches AI chatbot ‘Grok’ — says it can outperform ChatGPT

November 5, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Grok costs $16 per month on X Premium Plus. But for now it is only offered to a limited number of users in the United States.

Elon Musk and his artificial intelligence startup xAI have released “Grok” — an AI chatbot which can supposedly outperform OpenAI’s first iteration of ChatGPT in several academic tests.

The motivation behind building Gruk is to create AI tools equipped to assist humanity by empowering research and innovation, Musk and xAI explained in a Nov. 5 X (formerly Twitter) post.

Just released Grokhttps://t.co/e8xQp5xInk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2023

Musk and the xAI team said a “unique and fundamental advantage” possessed by Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform.

“It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems,” Muska and xAI said. "Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!"

The engine powering Grok — Grok-1 — was evaluated in several academic tests in mathematics and coding, performing better than ChatGPT-3.5 in all tests, according to data shared by xAI.

However it didn’t outperform OpenAI’s most advanced version, GPT-4, across any of the tests.

“It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4, Musk and xAI said. “This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.”

Example of Grok vs typical GPT, where Grok has current information, but other doesn’t pic.twitter.com/hBRXmQ8KFi
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2023

The AI startup noted that Grok will be accessible on X Premium Plus at $16 per month. But for now, it is only offered to a limited number of users in the United States.

Grok still remains a “very early beta product” which should improve rapidly by the week, xAI noted.

The xAI team said they will also implement more safety measures over time to ensure Grok isn’t used maliciously.

“We believe that AI holds immense potential for contributing significant scientific and economic value to society, so we will work towards developing reliable safeguards against catastrophic forms of malicious use.”

“We believe in doing our utmost to ensure that AI remains a force for good,” xAI added.

The AI startup's launch of Grok comes eight months after Musk founded the firm in March.

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Solana records 1 outage in first half of 2023, 100% uptime in Q2

July 21, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The Solana network is seeing steady improvements in performance and reliability as outages become more infrequent.

Layer-1 blockchain network Solana has shown an improvement in reliability and uptime so far this year only having one outage in 2023, according to a report from the Solana Foundation.

On July 20, the Solana Foundation released its latest performance report stating it has improved the network through the first half of 2023, as measured by uptime and the ratio of non-voting-to-voting transactions.

In previous years, Solana has been plagued with reliability and uptime issues which its co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, has previously called a “curse” but said the network’s low-cost transactions were the cause of the outages.

The latest report noted Solana has experienced 100% uptime since Feb. 25, marking a whole quarter without an outage. The single February outage saw the network knocked offline for almost 19 hours.

*Solana achieved a 100% uptime in Q2, 2023. Source: Solana*

The report added there have been improvements in the ratio of voting to non-voting transactions. Voting transactions occur when a validator votes to confirm one or more proposed blocks of information and non-voting transactions are triggered by user behavior on the blockchain.

“Over time, we would expect to see the ratio of voting to non-voting transactions go down because the overall percentage of voting transactions should drop as the network gets more efficient.”

Blocktimes, which measure how quickly new blocks are added to the chain, have also become more consistent aside from the spike during the outage.

1/ The Solana Foundation has released the most recent @Solana Network Performance report.

The Solana network’s performance has improved through H1 2023, as measured by uptime, the ratio of non-voting-to-voting transactions, & more.

Read the full report: https://t.co/naOftyknLA pic.twitter.com/yI9Q8swWdT
— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) July 20, 2023

Transactions per second (TPS) are also used to measure the network’s performance and throughput. Solana’s maximum daily TPS has been climbing since January with significant increases that correlate with new network upgrades, it noted. Dune Analytics reports the current figure on the network at 3,777 transactions per second.

The Artemis dashboard reports a daily transaction count of 19.2 million for Solana which has been the leader for this metric until it was recently usurped by the Sui Network due to the popularity of a Web3 game.

The price of the blockchain's native token, Solana (SOL),was down 4.5% on the day — around $25.50 at the time of writing, according to Cointelegraph data.

The token has been performing well over the past month with gains of 50% but remains down 90% from its November 2021 all-time high of $260.

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More TPS, less gas: Ethereum layer 2 Starknet outlines performance upgrades

May 1, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Starknet makes performance improvements top priority in 2023, aiming to increase throughput, lower latency and reduce transaction costs.

Layer-2 blockchain protocols have been in the spotlight in 2023, bringing major performance improvements to a variety of platforms and services operating in the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem.

Zero-knowledge proofs have been key in the roll-out of a variety of layer 2s, with the technology pioneered by the decentralized scaling network Starknet. StarkWare, the technology firm behind the scaling platform, has outlined plans to further improve its layer-2 network to meet an expected increase in users and developers through the rest of the year.

Cointelegraph caught up with Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of StarkWare, to unpack key points set out in a 2023 roadmap for Starknet. Chief among a list of to-dos is performance improvements that are centered around higher throughput and reduced latency of Starknet’s network.

Ben-Sasson highlighted the focus on performance upgrades that are expected to deliver significantly higher transactions per second (TPS) than on Ethereum’s mainnet at lower gas costs:

“The most important thing is for builders and developers to have high throughput so that they can really build. Starknet is about increasing the computational abilities of Ethereum and we just want to provide this raw power to the hands of developers.”

Starknet v0.12.0 is expected to be released in the next month and is the culmination of a six-month sprint that involves transitioning Starknet’s development stack to a Rust-based Sequencer as well as an open-source project that has built a Rust-Cairo VM (virtual-machine).

StarkWare open-sourced its programming language compiler Cairo early in 2023, with the language aimed at driving the development of zk-rollup and validity proof-powered decentralized applications (DApps).

Ben-Sasson added that Starknet continues to chase an ambitious target of processing at least 10 times the throughput of Ethereum at a tenth of the cost. He highlighted StarkEx’s ability to deliver significant TPS on decentralized exchange dYdX. StarkEx is another layer-2 scaling engine developed by StarkWare.

At times, dYdX processes up to 54 transactions per second, while the average TPS of Ethereum is around 10 to 12. Ben-Sasson also noted that these dYdX transactions are roughly four to five times larger than those on Ethereum, which bodes well for the improved scaling capabilities of Starknet in the near future:

“We're often experiencing practical TPS or gas usage that is orders of magnitude greater than what Ethereum can deal with. I'm very confident that this will also be replicated on Starknet.”

Performance improvements have been prioritized as a result of developer and user feedback highlighting delays in transaction processing on Starknet. The next port of call is the reduction of transaction costs which will be addressed by targeting the cost of storing data on Ethereum’s mainnet.

“We're going to roll out Volition, which allows users to opt as to whether they want their data on or off-chain and this will be part of the base layer of the Starknet system.”

Ben-Sasson said the release of off-chain data availability will complement Ethereum’s in-development improvement proposal ‘Proto-Danksharding’ EIP-4844, which will introduce a new type of transaction that carries binary large objects or ‘blobs’. The EIP fundamentally aims to provide cheaper transactions.

Starknet is also aiming to deliver faster finality further down the 2023 roadmap, which will produce shorter and fixed interval block times on the network. This will be carried out with the introduction of a fee market to prioritize Starknet’s network resources on users’ willingness to pay for transactions, inspired by conventional market systems:

“Market mechanisms are a very good way to solve this. Blockchain didn't invent this, blockchains adopted this from just the conventional world. That's how you prioritize resources and allow users to signal this.”

A number of Ethereum layer-2 protocols have begun rolling out zk-rollups to further improve efforts to provide faster and cheaper transactions to the smart contract blockchain network. This includes the likes of Polygon and ConsenSys.

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Over half of Americans fear ‘major impact’ by AI on workers: Survey

April 21, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Bias

More respondents said AI will “hurt” American workers more than it will “help” them over the next 20 years.

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of Americans think implementing artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace will have a “major impact” on American workers within the next 20 years, leaving many employees “wary” and “worried” about what their future holds.

An April 20 Pew Research report found 56% of the 11,004 adults surveyed in the United States said AI will have a major impact on the U.S. economy too. Another 22% believed AI will impact the economy to a minor degree.

Only 13% of participants believed “AI will help more than hurt” American workers, whereas 32% thought the opposite. The rest of the participants predicted “AI will equally help and hurt” American employees (32%) or were unsure (22%).

While 62% of Americans believe AI will have a major impact on workers generally, just 28% believe its use in the workplace will have a major effect on them personally. https://t.co/ExpDNlOsWl pic.twitter.com/biMSX1AUln
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) April 20, 2023

The study didn’t directly ask participants whether they thought they would lose employment to AI but many respondents cited worry that an AI-enabled workplace would lead to increased surveillance, data mismanagement and misinterpretations.

Pew Research said there is a “consensus” that many American workers feel like they would be watched “Big Brother” style, with 81% citing the concern.

71% of respondents said they oppose the idea of AI being used to help make a final decision in the hiring process.

Nearly two-thirds said they would be most bothered by AI tracking their minute-to-minute movements, and around half cited potential frustrations around an AI keeping track of how many hours they’re at their desk and recording exactly what they’re working on.

*For every participant that was in favor of AI being used in the hiring process, 10 opposed it. Source: Pew Research*

Just under 40% cited concern that AI would be used to evaluate their performance.

Despite the mixed views on what AI would offer to the workforce, two-thirds of respondents said they wouldn’t want to apply for a job where AI was used to make hiring decisions.

One surveyed man in his 60s explained that AI shouldn’t be used for that purpose because it can’t judge character:

“AI can’t factor in the unquantifiable intangibles that make someone a good co-worker ... or a bad co-worker. Personality traits like patience, compassion and kindness would be overlooked or undervalued.”

“It’s a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ problem,” another surveyed woman explained.

Not everyone agreed though as a man in his 50s explained AI has the potential to fill the shoes of a hiring manager:

“I think the AI would be able to evaluate all my skills and experience in their entirety where a human may focus just on what the job requires. The AI would see beyond the present and see my potential over time.”

Just under half of the participants said AI would treat all applicants in the same way “better” than what hiring managers do, while 15% said AI would be “worse.” Under 15% said the treatment would be “about the same.”

Those surveyed who claimed AI would lead to “better” treatment explained the technology would help circumvent biases and discrimination based on age, gender and race.

Others believed AI may reinforce the same prejudices that companies are trying to eradicate.

The motivation to carry out the study was partly prompted by what Pew Research describes as the “rapid rise of ChatGPT” — an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on Nov. 30.

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Performance