Facts · 2021
events: 8 · Timeline
- Worldcoin, from Sam Altman and Alex Blania, comes out of stealth with $25 million in funding and a promise to hand out tokens for iris scansPrivacy & surveillance · Finance & money · Proof of personhood · techcrunch.com ↗
- The Atlantic brings the dead internet theory to mainstream media: it is “patently ridiculous” but has “a morsel of truth to it”Media & information · Dead internet theory · theatlantic.com ↗
- The AlphaFold database: hundreds of thousands of protein structures in open accessScience · Health & medicine · Protein folding · mail.ncmir.ucsd.edu ↗
- GitHub Copilot: AI completes code right in the editorSoftware development · Work & jobs · AI pair programmer · github.blog ↗
- Cloudflare estimates that humanity spends about 500 years a day on CAPTCHAs (32 seconds per CAPTCHA, 4.6 billion users, one CAPTCHA every 10 days)Work & jobs · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
- Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru and co-authors, in the paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”, call a language model a “stochastic parrot” that stitches together linguistic forms according to probabilities “without any reference to meaning”Science · Values & religion · Large language model · doi.org ↗
- A post titled “Dead Internet Theory” appears on the Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe forum: most online content is supposedly made by AI and bots, and the internet “feels empty”Media & information · Culture & arts · Dead internet theory · forum.agoraroad.com ↗
- DALL·E: images from a text descriptionCulture & arts · Generative AI · en.wikipedia.org ↗