No-strings philanthropy is giving charities more decision-making power

No-strings philanthropy is giving charities more decision-making power
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/01/10/no-strings-philanthropy-is-giving-charities-more-decision-making-power
from The Economist

is no bad thing that recipients are spending more on overheads. In the past, many philanthropists have been willing to pay for a charity to roll out projects, such as building a new school or handing out food. But few have been willing to fund the staff who plan those projects, their training or their laptops. Academic research has shown that groups that spend more on overheads often deliver better results.

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Seetha Ram

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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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