chat: AI news

"Google just added a new customization tool for the viral AI podcasts in its NotebookLM software.   "I got early access and tested it out using Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as the source material, spending a few hours generating podcasts about the seminal novella —some of them more unhinged than others. "Released by Google Labs in 2023 as an experimental, AI-focused writing tool, NotebookLM has been enjoying a resurgence in user interest since early September, when the developers added an option to generate podcast-like conversations between two AI voices —one male-sounding and one female-sounding —from uploaded documents.  "While these audio 'deep dives' can be used for studying and productivity, many of the viral clips online focused on the entertainment factor of asking robot hosts to discuss bizarre or highly personal source documents, like a LinkedIn profile. "Raiza Martin, who leads the NotebookLM team inside of Google Labs, is pumped to give

After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer —and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”   Earlier this month, Mullenweg posed an “Alignment Offer” to all of his employees: Stand with him through a messy legal drama that’s still unfolding, or leave.  “It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” he wrote on his personal blog on Oct. 3, referring to the ongoing dispute between himself and website hosting platform WP Engine, which Mullenweg called a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem.  In the last month, he and WP Engine have volleyed cease and desist letters, and WP Engine is now suing Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of extortion and abuse of power.

On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its Privacy Policy to indicate that it would allow third-party “collaborators” to train their AI models on X data, unless users opt out.   While X owner Elon Musk trained xAI’s Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by the EU’s lead privacy regulator, the company hadn’t yet amended its policy to indicate its data may also be used by third parties. The addition to the policy implies that X, like Reddit and various media organizations, is looking into licensing data to AI companies as a potential new revenue stream . 

"I wrote a while ago that the era of major levels of affiliate revenue for publishers was going to come to an end within the next three to five years.  "Generative AI writing means both that Google is likely to become a sea of slop, and that anyone with a search engine —especially Google —is going to cream off the best quality search results for itself. "Amazon is taking this a step further by using generative AI to do product recommendations on site. Given that a large number of searches for products begin on Amazon anyway, this is more bad news for anyone who makes money from sending traffic towards the Seattle company.  "And as users get more and more exposed to using conversation to hone down what they want, this is going to get worse for publishers who focus on 'an article' as the canonical way of recommending products. "The truth is that articles have never been brilliant at recommending the right solution for any individual.   "For example,

"Impulse will provide its highly-maneuverable Mira vehicle to Anduril, allowing the two companies to move rapidly in pursuit of complex national security missions.   "Impulse Space will also onboard Mira into Lattice, Anduril’s AI-enabled software platform, to enable autonomous monitoring and mission management.   "Lattice will allow a single operator to control, task, and maneuver multiple spacecraft simultaneously, [henceforth] accelerating in-space mobility for national security customers, and [thereby] enhancing responsiveness in increasingly contested orbital environments, including geostationary Earth orbit (GEO).  "As the world enters a new era of strategic competition, Anduril is committed to bringing  Cutting-edge AI,  Computer vision,  Sensor fusion, and  Networking technology  to the military in months, not years."

"Why do people fall for online conspiracy theories, and what happens when disinformation shapes real-world events? "On this episode, Lucy Hockings is joined by the BBC's disinformation and social media correspondent, Marianna Spring, to explore how conspiracy theories and the rise of AI could shape the upcoming election in the United States.   "They discuss the role disinformation played in the 2020 vote, leading to real-world consequences, and how these conspiracies continue to undermine the US election system today.  "They also examine the growing influence of AI in generating and spreading false narratives, and what this could mean for the upcoming presidential race." 

Brian Krzanich's return to the CEO lounge has gone down like a lead balloon.   The former Intel boss, who famously resigned after a highly publicized relationship with a subordinate, not to mention a botched 10nm chip rollout, has landed himself a new job at AI-driven automotive startup Cerence. Yet rather than giving Cerence a pat on the back for the big name hire, the appointment of Brian has triggered backlash so fierce that Cerence opted for the nuclear option: disabling all comments on LinkedIn to stop the torrent of criticism over his recruitment. For anyone who followed Intel's stumbles over the past decade, Krzanich's name still rings with the unmistakable clang of bad management decisions and missed opportunities.  While he was overseeing Intel, the company's long-standing domination in the semiconductor market started to unravel. Perhaps the biggest fumble of his tenure at Chipzilla was its catastrophic 10nm process delays, a foible that saw Intel miss critic

"Mammalian photoreceptors aggregate numerous mitochondria, organelles chiefly for energy production, in the ellipsoid region immediately adjacent to the light-sensitive outer segment to support the high metabolic demands of phototransduction.   "However, these complex, lipid-rich organelles are also poised to affect light passage into the outer segment.   "Here, we show, via live imaging and simulations, that despite this risk of light scattering or absorption, these tightly packed mitochondria 'focus' light for entry into the outer segment and that mitochondrial remodeling affects such light concentration.  "This 'microlens'-like feature of cone mitochondria delivers light with an angular dependence akin to the Stiles-Crawford effect (SCE), providing a simple explanation for this essential visual phenomenon that improves resolution.  "This new insight into the optical role of mitochondria is relevant for the interpretation of clinical ophthalm

23andMe makes it easy to feel like you’ve protected your genetic footprint.   In their account settings, customers can download versions of their data to a computer and choose to delete the data attached to their 23andMe profile.  An email then arrives with a big pink button: “Permanently Delete All Records.”  Doing so, it promises, will “terminate your relationship with 23andMe and irreversibly delete your account and Personal Information.” But there’s another clause in the email that conflicts with that “terminate” promise.  It says 23andMe and whichever contracted genotyping laboratory worked on a customer’s samples will still hold on to the customer’s sex, date of birth and genetic information, even after they’re “deleted.”   The reason?  The company cites “legal obligations,” including federal laboratory regulations and California lab rules. 

"In physics, there are certain quantities in the mathematical description of a phase transition that we call order parameters .  "They allow you to understand what the phase transition is actually about. This allowed us to understand that magnetism is about atoms aligning: In one phase, the overall alignment is big, and in the other (nonmagnetic) phase, there is no alignment. "That’s the beautiful thing that appeared in our mathematical description of the language models. There were two order parameters, each with a precise meaning. One determined if the learning that happens relies a lot on the position of the words in the sentence. The other order parameter was specifically about the meaning of each word, the semantics. "And when we looked at the phase transition, we found that below a certain threshold of training examples, only the position mattered —not the semantics. And if we had more examples above that threshold, it was only the semantics that mattered. So,

"I think we’re just at the beginning of the revolution that machine learning is going to bring about in cancer biology and in medicine .  "And there are extremely powerful tools that we can use. And the applicability of those tools, of course, depends on the question that you want to ask. There’s lots of prediction tasks that are quite amenable to machine learning approaches.  "For instance, in radiology, right? If you are trying to identify which speckle on a CT scan or an MRI actually are tumor versus maybe something else, maybe a bile duct, maybe some other structure. There’s extreme talent that radiologists have, and experience, that they have to deploy in order to accurately disentangle all of these different structures. But maybe that can be aided by machine learning approaches that are trained on large enough, gold-standard labeled data sets, such that maybe later on we can do this automatically.  "We’re not quite there yet, but I think a lot of progress has

I feel as though my phone is spamming me.  I don't think that's the AI/assistant experience google is shooting for…  But, hey, what do I know… 

Keep thinking       I've turned all     the AI stuff off,            but it                       l  i  n  g  e   r   s  .  .  .

One utility in Ohio has proposed a requirement that data centers commit to 10-year service contracts requiring them to pay at least 90% of the cost of the electricity they ask for, regardless of whether the data centers end up using that much power .   AEP Ohio says it has received service inquiries from data centers totaling 30 gigawatts of new power demand, and that serving all those new data centers would require a massive investment in expensive transmission lines.   The utility wants to ensure other ratepayers aren’t stuck with the bill  If the data centers leave town,  If the AI boom goes bust, or  If technological breakthroughs reduce the amount of energy they need.  The data center industry is apoplectic , but other utilities and their regulators are watching closely to see if this is a requirement they should adopt, too.  This includes Virginia’s State Corporation Commission, which on October 2 announced plans for a technical conference on data centers to discuss “issues relat

Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov said on Friday that AI-enabled drones were playing a key role on the battlefield in Ukraine and urged more training for troops on how to use them. Belousov's ministry published video of him touring a centre for next-generation drone technologies and speaking with drone operators. One soldier showed Belousov a simulation of a drone equipped with AI-powered automatic image recognition attacking a small boat on a river.

Canon hopes to start shipments of new low-cost chip-making machines as early as this year, as the Japanese company best known for its cameras and printers tries to undercut longtime industry leader ASML in providing the tools to make leading-edge semiconductors. The challenge from Canon comes as Western governments attempt to restrict China’s access to the most advanced semiconductor technologies and as global demand for chipmaking machines has soared.  If successful, Canon’s nanoimprint  technology could give back Japanese manufacturers some of the edge they ceded to rivals in South Korea, Taiwan and, increasingly, China over the past three decades.

The Nobel Assembly, the award-giving body, said in a statement that the laureates discovered a new class of tiny RNA molecules, which play a crucial role in gene regulation .  "Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans," the assembly said. Also speaking to Reuters, Ambros described microRNA as a "Communication network amongst genes that enables the cells in our bodies to generate all kinds of different complex structures and functions". 

While it’s almost impossible to protect yourself from the predatory market for private data, one can try, especially for things like genetic data, which may be used to limit your future access to healthcare or insurance .   This week, the genetic testing company 23 and Me offers an example of how hard getting personal data deleted can be. To be clear 23 and Me as a company isn’t and may never have done anything wrong in any legal sense.   What they have done is collected the genetic information of millions of people and then stumbled towards bankruptcy. 23 and Me ’s hoard of genetic data is likely their most valuable asset —and it will be sold if it can be. Customers concerned that their personal genetic information could be sold might think they can demand that information deleted under laws like the GDPR or California Consumer Privacy Act and may have the impression that it’s fairly a simple process where 23 and Me will have to honor your request. It seems like they won’t. At leas

The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry recognized Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker for using machine learning to tackle one of biology’s biggest challenges: Predicting the 3D shape of proteins and designing them from scratch. This year’s award stood out because it honored research that originated at a tech company: DeepMind, an AI research startup that was acquired by Google in 2014. Most previous chemistry Nobel Prizes have gone to researchers in academia.  Many laureates went on to form startup companies to further expand and commercialize their groundbreaking work —for instance, CRISPR gene-editing technology and quantum dots —but the research, from start to end, wasn’t done in the commercial sphere. Although the Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry are awarded separately, there is a fascinating connection between the winning research in those fields in 2024. The physics award went to two computer scientists who laid the foundations for machine learning, while the chemistry l

If my brain transforms what my eyeballs see, then why isn't there an unblur function?  Like, HDR effect might help, here? But, nooooooooo, brain says, "Can't have!"

The Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to two researchers for their groundbreaking work on machines that learn. John Hopfield at Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto were honoured for their pioneering work on artificial neural networks which underlie much of modern artificial intelligence. Announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, the winners share 11m Swedish kronor (about £810,000). The Nobel committee said the prize was given “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. 

"When I use a calculator to tell me that 245 × 46 = 11,270, I learn something that I didn’t know before, even though calculators don’t have any beliefs or knowledge .  "Even small children know how to count things, and it is through our own capacity to enumerate and count things that we learn basic arithmetic.  "Calculators do not count things in any sense like we do, yet we can use them to learn arithmetic facts. "Calculators are one a simple example of the growing phenomenon of meaning at the boundary between humans and machines.   "In this talk I’ll draw out some lessons from recent work using computers to augment human reasoning to help us clarify what we are doing when we’re making claims about the world and trying to reason about them."

"Quantum computations happen in this universe, not the multiverse .  "But the media, always on the hunt for tantalizing stories, grabbed onto this narrative, creating a feedback loop.  "The more the idea was mentioned, the more ingrained it became in public consciousness. Over time, the concept of many worlds became intertwined with quantum computing in popular discourse , leading to the prevalent yet misconstrued belief that quantum computers work by operating simultaneously across parallel universes. "The portrayal of quantum computing as a magical tool that can solve all problems by computing in multiple universes can lead to misunderstandings and inflated expectations.  "It’s crucial to separate the fascinating yet speculative ideas about the nature of reality from the actual, proven capabilities of quantum computers." 

Ryssdal : I do want to get to, I think it’s the subhead of this piece. “You can’t spell CIA without AI,” you write. [Artificial intelligence] figures very prominently in what In-Q-Tel is looking at. Keegan : Yes, it’s actually the largest category of companies that they’re investing in right now. Unlike the CIA, which has, you know, opaque financials, In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit, so their tax returns are public, and they share quite a bit on their website about the portfolio of companies they invest in. So looking at their website, you can get a sense of some of the different applications within AI that they are looking at. They do a lot of AI infrastructure and hosting companies, so these would be companies like Databricks, where you can host these tools or train AI models. But then also a lot of companies that are involved in geospatial and remote sensing. This could be a satellite company that can identify the number of cars in a parking lot at a shopping mall or shipping containers mo

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says it's time for us to fully invest in AI infrastructure because climate goals are too lofty to reach anyway. The AI boom has spurred a wave of spending on data centers, which provide the computational power needed to train and run AI models. But the surge in development comes at a price, as data centers consume huge amounts of natural resources. According to McKinsey, data centers are expected to consume 35 gigawatts of power annually by 2030, up from 17 gigawatts last year. The Biden administration set an ambitious target for the power sector to be carbon-neutral by 2035 and for the US economy to be net zero by 2050.  But AI's dramatic need for energy has pushed some AI execs to turn to fossil fuels, which could threaten those net-zero goals. Schmidt's comments came at an AI summit in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, where he addressed the crowd and gave his thoughts on the future of artificial intelligence. 

Sean’s office is on a busy street near the centre of Brisbane, with passers-by giving me strange looks as I hold my phone to the sky. Soon, his device —helpfully labelled ECOVACS  —pops up on my phone. And we’re in business.  Upstairs, Sean is making himself a cup of coffee. These photos of him start being streamed to my laptop, in real time. As his robot starts moving around the room to clean, Sean’s face is caught in the shot. It passes his ankles as he leans against the counter, doing its best to navigate the unfamiliar office kitchen. The robot fails to play its ‘camera recording’ warning sound —that only seems to play if the camera is accessed through the Ecovacs app. When we peer through after hacking in remotely, those in the room get no warning they’re being watched. Then again, Sean probably expects me to be watching him; he did consent to it less than an hour ago. But what he doesn’t know is we’d built in a secret function for our demonstration. And when the moment feels righ

Brazil's Supreme Court said on Friday that lawyers representing social media platform X did not pay pending fines to the proper bank, postponing its decision on whether to allow the tech firm to resume services in Brazil. The payment of the fines, which X lawyers argued that the company had paid correctly, is the only outstanding measure demanded by the court in order to authorize X to operate again in Brazil. X has been suspended since late August in Brazil, one of its largest and most coveted markets, after not complying with court orders related to hate speech moderation and failing to name a legal representative in the country, as required by law. Earlier on Friday, X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, filed a fresh request to have its services restored in Brazil, saying it had paid all pending fines. In response to the request, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes requested the payment to be transferred to the right bank . 

In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play .  Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun . The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited today [April 19, 2024], buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before.  For decades, there’s been a broad agreement among scientists that animals similar to us —the great apes, for example —have conscious experience, even if their consciousness differs from our own.  In recent years, however, researchers have begun to acknow

The debate over AI’s impact on art is hitting dance floors in Berlin, where DJ veteran Christian Becker keeps the crowd grooving at a trendy bar, manually transitioning between indie throwbacks and electronic tracks. Within the city’s iconic and diverse club scene —best known globally for its techno culture and industrial raves —the reception and adoption of AI among professional DJs is mixed.  Some find the tools harmless and helpful, while others question whether AI has a place in the DJ booth.  It’s part of a broader debate among artists, musicians, filmmakers, and authors on what role the technology should have, if any, in the creative process. “It wouldn’t work,” Becker, a 33-year-veteran and co-owner of Bohnengold in the buzzy Kreuzberg district, said while taking a break from his set on a recent Saturday night. “Because you’re connecting with the people … you have to watch the people, how they dance.”

Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them." In a Google document , AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases.   They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to  Dox someone in a glance or  Surface information to scam someone in seconds —or  Other nefarious uses, such as "Some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media . In their Google document , Nguyen and Ardayfio provide instructions for people to remove their faces from reverse face search engines like

After fifteen years of fighting to make the web safer and more accessible, the World Wide Web Foundation is shutting down. In a letter [ PDF ] shared via the organization's website, co-founders Sir Tim Berners-Lee —inventor of the World Wide Web —and Rosemary Leith explain that the organization's mission has been somewhat accomplished and a new battle needs to be waged. When the foundation was founded in 2009, just over 20 percent of the world had access to the web and relatively few organizations were trying to change that, say Sir Tim and Leith.  A decade and a half later, with nearly 70 percent of the world online, there are many similar non-governmental organizations [NGOs] trying to make the web more accessible and affordable. The two founders thank their supporters over the years who "have enabled us to move the needle in a big way" with regard to access and affordability. But the issues facing the web have changed, they insist, and the foundation believes othe

OpenAI just became one of the highest-valued privately held companies with its latest funding round, but it has a lot to live up to, amid ever-increasing competition. On Wednesday, the creator of ChatGPT said in a blog post that it raised $6.6 billion in new funding at a whopping valuation of $157 billion to “accelerate progress toward its mission.”  OpenAI did not specify its investors, but the Wall Street Journal reported that the round was led by venture-capital firm Thrive Capital, current investors such as Microsoft Corp. MSFT and new investors including Softbank Group Corp. 9984 and chip giant Nvidia Corp. NVDA . At that valuation, OpenAI is worth more than 87% of the S&P 500 SPX companies.  It makes OpenAI among the highest-valued private companies in the world, along with SpaceX, which is currently valued at $201 billion, and TikTok. At the start of last year, according to Forge Global’s secondary-market trading data, OpenAI was valued at $29 billion. Before this round,

"OpenAI's value surges to $157bn in funding deal where the maker of ChatGPT raised $6.6bn from a pool of investors that include Microsoft.   "We also hear from North Carolina, where damages caused by hurricane Helene could have serious implications for the tech-industry.  "Andrew Peach discusses these and more business stories with two guests on opposite sides of the world: Walter Todd, Chief Investment Officer at Greenwood Capital in California, and Stefanie Yuen Thio, Joint Managing Partner at TSMP Law in Singapore." 

Y Combinator startup named PearAI launched with an X post thread and YouTube video on Saturday and created immediate controversy. And some of that is splashing onto YC [Y Combinator] itself. PearAI offers an AI coding editor.   The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT . Changing a license like this is a big deal in the open source world. Not only are there legalities involved in violating a software license, but it defeats the whole purpose of open source, which is about   Community building, Sharing, and  Contributing.  In an apology PearAI’s Pan posted on Monday, he said that the project has now been released under the same Apache open source license as the original project. The launch thre

Cheng : I think sometimes people accuse math of not being real because mathematicians have just kind of made it up. And they say that like it’s a bad thing. But I want to say that’s a great thing. Isn’t that amazing? So it’s like language: Is language real? Well, it’s just something humans made up to communicate about the world around us. We just invented it, but it works. It enables us to communicate amazing things. The fact that it’s made-up makes it particularly powerful because we can keep making up more of it, and we’ll never run out of it as long as our brains don’t run out of imagination. You know, with other stuff we invent, we run out of resources. We run out of money. We have to spend money buying equipment. We have to bug somebody else to give us money for things. Not with abstract math —it’s only limited by our imagination.  Santos : So we may not have a total consensus on the exact nature of math. But whatever it is, we can all agree that math works. We can use it to predi

Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, the community of Spruce Pine, population 2,194, is known for its hiking, local artists, and as America’s sole source of high-purity quartz.  Helene dumped more than 2 feet of rain on the town, destroying roads, shops, and cutting power and water. But its reach will likely be felt far beyond the small community. Semiconductors are the brains of every computer-chip-enabled device, and solar panels are a key part of the global push to combat climate change.  To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean .  One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz. Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine. “As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also s