It's a Bird... It's a Plane… Loljk It's AI Regulation ⚒️

You know this was going to happen sooner or later.

Following the overnight success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, it was only a matter of time before the population at large began dreaming up doomsday scenarios. And so, of course, governments had to be involved to keep a check and balance, which sounds a ton better than just straight-up blowing up server farms where deep AI may be hosted.

While governments are still grappling with the implication of AI and the policies they should develop, some government agencies are already taking charge. Case in point: the U.S. Homeland Security.

The agency's head, Alejandro Mayorkas, said his department is creating a task force to help in the matters of national security, such as cargo screening and protecting critical infrastructure. "Our department will lead in the responsible use of AI to secure the homeland and in defending against the malicious use of this transformational technology," Mayorkas said.

By using AI in a governmental department, that too for national security, Mayorkas is invariably bringing in regulation, which might not necessarily be a bad thing.

The U.S. government isn't the only government creating task forces to harness the power of AI. Britain has announced a $124.5 million program to help develop foundation models for use in fields like healthcare and education, for example.

While some governments are embracing this new technology, others are worried, such as those in the EU. Here's a full list of governments' efforts to regulate AI tools.

Meta Layoffs paint bleak future for programmers 😞

A new report from Vox paints a gloomy picture for everyone that decided to get into coding and/or programming because they thought it was going to be a relatively safer career choice, immune from macro economic trends and things that plague other industries, like layoffs.

Well, that's not the case. In fact, Vox reporter Rani Molla did a breakdown of the roles that were eliminated at Meta as part of its efforts to transform the social media titan into an efficiency powerhouse, only to find that the bulk of the jobs that were eliminated were in software engineering.

"In other words, tech companies aren’t just trimming the fat by firing people who fill out their extensive ecosystem, which ranges from marketers to massage therapists. They’re also, many for the first time, making cuts to the people who build the very products they’re known for, and who enjoyed a sort of revered status since they, like the founders of the companies, were coders. Software engineers are still important, but they don’t have the power they used to," Molla wrote.

Often, it were the writers who were said to be the most vulnerable with the launch of AI, but it looks like programmers and/or coders, which are traditionally viewed as safer bets and hard technical skills, are just as vulnerable, if not more, due to the rise of AI.

In fact, Google just announced recently that its Bard AI chatbot could now generate and debug code, which raises even more worries about the future of programmers.

Meta ranked #65 in this week's Tech Company Rankings.

In Other News.. 📰

• HODL GANG ASSEMBLE! Britain's Standard Chartered believes bitcoin could touch a peak of $100,000 by the end of 2024. Though of course, they also expected the cryptocurrency to fall below $5,000 in 2023. 😆
• John Oliver has some thoughts on cryptocurrencies. 🤣
• Elon Musk's SpaceX had a failed rocket launch. Here's why that was a success. 🚀
• Twitter removed the verified "blue tick" from legacy users, only to restore it later, free of charge, to celebrity users of the social network. 📳

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to subscribe to my profile and share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️