Week 7 - Sunday, 22nd January

6GHz achieved for the first time without overclocking.

Written by Rayan Nadeem

This week, Intel made history by releasing the Core i9-13900K processor, which is the first to break the 6GHz barrier without overclocking. This is a significant milestone for Intel and the tech world as a whole, and will have a major impact on the industry. This week’s article will discuss the impact of such an achievement.

Firstly, this is amazing news for people who use computers for heavy-weight calculations, software etc. because such tasks will happen faster. However, this is not guaranteed. This is due to a multitude of reasons. Firstly, it depends on what kind of program is using the CPU. Different programs are better suited for different CPUs. For example, running a server on an i9 will be really bad (due to multithreading and a host of other problems). However, for gamers playing specific types of games this is great news. However, 6GHz is only a marginal improvement from the previous highest which was 5.8GHz.

Furthermore, this is without overclocking. Overclocking is a widely used and well-tested method of getting more performance out of your PC components. It involves pushing your CPU to the limit using excellent temperature management and a good control over the stability of the CPU. Although it can be unreliable at times, it is still a very good method of achieving higher clock speeds, often higher than the 6GHz that has recently been achieved by Intel.

However, it is not all bad. Achieving 6GHz is a quite important breakthrough, as it allows for people who don’t know how to overclock, or people running the CPU in an environment where it cannot be overclocked to achieve higher speeds and run programs faster. Furthermore, reaching 6GHz and maintaining 6GHz is also a breakthrough in terms of stability. Reaching such high speeds and maintaining it shows us where CPU development is headed and what it could achieve even within the next decade or so.

What do you think this means for the computer industry? Is it a big leap forward, or was it expected? Respond to this email with your thoughts!

Media censorship in 2023 and its issues.

Written by Muhammad Shah

Multiple videos sharing the first episode of the BBC documentary "India: The Modi Question" have been blocked as per the directions issued by the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, sources reported on Saturday. Along with these videos, the federal government has also directed Twitter to block over 50 tweets containing links to the blocked videos. Both YouTube and Twitter have reportedly complied with the government's request, which was issued by the Secretary of Information and Broadcasting on Friday using the emergency powers under the IT Rules, 2021.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the UK's national broadcaster, aired a two-part series that criticized Prime Minister Modi's tenure as Gujarat Chief Minister during the Gujarat riots of 2002. The documentary sparked outrage and was removed from select platforms.

On Thursday, India denounced the controversial BBC documentary series on Prime Minister Modi and described it as a "propaganda piece" that is designed to push a discredited narrative. External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi stated during a weekly media briefing, "We think this is a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative. The bias and the lack of objectivity and frankly continuing colonial mindset are blatantly visible."

Despite the documentary not being made available in India by the BBC, some YouTube channels appear to have uploaded it in order to promote an anti-India agenda. Sources indicate that YouTube has also been instructed to block the video if it is again uploaded on its platform, and Twitter has been directed to identify and block tweets containing links to the video on other platforms.

This decision was made after top government officials from various ministries examined the documentary and found it to be an attempt to cast aspersions on the authority and credibility of the Supreme Court of India and sow divisions among various Indian communities. The sources also added that the documentary was found to be undermining the sovereignty and integrity of India and having the potential to adversely impact India's friendly relations with foreign states.

Rather than debunking and allowing the idea of free speech by which India's government supposedbly stands by, the extreme reaction and censorship which has been opted for instead raises red flags as to what the Indian Government is trying to cover up. Whilst this is not the first time that inflamatory content has been censored by various governments, the question remains whether the media is really trustworthy anymore due to such severe censorship on social platforms which otherwise advocate free speech.

Programming News

Written by Joel Swedensky

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI in late November last year, based off their model GPT-3 used for natural language processing. It has sparked huge interest as its key focus is on generating extremely human-like natural sounding responses - and it does this very well. (Try it out yourself and see).

Already, people have been using the site for many things - mostly fun. Realistically, practical applications should use the more general GPT-3 model to get better results, so the AI chatbot only serves to be used for fun. Since it's so good at generating natural-sounding language, people have asked it hilarious prompts such as a debate between Donald and Daffy Duck in the style of Shakespeare. The AI clearly understands humour, to an extent, such as when asked to write a 3-line poem. It has also been used to generate clickbaity titles and new colours...

Crucially, the chatbot does not have access to the internet. While this is generally a good idea to allow the bot to run in a controlled environment (and avoid taking over the world), it means it has no way to verify information; if you ask it a question about information after 2021 (when it was trained), it does not know at all, stating

my knowledge was cut off in 2021, and I am not able to browse the web or access new information. Can I help you with anything else?
Generally, if you ask it for a fact, however, it is often extremely overconfident in its response, even if it's not correct. Like claiming a banana is bigger than a cat. Even though a cat has bigger dimensions. Really. This is potentially dangerous as it is in some ways better at lying than humans, and can be used to generate trustworthy sounding text which can be used to mislead.

So much is this problem that stackoverflow - the (in)famous programming Q&A site - banned the AI, claiming that
Overall, because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking and looking for correct answers.
People, potentially well-meaning, had been looking to help out on questions extremely fast - by asking ChatGPT - and copy-pasting the response without checking its truth, leading to misinformation spreading through the site.

While the ban is great in theory, it's not that easy to detect - or wasn't, until GPTZero arrived at the beginning of the year. It has already received over 7 million views and can detect ChatGPT's writing style - using the same technology that ChatGPT is built upon. It measures "perplexity" of the text - how random it is. Humans tend to have a much higher score of perplexity, and the tool gives you statistical information on the perplexity of sentences in the text before giving its verdict. This could be very useful for stopping ai-plagiarism in education. "Plagiarism" of AI has been a controversial subject recently, specifically pertaining to AI art, such as Dall-E 2 (also by OpenAI). While the art looks a lot fantastic, several questions are under debate - whether the prompter or the AI made it, for a start; and also the ethics of the training data used for the AI: should all artists whose images were trained on be credited?

ChatGPT is a showcase of great advancements in natural language AI, which has come extremely far from when Alan Turing created the Imitation Game (aka Turing Test), to Eugene Goostman passing it and developing much more since then. However, many ethical issues arise from it that do need to be adressed.

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