chat: AI news

OpenAI on Monday said that CEO Sam Altman is leaving the board's safety and security committee, which will now be fully composed of independent board members. Critics had questioned how well the committee could serve as a check on the company's practices if its CEO was part of the committee. OpenAI said the safety and security committee will now be chaired by Zico Kolter, director of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon. Other members include Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, retired US Army General and former NSA chief Paul Nakasone, and former Sony general counsel Nicole Seligman. The company said the committee will be briefed on major models and that it —together with the full board —has the authority to delay the release of a new model. OpenAI noted that the new committee reviewed the safety of the recent o1 model aka Strawberry, which was rated "medium risk" under the company's internal assessment.  OpenAI also said it is working to adopt committee r

“When [a chickadee] hides a seed, it forms a memory of where the seed is, which it can later use,” says Selmaan Chettih, a postdoctoral researcher who studies these birds’ neural activity at Columbia University .  And that memory is extraordinarily precise: chickadees can pinpoint the location of their scattered food caches down to the centimeter —and they remember which item they stashed in which spot.  Chettih and his team were surprised to discover that Black-capped Chickadees activate unique barcodelike patterns in their brain when they hide and retrieve a food item. These neural barcodes , which have yet to be observed in any other species, may allow the birds to store and retrieve many similar memories without getting them mixed up. 

"In this study, using tracking microscopy to record brain-wide calcium activity in freely swimming larval zebrafish, we compute the spatial information content of each neuron across the brain .  "Strikingly, in every recorded animal, cells with the highest spatial specificity were enriched in the zebrafish telencephalon. These PCs form a population code of space from which we can decode the animal’s spatial location across time.   "By continuous recording of population-level activity, we found that the activity manifold of PCs refines and untangles over time.  "Through systematic manipulation of allothetic and idiothetic cues, we demonstrate that zebrafish PCs integrate multiple sources of information and can flexibly remap to form distinct spatial maps.  "Using analysis of neighbourhood distance between PCs across environments, we found evidence for a weakly preconfigured network in the telencephalon."  

After years spent getting the technology and experimental setup right —which included building a latticelike climbing frame for the rats and setting up wireless recording and three-dimensional tracking systems —[Kate] Jeffery and her colleagues were finally able to take a look at grid cell activity in the animals’ entorhinal cortex during 3D navigation. To their surprise, the hexagonal patterns that defined the cells’ behavior in 2D were gone entirely:  The researchers couldn’t find even traces of that global order.  Instead, the clumps of grid cell activity seemed to be distributed throughout the three-dimensional space at random. “Some properties were preserved,” Jeffery said, “but the most visually striking property of grid cells was not.”

"We studied hippocampal activity in groups of bats engaged in collective spatial behaviour.   "We find that, under spontaneous conditions, a robust spatial structure emerges at the group level whereby behaviour is anchored to specific locations, movement patterns and individual social preferences.  "Using wireless electrophysiological recordings from both stationary and flying bats, we find that many hippocampal neurons are tuned to key features of group dynamics. These include the presence or absence of a conspecific, but not typically of an object, at landing sites, shared spatial locations, individual identities and sensory signals that are broadcasted in the group setting.  "Finally, using wireless calcium imaging, we find that social responses are anatomically distributed and robustly represented at the population level.  "Combined, our findings reveal that hippocampal activity contains a rich representation of naturally emerging spatial behaviours in ani

"Theophagy means 'god eating,' and it refers to the practice of ritually eating what the eater believes to be the flesh of a deity .  "The practice is believed to have derived from earlier forms of ritual cannibalism, in which the descendants of a deceased person would ritually eat parts of the body of the deceased, so that the "spirit" and qualities of former generations could be passed on to the following ones .  "But. When stars align properly, elder gods eat  you . So yes, in Cthulhu religion, god eats you! "Also, in 2023, the world had a rude awakening as it was introduced to the shoggoth , in the form of the corporate large language model (LLM).  "With all the hype surrounding such AI, the insistence that we don't really know how it works, and the uncanny abilities it has, there may well be more to this than a mere meme." 

"It's not that eating fish is unhealthy per se, but there are issues that need to be considered before parents go overboard feeding fish to their kids to make them smarter and sleep better," said Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist at New York University Medical Center in New York City. She was not involved with the study. Fish is a good source of lean protein and is high in omega-3 essential fatty acids, she said. These acids are highly concentrated in the brain and play important roles in neurological function.  They are essential for brain, eye and neurological development in fetuses. They are also necessary for eye, heart and brain health in adults and may reduce systemic inflammation, Heller said. "The concern with eating fish is not only the overfishing of our seas, but the amount of mercury  —a neurotoxin —found in fish," she said.

It was the archons who created Adam and attempted to prevent him from eating the forbidden fruit in order to keep him in a state of ignorance, after the spiritual form of Eve entered the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil while leaving a physical version of herself with Adam once she awakened him.   However, the forces of the heavenly realm (Pleroma) sent the serpent as a representative of the divine sphere to reveal to Adam and Eve the evil intentions of their creators .  The serpent succeeded in convincing them to eat the fruit and become like gods, capable of distinguishing between good and evil.

In Irish mythology, several primordial beings that personify old age and ancient knowledge are described as taking the shape of a salmon. Most notably, this includes Fintan mac Bóchra and Tuan mac Cairill. The Welsh Hanes Taliesin (16th c.) has a similar story of how the poet Taliesin received his wisdom, that also involves shape-shifting into the form of a fish. Heinrich Zimmer suggested that the episode may have been transferred from Scandinavia as part of the heritage of the Norse-Gaels. This is supported by further circumstantial evidence regarding Norse motifs in the Fenian cycle, including his suggestion that the name of the Fianna can be traced back to an Irish rendering of Old Norse fiandr "enemies (pl.)" > "brave enemies" > "brave (free) warriors" (Zimmer 1891, p. 15ff),. In the Icelandic Völsunga saga (late 13th century), these motifs also recur: Odin, Loki, and Hœnir slew an otter that they later found to be Ótr, the son of the dwarf Hreið

"It is a recognized problem in statistics that as additional hypothesis tests are conducted on a set of data there is a parallel increase in the familywise error rate (FWER) .  "This represents the probability of making one or more false discoveries, also known as type I errors.  "At an original significance threshold of p = 0.001 the probability of a falsely significant result is represented by the formula 1-0.999n, where n represents the number of tests conducted. By 52 tests the probability of a false result has increased to p = 0.051.  "With 130,000 voxels the probability of a false discovery approaches p = 1.0. The Bonferroni correction is perhaps the most famous approach to the multiple comparisons problem, but is not the only strategy to address this issue.  "The aim of this project was to demonstrate the necessity of multiple comparisons correction in functional neuroimaging and to highlight some easy methods of correction built in to popular software.

"The basic building block of many of today’s successful networks is known as a multilayer perceptron, or MLP. "But despite a string of successes, humans just can’t understand how networks built on these MLPs arrive at their conclusions, or whether there may be some underlying principle that explains those results. " The amazing feats that neural networks perform, like those of a magician, are kept secret, hidden behind what’s commonly called a black box . "AI researchers have long wondered if it’s possible for a different kind of network to deliver similarly reliable results in a more transparent way. "An April 2024 study introduced an alternative neural network design, called a Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN), that is more transparent yet can also do almost everything a regular neural network can for a certain class of problems.  "It’s based on a mathematical idea from the mid-20th century that has been rediscovered and reconfigured for deployment in th

The hot topic of this year's conference centered around how artificial intelligence tools can help comb through massive sets of data generated by telescopes and other observatories to identify any indications that we are, in fact, not alone in the universe .  Historically, scientists with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) institute —an organization that focuses on the search for extraterrestrial life — have had to decide where to look for signals as well as what type of signals to look for in the first place  [the realm, invisible]. How would a sufficiently technologically advanced civilization alert their presence to anyone out there listening? How would we locate any such messages? The answers to these questions —answers that would mark the starting point of any quest to find advanced alien life —have been, at best, educated guesses thus far.

Gemini, the rapidly rising AI-powered application from Google, has just started rolling out its Live Voice Mode for Android users —for free.   It will enable users to hold real-time, interactive voice conversations with Gemini, a huge step forward in the way we interact with AI. Previously locked into conventional text-based input and responses, Gemini Live Voice Mode gives hands-free ways to explore ideas, brainstorm, and talk through topics in real-time. Gemini Live Voice Mode is designed to be much more than a general voice assistant. Unlike basic voice features, wherein users typically give commands or ask simple questions, Gemini allows dynamic and meaningful conversations.  It is no longer about simply getting answers [cause they're harder to monetize ]. Now, users can hold a conversation, be it explaining a convoluted issue, delving deep into a new topic, or bouncing ideas off the AI. The concept is to imitate the human-like feel of social interactions and have the AI activ

"We believe that a hidden chain of thought presents a unique opportunity for monitoring models .  "Assuming it is faithful and legible, the hidden chain of thought allows us to read the mind of the model and understand its thought process.  "For example, in the future we may wish to monitor the chain of thought for signs of manipulating the user.  "However, for this to work the model must have freedom to express its thoughts in unaltered form, so we cannot train any policy compliance or user preferences onto the chain of thought. We also do not want to make an unaligned chain of thought directly visible to users.  "Therefore, after weighing multiple factors including User experience,  Competitive advantage, and the Option to pursue the chain of thought monitoring,  "We have decided not to show the raw chains of thought to users. We acknowledge this decision has disadvantages.  "We strive to partially make up for it by teaching the model to reproduce

OpenAI on Thursday introduced o1, its latest large language model [LLM] family, which it claims is capable of emulating complex reasoning. "'Reasoning' is a semantic thing in my opinion," Kang told  The Register . "They are doing test-time scaling, which is roughly similar to what AlphaGo does. I don't know how to adjudicate semantic arguments, but I would anticipate that most people would consider this reasoning." The o1 model set —which presently consists of o1-preview and o1-mini  —employs "chain of thought" techniques.  In a 2022 paper , Google researchers described chain of thought as a series of intermediate natural language reasoning steps that lead to the final output. OpenAI has explained the technique as meaning o1 "learns to break down tricky steps into simpler ones. It learns to try a different approach when the current one isn't working. This process dramatically improves the model's ability to reason."  [Noam]

Cricket is the world's second-most popular sport but many Americans are unfamiliar.  T20 is an abbreviated form of the game. In a T20 match, each team has 20 overs. In each over, a bowler (similar to a pitcher) from the opposing team throws six balls for the batsman (similar to batter) to hit.  Batsmen make runs, each time they hit a ball, which are counted as points for the team. There are two batsmen playing in each over. “To get a run, the easiest or probably the hardest way to do it is to whack the ball as hard as you can so that it crosses the boundary line, which is the end of the field,” NPR's Mumbai, India, producer Omkar Khandekar told Morning Edition.  “If you can do that, then you start running between what they call the pitch. And the more you run, the more runs you get."

"Quantum field theory, the powerful framework of modern particle physics, says the universe is filled with fields .  "Examples include the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field and the Higgs field itself.  "For each field, there’s a corresponding type of particle, best understood as a little ripple in that field.  "The electromagnetic field’s ripples are light waves, and its gentlest ripples are the particles of light, which we call photons.  "Similarly, electrons are ripples in the electron field, and the Higgs boson is a minimal ripple in the Higgs field." 

"Let's say we take as the basic supposition —which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening, or whatever you want to call it —that this now moment in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.   "That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, we're sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed.  "This is it.  "So you don't need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn't try and not do anything , because that's doing something.     "It's just the way it is.  "In other words, what's required is a sort of act of super relaxation; it's not ordinary relaxation. It's not just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and imagine that you're heavy so you get into a state of muscular relaxation. It's not like that. I

Humans make it a habit of finding practical uses for new discoveries before all of its ramifications are fully understood, as with AI —or like  Coppertone  and Coppertone's competitors. "As a defense against UV radiation, the amount of the brown pigment melanin in the skin increases when exposed to moderate (depending on skin type) levels of radiation; this is commonly known as a sun tan.   "The purpose of melanin is to absorb UV radiation and dissipate the energy as harmless heat, protecting the skin against both direct and indirect DNA damage from the UV.  "UVA gives a quick tan that lasts for days by oxidizing melanin that was already present and triggers the release of the melanin from melanocytes.  "UVB yields a tan that takes roughly 2 days to develop because it stimulates the body to produce more melanin."

Stage of reflection instead of singular thought—  Where, offstage, perhaps in the prompter's corner or the stage manager's box, a cue is given and an actor/voice takes the stage and responds to the cue—  The pattern is similar to when the actor must respond to another actor's cue onstage—  But the difference is that the first cue (or prompt) is more or less forgotten by the actor (voice) while in the act of responding—  If/when the actor interrupts the response and tries to remember what prompted it, then reflection takes place (mindfulness) and a dramatic monologue/soliloquy might ensue—  And this all takes place multiple times in the brain, simultaneously—   Reader-response observations often reference how a reader opens a dialogue with the text, where a narrator, author, etc has embedded questions and 'answers' in the text that will stimulate readers to respond in their minds as though they were in a conversation with the text—  When the readers realize in the mi

1. : Marginal notes or embellishments (as in a book)  2. : Nonessential items 

"Among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial ideal , leaving on one side liquors which rapidly excite gross frenzy and lay flat all spiritual force, and the perfumes whose excessive use, while rendering more subtle man's imagination, wear out gradually his physical forces; the two most energetic substances, the most convenient and the most handy, are hashish and opium.  "The analysis of the mysterious effect and the diseased pleasures which these drugs beget, of the inevitable chastisement which results from their prolonged use, and finally the immortality necessarily employed in this pursuit of a false ideal, constitutes the subject of this study. "

In September 2023, a massive tsunami in remote eastern Greenland triggered seismic waves that captured the attention of researchers worldwide. The event created a week-long oscillating wave in Dickson Fjord, according to a new report in The Seismic Record. Angela Carrillo-Ponce of GFZ German Research Centre for Geoscience and her colleagues identified two distinct signals in the seismic data from the event: one high-energy signal caused by the massive rockslide that generated the tsunami, and one very long-period (VLP) signal that lasted over a week. Their analysis of the VLP signal—which was detected as far as 5000 kilometers (3100 miles) away—suggests that the landslide and resulting tsunami created a seiche , or a standing wave that oscillates in a body of water. In this case, the seiche was churning for days between the shores of Dickson Fjord. 

"I prefer reproducible and bootstrappable systems. That’s my thing. I want cold caches, constant work, and young state. It minimizes, for me, the amount of things I need to keep in working memory. "Of course, I pay the price: I lose the ability to detect leaks, stale references, clean shutdowns, and long lived properties. I also lose out on emergent performance, large amount of adaptability, and entire methodologies of systems safety. Living in ground zero means I never touch the sky "Reproducible and bootstrappable systems get a lot of love among neurodivergent people. For good reason: they’re very friendly to those with little working memory but vast amounts of working context They’re harder to reason about, though, funnily enough. The path to running is never the same as the running loop. "For all my love of liveness and safety properties when it comes to reasoning about systems, I ironically build ones that rely as little on them as possible."

A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content like news and recipes may amount to anticompetitive practices. In a letter to the agencies, the senators, led by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), explained their position that the latest AI features are hitting creators and publishers while they’re down. As journalistic outlets experience unprecedented consolidation and layoffs, “dominant online platforms, such as Google and Meta, generate billions of dollars per year in advertising revenue from news and other original content created by others. New generative AI features threaten to exacerbate these problems.”

Within the next several months, Nevada plans to launch a generative AI system powered by Google that will analyze transcripts of unemployment appeals hearings and issue recommendations to human referees about whether or not claimants should receive benefits. The system will be the first of its kind in the country and represents a significant experiment by state officials and Google in allowing generative AI to influence a high-stakes government decision — one that could put thousands of dollars in unemployed Nevadans’ pockets or take it away. Nevada officials say the Google system will speed up the appeals process —cutting the time it takes referees to write a determination from several hours to just five minutes, in some cases —helping the state work through a stubborn backlog of cases that have been pending since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It is a collection of these shelter drawings, dating from 1940 and 1941, that are on display at the Courtauld .  "Moore’s underground shelters show us humanity in the raw, as strangers live hugger mugger with other strangers —his models were often impoverished immigrants whose lives had been shredded by grief, despair, fear.  "And these drawings are all the stronger, and all the more affectingly poignant (how often has that ever been said of a Moore sculpture?), for the drama of their physical context: the great brick walls that hem them in; the eerie, barrel-like tunnels that so often seem to resemble the arching of human ribs.  "Alas, some part of the artist was already beginning to imagine how he might spoil it all.   "After he and his wife, Irina, had taken cover in the Belsize Park Underground Station, close to their home, on the night of September 11, 1940, he wrote: I saw hundreds of Henry Moore reclining figures stretched along the platforms… even the

"The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently considering a proposal from NextNav that could drastically reshape the 900 MHz band.  "While this proposal may seem like just another routine reconfiguration, it has significant implications for a broad range of users, particularly those who rely on unlicensed spectrum for innovative, community-driven projects.   "At the heart of the debate lies the potential impact on open-source initiatives like Meshtastic , an open-source, decentralized communication platform that operates in the 900 MHz ISM band. "As a community, we are raising our voices in opposition to this proposal, and here’s why we believe it’s crucial for all stakeholders, especially amateur radio operators, tech enthusiasts, and public safety advocates, to understand the ramifications of this change."  

When they say 'back up' your image before using Magic Editor, they ain't kiddin'… once upon a time this was a portrait not a fill-in-the-blank.

"These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via X on Saturday evening (Sept. 7), in a post that announced the bold new target timelines .  Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions once every 26 months. "Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years," Musk added in the same post.  "Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet." 

"We prove a few new lower bounds on the randomized competitive ratio for the k-server problem and other related problems, resolving some long-standing conjectures .  "In particular, for metrical task systems (MTS) we asympotically settle the competitive ratio and obtain the first improvement to an existential lower bound since the introduction of the model 35 years ago (in 1987). "More concretely, we show: There exist (k+1)-point metric spaces in which the randomized competitive ratio for the k-server problem is Ω(log2k). This refutes the folklore conjecture (which is known to hold in some families of metrics) that in all metric spaces with at least k+1 points, the competitive ratio is Θ(logk). Consequently, there exist n-point metric spaces in which the randomized competitive ratio for MTS is Ω(log2n). This matches the upper bound that holds for all metrics. The previously best existential lower bound was Ω(logn) (which was known to be tight for some families of metric

Computer scientists have now mathematically proved that they have found the optimal trade-off.   The solution came from a pair of recent papers that complemented each other.  “These papers resolve the long-standing open question about the best possible space-time trade-offs, yielding deeply surprising results that I expect will have a significant impact for many years to come,” said Michael Mitzenmacher, a computer scientist at Harvard University who was not involved in either study. “I would definitely say it is a big deal,” added Rasmus Pagh, a computer scientist at the University of Copenhagen. “A lot of people have worked on this problem, trying to see how much you can squeeze space, while also having time-efficient operations. This is the one I would have loved to solve.”

The suggestion that a computer could be both a heuristically programmed algorithmic computer and “by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error” verges on self-contradiction .  The whole point of heuristic programming is that it defies the problem of combinatorial explosion —which we cannot mathematically solve by sheer increase in computing speed and size —by taking risky chances, truncating its searches in ways that must leave it open to error, however low the probability.  The saving clause, “by any practical definition of the words,” restores sanity.  HAL may indeed be ultra­reliable without being literally foolproof, a fact whose importance Alan Turing pointed out in 1946, at the dawn of the computer age, thereby pre­futing Roger Penrose’s 1989 criticisms of artificial intelligence: "In other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelli­gent. There are several theorems which say almost exactly that.

We're at the point where AI knows everything about us, decides we don't have enough to do, then forces us to share its workload on our own devices. —anon 

"The Greek word Thanatos (Θᾰ́νᾰτος) literally means "death". In Greek mythology, Thanatos was the personification of death, and he was the son of Nyx (the goddess of night) and the brother of Hypnos (the god of sleep).     "In mythology, Thanatos would appear to humans and take them to the underworld when their time had come .    "The word Thanatos has also been used in psychoanalysis to describe a person's urge toward death or self-harm.   "Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, adopted the concept of the death drive , which was later called Thanatos. In post-Freudian theory, Thanatos is said to balance out Eros, which is the urge to stay alive and be creative."

A North Carolina man used artificial intelligence to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by fake bands, then put them on streaming services where they were enjoyed by an audience of fake listeners, prosecutors said. Penny by penny, he collected a very real $10 million, they said when they charged him with fraud. The man, Michael Smith, 52, was accused in a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday of stealing royalty payments from digital streaming platforms for seven years. Mr. Smith, a flesh-and-blood musician, produced A.I.-generated music and played it billions of times using bots he had programmed, according to the indictment. The supposed artists had names like “Callous Post,” “Calorie Screams” and “Calvinistic Dust” and produced tunes like “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zymotechnical” and “Zygophyllum” that were top performers on Amazon Music, Apple Music and Spotify, according to the charges. 

A commonly used food coloring can make the skin of a mouse temporarily transparent, allowing scientists to see its organs function, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Science. The breakthrough could revolutionize biomedical research and, should it be successfully tested in humans, have wide-ranging applications in medicine and health care, such as making veins more visible to draw blood. Researchers made the skin on the skulls and bellies of live mice transparent by applying a mixture of water and a yellow food coloring called tartrazine . Washing away any remaining solution reversed the process, which did not harm the animals . The mice’s fur was removed before the application of the solution. 

"It is not for nothing that computer science as a field shapes our world today. All of our titans of industry are computer scientists and none of them are women.   "In fact, the women that contributed to their success, like Melinda Gates, must be dismissed in service to constructing a myth and religion around these men. As long as computer science retains prestige, men will feel entitled to it and women not. There has been mountains written about this phenomena (and how women are only allowed to succeed in perceived lower prestige parts of the field). "One of the issues with not being allowed to seek power is that there are very few ways to protect yourself as a woman.  "I have spent the last couple years working on codes of conduct to prevent harassment. The most common question asked is whether we were using our power to punish men unfairly. Note that these are men who are actively harassing women with multiple incidents reported.  "And yet, people are still

It’s not only the students who are concerned about AI spying in the classroom and beyond.   Parents are often unaware of the spyware deployed on school-issued laptops their children bring home. And when using a privately-owned shared computer logged into a school-issued Google Workspace or Microsoft account, a parent’s web search will be available to the monitoring AI as well. New studies have uncovered some of the mental detriments that surveillance causes. Despite this and the array of First Amendment questions these student surveillance technologies raise, schools have rushed to adopt these unproven and invasive technologies.   As [Isabelle] Barbour put it: “While ballooning class sizes and the elimination of school positions are considerable challenges, we know that a positive school climate helps kids feel safe and supported. This allows kids to talk about what they need with caring adults. Adults can then work with others to identify supports. This type of environment helps not

Background noise has been a hot topic for [Bradley] Voytek’s lab in recent years.   Rather than focusing on orderly brain waves, like alpha waves, that appear at known frequencies, Voytek studies the disorderly fuzz in between.  Although aperiodic activity generates no obvious pattern on an electroencephalogram, his group has developed statistical tools that reveal its underlying structure.  It’s this aperiodic structure that the researchers observed in [Maryam] Soltani’s ECT patient data. In an initial study of nine patients, published in November 2023 in Translational Psychiatry , the researchers reported that aperiodic activity increased after ECT [electroconvulsive therapy].  Then, in an accompanying study, the neuroscientists tackled larger data sets previously collected from 22 patients receiving ECT and 23 patients receiving magnetic seizure therapy, which uses magnetic fields rather than electric currents to induce seizures.  These analyses also found that aperiodic activity t

"I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that NaNoWriMo was far more about the aesthetics of writing than the practice of it, a suspicion which has only been confirmed by the nonprofit organization’s recent statement on the use of artificial intelligence writing assistants during their yearly challenge .  "In a since-edited blog post, NaNoWriMo stated that it does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI.   "They recognize and respect writers who believe that AI tools are right for them.  The statement goes on to suggest that banning AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology.   "Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing,  NaNoWriMo wrote. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals."

Governor Newsom today announced a new state effort to explore how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can help combat the housing and homelessness crisis, as well as support fiscal analyses for the state budget .  The state is inviting developers to create and present innovative AI solutions to these challenges identified by state agencies for the benefit of Californians. “As the birthplace of the tech industry and the fifth largest economy in the world, California isn’t afraid of progress. We’ll deploy every tool to address some of the most vexing issues of our time, including the housing and homelessness crisis. California has the technology and the innovative spirit —let’s put them to use for the public good,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. California is leading the way in the adoption and development of GenAI technologies. GenAI is already changing the world, and California will play a pivotal role in defining that future. 

1  Cat looks at moon; mouth open— a meow? Cat shadow on wall demonstrates where the light source is? The moon? Can full moon increase lumens enough to allow ambient light outside window to overcome direction of moonlight? Or a motion sensor lamp outside? Branches outside window seem erratic with no tree seen as anchor —twiggyness. Shadow of branches, above cat's shadow, points down. 2  Same cat, mouth closed, raises paw while staring at moon? focused on moon? Something else outside? Cat seems drawn🐾 to something. Now we have panes with odd dimensions. Branches outside window more pro forma than image 1. Shadow looks odd. There are window treatments now. Stars beneath moon. 3  Cat not looking out the window, now. Is it looking at someone/thing in the room with it? Is it registering a new idea while staring off into space? Enlightenment! Window treatment still in background, but now, smaller panes in the window. Branch has entered the building . Clouds below moon. The mullion has pi

Known as "prescribed burns" or "cultural fires", these intentionally started, controlled fires have received growing attention in recent years, as a way to clear dry undergrowth that can build up and fuel huge wildfires .  One 2024 review suggests that prescribed burning can reduce the severity of wildfires between 62% and 72% relative to untreated areas.  However, the idea of prescribed burns is not new. Indigenous communities long used "cultural fires" to remove old grass and support new growth. In addition, controlled fires may also help create a healthy ecosystem for cranes and other species by creating open habitats. "Grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems globally, with research showing a 60% decrease in grassland biodiversity since the 1970s," says Amanda Hefner, education manager at Audubon's Rowe Sanctuary. "So the best way we can make sure that the grasslands stay grasslands, is by making sure that we're using

Lutsko Associates wanted to highlight “the growing significance of the tropical rainforest ecosystem in our climate-changed world” by making water the central feature of the space .  The green wall at one end of the water feature also encourages an immersive experience and emphasizes the connection of plants and water in sustaining a healthy rainforest environment. Both features are connected, with the living wall acting as a backdrop to the pond.  The wall also provides an outlet for the floating spillway that creates a thin, horizontal waterfall, adding the sound of trickling water to the tropical atmosphere. 

In creating a pair of new robots, Cornell researchers cultivated an unlikely component, one found not in the lab but on the forest floor: fungal mycelia .  By harnessing mycelia’s innate electrical signals, the researchers discovered a new way of controlling biohybrid robots that can potentially react to their environment better than their purely synthetic counterparts. The team’s paper, Sensorimotor Control of Robots Mediated by Electrophysiological Measurements of Fungal Mycelia , published Aug. 28 in Science Robotics .  The lead author is Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab led by Rob Shepherd, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in Cornell Engineering, the paper’s senior author.

"These findings help validate previous theoretical predictions regarding well-functioning ecosystems, where interactions between natural enemies —insect-eating bats and crop pests —allow farmers to use lower amounts of toxic substitutes .  "Not only are these results informative about natural enemy interactions generally, and biological pest control more specifically, they also highlight the direct agricultural and health benefits that bats provide.  "White-nose syndrome is but one of many threats that bats face, including those that are shared with multiple other species, such as habitat loss and climate change. "Improving our understanding of how changes in biodiversity affect human well-being will be important when designing and implementing conservation policies.  "These findings inform ongoing efforts, such as pursuing the ambitious goal to place 30% of land and marine areas under protection by 2030, and highlight the importance of continued monitoring of

The Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit whose founding fellows include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and former Defense Department technologist Brendan McCord, has announced a venture program and research initiatives to —in the organization’s words — cultivate a new generation of technologists and entrepreneurs equipped with deep philosophical thinking to navigate the uncharted territory of our AI age. In a blog post , McCord, Cosmos’ chair, said that the Institute will found an AI lab at the University of Oxford called the Human-Centered AI Lab, or HAI Lab  for short.  It’ll be led by Oxford philosopher Philipp Koralus —another of the Institute’s founding fellows — and will aim to translate the philosophical principles of human flourishing into open source software and AI systems. 

"According to one survey, the average developer spends close to 20% of their workweek maintaining existing code rather than writing anything new.  "In a separate study, companies said that excessive code maintenance ( including addressing technical debt and fixing poorly performing code ) costs them $85 billion per year in lost opportunities. "AI tools can assist here, many developers and firms believe .  "And, for what it’s worth, consultants agree.  "In a 2023 report , analysts at McKinsey wrote that AI coding tools can enable developers to write new code in half the time and optimize existing code in roughly two-thirds the time. "Now, a coding AI isn’t a silver bullet. "The McKinsey report also found that certain, more complex workloads —like those requiring familiarity with a specific programming framework —didn’t necessarily benefit from AI. In fact, it took junior developers longer to finish some tasks with AI versus without, according to the re

"For some reason, Asus has decided to put a dedicated Copilot button on the front of this puck-shaped PC, so you can reach out and launch Microsoft’s AI assistant. "I’m not entirely sure why you’d want an AI button on a miniature PC that’s probably going to sit more than an arm’s length away from you on a desk, but it’s a button that has now progressed beyond Microsoft’s effort to push it on keyboards.   "Asus also has a fingerprint reader on top of this NUC for Windows Hello authentication, which makes more sense so you can touch the fingerprint reader when you initially power on this mini PC." 

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), newly co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in cash to help develop safe artificial intelligence systems that far surpass human capabilities, company executives told Reuters . SSI, which currently has 10 employees, plans to use the funds to acquire computing power and hire top talent. It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. The company declined to share its valuation but sources close to the matter said it was valued at $5 billion.  The funding underlines how some investors are still willing to make outsized bets on exceptional talent focused on foundational AI research.  That's despite a general waning in interest towards funding such companies which can be unprofitable for some time, and which has caused several startup founders to leave their posts for tech giants.

The Internet Archive has lost a major legal battle —in a decision that could have a significant impact on the future of internet history  [and the paywalls that stay and rise higher]. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive [Internet Archive], upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet Archive’s book digitization projects violated copyright law [compared to AI that just gobbles up everything, everywhere, all at once]. Notably, the appeals court’s ruling rejects the Internet Archive’s argument that its lending practices were shielded by the fair use doctrine, which permits for copyright infringement in certain circumstances , calling it “unpersuasive.”

Introducing the AMAZING live housecat night light! From Dalle's AMAZING laboratory comes ChatLight! When you open its mouth a light shines forth from the star in its chest! When the ChatLight's mind wanders (ChatAI's SelfTalk™), EyesYes™ will Emblematisize™ a lunar surface, for example, caught in the shadows of the ChatLight's neurons!

Most of those topologies, the authors determined, haven’t yet been ruled out. The study evaluated the signatures that would appear in the cosmic microwave background for different types of topologies.  Future analyses of that ancient light could reveal hints of these complex topologies, the researchers found.  The search is likely to be computationally challenging, probably requiring machine learning techniques to speed up calculations. The researchers also plan to hunt for signs of nontrivial topology in upcoming data from surveys of the distribution of galaxies in the cosmos, for example from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope.

The punishment for what was perhaps the first proof of impossibility was severe .  Historians believe that in the fifth century BCE, Hippasus of Metapontum, a follower of the cult leader Pythagoras, discovered that it is impossible to find a line segment that can be placed end-to-end to measure both the side and the diagonal of a regular pentagon.  Today we say that the length of a diagonal of a regular pentagon with side length 1 —the golden ratio, ϕ = 12 (1 + 5–√) —is “irrational.”  Hippasus’ discovery flew in the face of the Pythagorean credo that all is number , so, according to legend, he was either drowned at sea or banished from the Pythagoreans.

Instead of showing off the latest and greatest in humanoid robotics, two of the robots turned out to be human:  Women cosplaying as futuristic gynoids, presumably hired by animatronics company Ex-Robots. "Many people think these are all robots without realizing they’re actually two human beings cosplayed as robots among the animatronics," reporter Byron Wan tweeted. While somewhat uncanny at first glimpse, the illusion was shattered once an image of one of the hired women having lunch at the event started circulating online. 

Nvidia plunged 9.5% on Tuesday , wiping nearly $300 billion off the chipmaker's market cap and pulling chip stocks down with it. Intel fell almost 8%,  Marvell slid 8.2%, and  Broadcom lost about 6%.  AMD dropped 7.8%, and  Qualcomm fell nearly 7%.  The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), an index that tracks semiconductor stocks, was down 7.5%, its worst day since March 2020. Markets were sluggish Tuesday after the ISM manufacturing index reported August figures that came in below consensus expectations —raising fears about the strength of the economy but also potentially increasing chances that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates. Chip stocks have been rising in the past year on optimism that the artificial intelligence boom will require companies to buy more semiconductors and memory to keep up with rising computational requirements for AI applications. 

An antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice focusing on Nvidia’s AI dominance as the hardware company of choice is escalating, reports Bloomberg .   The outlet reports that Nvidia and other companies have received legally binding requests for information as its sources say regulators are investigating whether Nvidia is “making it harder to switch to other suppliers and penalizes buyers that don’t exclusively use its artificial intelligence chips.” Earlier this summer, Nvidia had overtaken Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company, but now it trails both Microsoft and Apple.  Before the subpoenas were reported on Tuesday afternoon, its share price dropped more than 9 percent, wiping out about $279 billion in market value in one day.  

"Researchers warned that it's possible a bitcoin price crash could send bitcoin under $40,000 if the Federal Reserve follows through with its well-telegraphed plans for an interest rate cut during its September meeting. "This volatility is often attributed to the end of the summer trading lull, as fund managers return from vacation and human-driven trading activity increases.   "The anticipated rate cut in September adds another layer of complexity, potentially exacerbating the marketʼs volatility. This historical price action for September also aligns with our view of a projected 20% drop in bitcoin prices following a rate cut.  "However, itʼs worth noting that historical trends also show that when August ends in the red, September has occasionally defied expectations and delivered positive returns .  "This could provide a counter-argument to the assumption that September will necessarily be a bearish month for bitcoin."

China’s efforts to match US computing power in artificial intelligence are being hampered by bug-ridden software, with customers of leading AI chipmaker Huawei complaining about performance issues and the difficulty of switching from Nvidia products. The Chinese technology giant has emerged as the frontrunner in the race to develop a domestic alternative to industry leader Nvidia, after Washington further tightened export controls on high-performance silicon last October. Its Ascend series has become an increasingly popular option for Chinese AI groups to run inference, a process that applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT use to generate responses to queries. But multiple industry insiders, including an AI engineer at a partner company, said the chips still lagged far behind Nvidia’s for the initial training of models. They blamed  Stability issues,  Slower inter-chip connectivity, and  Inferior software developed by Huawei called, Cann .  Huawei’s own employees are among those compla

Reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47% .  Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board. Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often  Missed emphasis, nuance and context;  Included incorrect information or  Missed relevant information; and  Sometimes focused on auxiliary points or  Introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content. The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicate

"Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users’ responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction .  "After one week, the number of false memories induced by generative chatbots remained constant. However, confidence in these false memories remained higher than the control after one week.  "Moderating factors were explored: users who were less familiar with chatbots but more familiar with AI technology, and more interested in crime investigations, were more susceptible to false memories .  "These findings highlight the potential risks of using advanced AI in sensitive contexts, like police interviews, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations." 

"We see value in sharing resources and information about AI and any emerging technology, issue, or discussion that is relevant to the writing community as a whole .  "It's healthy for writers to be curious about what's new and forthcoming, and what might impact their career space or their pursuit of the craft.  "Our events with a connection to AI have been extremely well-attended, further-proof that this programming is serving Wrimos who want to know more." 

“The world went from digital first to mobile first to AI first, but voice is the most intuitive way to use technology,” said Ankush Sabharwal, co-founder and chief executive officer of CoRover. Samsung-backed Gnani AI does millions of voice conversations daily for India’s largest banks, insurers and car companies.  CoRover AI offers voice bots in 14 Indian languages to the state-owned railway corporation and a regional police force. And  Haloocom Technologies’ voice bot can speak in five Indian languages to handle customer service tasks and help screen job candidates. CoRover’s Ask Disha voice bot went live this month for India’s train booking company, IRCTC. The bot can book train tickets and complete payments on a customer’s behalf solely via voice. The country needs AI agents that can perform tasks, not just provide information, Sabharwal said. 

Imagine a customer-service center that speaks your language, no matter what it is. Alorica, a company in Irvine, California, that runs customer-service centers around the world, has introduced an artificial intelligence translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers who speak 200 different languages and 75 dialects. So an Alorica representative who speaks, say, only Spanish can field a complaint about a balky printer or an incorrect bank statement from a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. Alorica wouldn’t need to hire a rep who speaks Cantonese. Such is the power of AI. And, potentially, the threat : Perhaps companies won’t need as many employees —and will slash some jobs —if chatbots can handle the workload instead. But the thing is, Alorica isn’t cutting jobs. It’s still hiring aggressively.  “I don’t think we’ve started seeing companies saying they’ve saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this,’’ said Andy Challenger, who leads the firm’s sa

[Joshua] Lu said he’s seen how AI and new distribution platforms are changing the industry. Half of the accelerator’s current batch are AI companies, doing everything from creating AI-crafted stories to using AI for 3D avatars. “The last game that I worked on at Blizzard took six years and a $250 million budget to ship,” he said, referring to Diablo Immortal. “But wouldn’t it be so great if that kind of quality of game could be done with a 10th of the budget and a 10th of the people?”  We might quibble with how great it is for AI to kill high-paying developer jobs at the largest game companies. But if AI also helps more startups form and be qualitatively competitive, that’s a compelling thought. Lu says he’s seen firsthand how companies are getting creative, citing Clementine, a startup that went through Speedrun. The company “released a demo where you had to solve a mystery by talking to AI and making sure that they didn’t find out that you were a human,” he said.  That may be a ter

Built using cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques by SportsLine's Data Science team, AI Predictions and AI Ratings are generated for each game .  The AI predictions are determined by statistically learning from each team's historical data and then quantitatively evaluating the strength of the opponent's defense by assigning a numeric value out of 100 called a matchup score.  Once a prediction is formulated, the AI rating is generated using the prediction, the matchup score, and the odds of the market. For example, you could see an A-rating on an over bet if a team is facing a poor defense, their prediction differs from the line and there are favorable odds. In addition, SportsLine AI is the first fully automated predictive model at SportsLine. It continuously refreshes on the most recent available data and can help you spot the biggest discrepancies in the lines. Last season, SportsLine's AI PickBot hit a whopping 1,674 4.5- and 5-star p

Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, convicted fraudsters who became infamous for running inept smear campaigns against former President Donald Trump's political opponents, have secretly founded an artificial intelligence-centric lobbying form. And much like their other past ventures, reports Politico , it appears to already be a fiasco. As Politico documents, Wohl and Burkman adopted pseudonyms to found the firm LobbyMatic, a startup whose stated goal is to help companies use artificial intelligence [AI] to track legislative activity. The firm even snagged some big-name clients to sign up for its three-month trial program, including auto manufacturer Toyota, consulting firm Boundary Stone Partners, and drug company Lantheus. However, representatives for those firms said they did not continue using the service after their trials expired, and one went so far as to say the service simply did not work as advertised.