I was temporarily very interested in trying out Anthropic's "computer use" when they announced it a few days ago, but after thinking about it a bit and especially after reading this article, my interest has vanished. There's no way I'm going to run that on a computer that contains any of my personal information.
That said, I played some with the new version of Claude 3.5 last night, and it did feel smarter. I asked it to write a self-contained webpage for a space invaders game to my specs, and its code worked the first time. When asked to make some adjustments to the play experience, it pulled that off flawlessly, too. I'm not a gamer or a programmer, but it got me thinking about what kinds of original games I might be able to think up and then have Claude write for me.
Just curious, before reading this, would you have given an alien intelligence access to your computer, not understanding how it works, and not trusting it? It doesn't have to be an AI, just ... an alien intelligence. Something not human. Actually, strike that, reverse it! Would you give human intelligence access to your unsandboxed computer?
What is "sandboxing" in the age of Microsoft Copilot+ AI, Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini already or coming soon to various phones and devices?
Assistant, Siri, Cortana were dumb enough not to be a threat. With the next breed, will we need to airgap our devices to be truly safe from external influences?
I wouldn't either. I guess at first I thought this new "computer use" was like a super macro—versatile but still under my control. At least in its current form it seems to be much more than that.
That said, I played some with the new version of Claude 3.5 last night, and it did feel smarter. I asked it to write a self-contained webpage for a space invaders game to my specs, and its code worked the first time. When asked to make some adjustments to the play experience, it pulled that off flawlessly, too. I'm not a gamer or a programmer, but it got me thinking about what kinds of original games I might be able to think up and then have Claude write for me.