India’s government wants to monetise state-owned assets

https://www.economist.com/business/2021/08/28/indias-government-wants-to-monetise-state-owned-assets
India's government wants to monetise state-owned assets from TheEconomist

First, the government still has uses for some of the firms; lic has served as a source of bail-out cash for struggling businesses. Second, the firms' employees are a powerful constituency that resists change. Third, like bureaucrats everywhere, Indian ones worry that a completed sale would prompt endless inquiries into whether the price was too low. For everyone involved, safer to do nothing. 7

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AI sceptic Emily Bender: ‘The emperor has no clothes’

Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, Google and Meta are little more than "stochastic parrots", a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system "for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning". https://on.ft.com/465EHFT I saw this article when using the Financial Times app and thought you might be interested: Financial Times, AI sceptic Emily Bender: 'The emperor has no clothes' -- George Hammond -- Read the full article at:

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