Sam Ortman announced in the last couple of hours that ChatGPT will start trying to assess whether you are a child and in some circumstances can flag conversations for review by parents and the authorities. For those of us who aren't children, ChatGPT will also sometimes begin flirting. This video then will give you the five minute TLDR on this announcement, which is not unique to ChatGPT by the way, as well as some other things Sam Ortman said this week that 99% of people may have missed, but a good chunk of those should hear.

First, the classic corporation speak, which is that OpenAI are building toward a long-term system to understand whether someone is over or under 18. Unless I missed it, I can't find anywhere where they announced when this would occur or whether it starts as of today. One thing to immediately flag is that as of July, YouTube already does this based on the type of videos that you watch.

Okay, but what will ChatGPT do if it assesses that you're a teen? Well, first of all, it won't flirt with you ever. And second of all, in extreme circumstances, depending on the discussion, it may contact law enforcement. You may of course have seen some recent very sad headlines about why they may have felt they needed to take this step.

Like many of you, I think the goal is admirable. The question is, they better be really confident they're flagging the right conversations. Then comes a really key sentence. If we are not confident about someone's age or have incomplete information, we'll take the safer route and default to the under 18 experience and give adults ways to prove their age to unlock adult capabilities.

In the next two weeks, we do know that there will be parental controls enabling parents to, for example, for teens, set blackout hours when a teen cannot use ChatGPT. Then, as before, if the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress, it will flag to the parent first and foremost, and then only afterwards to law enforcement.

Again, I totally understand the motivation. I guess one thing I'd flag to OpenAI is, what happens if, like Twitter, a foreign country with different standards asks them and says, according to our law, you have to notify us when X occurs, when a user says Y about the government or does Z.

Some tech companies cave into that, others don't, so only time will tell. The next two announcements, which came just an hour ago as our filming, might have been missed. OpenAI say that they want to give the same level of protection to your conversations with AI as you might have with your conversations to a doctor or to a lawyer.

They say that people are increasingly turning to AI for sensitive questions and about their private concerns. Interestingly, we learned today exactly what percentage of people are turning to ChatGPT for, for different reasons. I spent about half an hour analyzing this image earlier, and it's pretty fascinating to see how people use ChatGPT.

According to this, for the web version at least, only 4.2% are using it for coding. That compares to 10% to be tutored or taught something, and even 5.7% for fitness, beauty, self-care, or health advice. I was also kind of shocked how creating an image was a less used capability than translation.

You may also notice that 0.4% of people just spend their time asking about the model. How are you? Are you conscious? That kind of thing. Back to the announcement though, so what could be the concerns about this greater level of privilege and privacy, it seems, for adults? My concerns are for startups, because OpenAI say we are advocating for this protection with policy makers.

That is of course, therefore, the Trump administration. My concern is that if OpenAI gets a law passed, that any Chat with an AI system has to be protected by numerous layers of privilege and privacy and protection. While that sounds good initially, like needing to pass the bar to become a lawyer, it raises the bar literally for all startups and open source initiatives.

Or at least it could force them to go through all sorts of hurdles. That's my concern. Yes, I know, OpenAI will claim that this is just about stopping the New York Times forcing them to retain user data indefinitely. I guess I'm just a tad skeptical about the possibility for regulatory capture.

Another theory, by the way, is it could have been in response to the FDC launching an inquiry in America to quote "understand what steps, if any, companies have taken to evaluate the safety of their chatbots when acting as companions." Last announcement from this afternoon before I get to the quote from Sam Altman that many people will have missed.

I think practically everyone, actually. This is regarding the question of when ChatGPT will flirt with you. And the answer is simple. If you ask for it, they should get it. I personally have never asked ChatGPT to flirt, but presumably some of you have and have seen the model refuse.

Well, apparently it won't do so anymore. If the system then believes you're an adult, or you have been forced to provide ideas showing you're an adult, it will now also help you write a fictional story that involves, presumably, let's say extreme flirtation and a self-caused tragedy. I guess you could summarize all of these announcements is that they're great if we could perfectly trust OpenAI to implement them correctly.

If those were the announcements, what was the quote that almost everyone missed? Well, first, for some context, here's what Sam Altman was telling lawmakers in the US in private in 2024. I want to talk a little bit about the workforce, but Mr. Altman, when we met last year in my office and had a great conversation, you said that upwards of 70% of jobs could be eliminated by AI, and you acknowledged the possible social disruption of this.

If that's happening, we have to prepare for it. We're not going to stand in the way of the incredible opportunities here. Now, Sam Altman did not backtrack from that quote when speaking to the Senate, but here's an interview he did just a few days ago with Tucker Carlson. You'll see for yourself, but he implies that it could be towards the end of this century that the job ramifications fully play out.

There's going to be massive displacement, and maybe those people will find something new and interesting and lucrative to do. But how big is that displacement, do you think? Someone told me recently that the historical average is about 50% of jobs significantly change. Maybe I don't totally go away, but significantly change every 75 years on average.

That's the kind of, that's the half-life of the stuff. My controversial take would be that this is going to be like a punctuated equilibrium moment where a lot of that will happen in a short period of time. But if we zoom out, it's not going to be dramatically different than the historical rate.

Like we'll do, we'll have a lot in this short period of time, and then it'll somehow be less total job turnover than we think. Some may say that's a case of giving different opinions in public versus in private. Others might say, well, he's just changed his mind. I've spent the last week or so preparing a video for my Patreon on this fascinating paper, Why Language Models Hallucidate.

I'm trying to get an interview with the author. Essentially, it argued that we already have a literature on misclassification in machine learning models. Years before language models, we figured out why it's intractable how classifiers can sometimes get wrong. Is this a cat or is it a dog? What the paper does essentially is map the problem of classification to that of generation, i.e.

language models. Because we force models to output one response rather than a probability distribution of responses, they're essentially forced to sometimes BS. Multiple choice benchmarks, like my own simple bench, are part of the problem because it always rewards guessing over saying I don't know. Solving that will be a socio-technical problem.

But anyway, that was the massive summary. That's not the point of this video. But I wonder if Sam Ortman read this and is gradually adjusting his opinion. The paper was so thought-provoking for me and it'll be linked in the description. It created this grid on what the blockers are to the singularity and how they can be overcome.

It kind of got carried away and created visualizations for each of the categories. But anyway, that's for another day. But I do want to be fair to Sam Ortman because he's often vilified for changing his mind. But he's not actually the only one. There's one figure who's almost universally praised and I respect him massively.

He comes from my neck of the woods, Demis Asabis, and people say I sound like him. Of course, he's the Nobel Prize winning leader of Google DeepMind. But let's just say he's capable of his own about turns. It's not just Sam Ortman. Back in December of 2023, I think I was one of the only people to really focus on a particular quote from Demis Asabis.

And you listened to the hype he attached to Gemini. I think this was Gemini 2 or 1.5 Pro beating human experts. We started seeing that Gemini was better than any other model out there on these very, very important benchmarks. For example, each of the 50 different subject areas that we tested on, it's as good as the best expert humans in those areas.

Did you catch that? In 50 different domains, different subjects, better than human experts. Now, I debunked that quote both at the time and more recently, so I'm not going to debunk it again. But here Demis Asabis is, just the other day, dunking on competitors and how their leaders say that the models are as smart as experts.

That's not something he would ever do, for sure. You often hear some of our competitors talk about, you know, these modern systems that we have today are PhD intelligences. I think that's a nonsense. They're not, they're not PhD intelligences. They have some capabilities that are PhD level, but they're not in general capable.

And that's what exactly what general intelligence should be of performing across the board at the PhD level. In fact, as we all know, interacting with today's chatbots, if you pose the question in a certain way, they can make simple mistakes with even like high school maths and simple counting.

Do you agree that that was a bit of an about face having earlier said that Gemini Ultra was as good as the best human experts in 50 different subjects? For me, this is a deceptively interesting time in AI for all of the reasons given in this video and far more.

Almost every week, there is a significant improvement in how language models can help us code and do software engineering. And yes, I do think that's relevant even if you don't code. One of my goals for perhaps the end of this year or maybe next is to show how you can build a production level app just with the help of AI.

That's even without a coding background, by the way. Now, I guess that would be creating your own job, but the more traditional path would be using a job board like this one from the sponsors of today's video, 80,000 hours. You can use my own link found in the description to take you to this job board, which is updated.

I was going to say almost every day, but I think it's multiple times per day. These are real jobs from across the world, some of them remote and some of them in person. The focus is, of course, on having a positive impact. And the jobs, as you can see, are sourced not just from AI labs or universities, but also think tanks and other organizations.

Again, if you want to check them out, do use the link in the description. So which of those for you was the most interesting announcement? For me, they're all interesting. From the deeply technical, like the hallucinations paper, to the deeply social and emotional, like the child protections. Thank you anyway for watching this brief recap, and as always, have a wonderful day.