chat: AI news

 

"The AI industry should invest in frameworks that reward creators of all kinds for sharing valuable content.    "From YouTube to TikTok to X, tech platforms have proven they can administer novel rewards for distributed creators in complex content marketplaces. Indeed, fairer monetization of everyday content is a core objective of the web3 movement celebrated by venture capitalists.  "The same reasoning carries over to AI search. If queries yield lucrative engagement but users don’t click through to sources, commercial AI search platforms should find ways to attribute that value to creators and share it back at scale. "Of course, it’s possible that our digital economy was broken from the start. Subsistence on trickle-down ad revenue may be unsustainable, and the attention economy has inflicted real harm to privacy, integrity, and democracy online. Supporting quality news and fresh content may require other forms of investment or incentives.  "But we shouldn’t g...

"China has extended its dominance at home and abroad over critical minerals that are essential to future high-tech and renewable-energy industries.   "Amid intensifying geopolitical competition, Western countries are increasing their efforts to claw back market share while countries in the Global South, where many of these minerals are mined, are attempting to capitalize on growing global demand.  "A recent article on the subject by The Economist stated that in 2023 Chinese companies invested roughly $16 billion in foreign mines, the highest figure in a decade, up from less than $5 billion the year before.  "This month, Chinese companies have announced plans to invest billions of dollars in mines in Afghanistan, Ghana, Zambia, and the Philippines.   "Keith Bradsher at The New York Times reported that over the past few weeks, the Chinese government has enacted measures to increase its grip over the mining and refining of rare minerals within China by making i...

Llama 4 development is well underway, Zuckerberg told investors and analysts on an earnings call, with an initial launch expected early next year.   “We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s, or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the Nvidia chips popular for training AI systems. “I expect that the smaller Llama 4 models will be ready first.” Increasing the scale of AI training with more computing power and data is widely believed to be key to developing significantly more capable AI models.  While Meta appears to have the lead now, most of the big players in the field are likely working toward using compute clusters with more than 100,000 advanced chips.  On Wednesday, Zuckerberg declined to offer details on Llama 4’s potential advanced capabilities but vaguely referred to “new modalities,” “stronger reasoning,” and “much faster .” 

"Sophos analysts identified a series of hacking campaigns that had started with indiscriminate mass exploitation of its products but eventually became more stealthy and targeted, hitting   Nuclear energy suppliers and regulators,  Military targets including a military hospital,  Telecoms,  Government and  Intelligence agencies, and the  Airport of one national capital.  "While most of the targets —which Sophos declined to identify in greater detail —were in South and Southeast Asia, a smaller number were in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. "Sophos' report ties those multiple hacking campaigns —with varying levels of confidence —to Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups including those known as APT41, APT31, and Volt Typhoon, the latter of which is a particularly aggressive team that has sought the ability to disrupt critical infrastructure in the US, including power grids.  "But the common thread throughout those efforts to hack So...

"We find the reference to artificial intelligence (AI) in many documents and debates of the policy realm, assigning it a strong potential to contribute to all these domains.   "AI for the public interest, and its close relatives, AI for (common or social) good, have become a common theme not only for tech companies, but also for political actors in the EU, including for instance international NGO networks.  "However, most often the definition of the public interest in the best case is limited to references to AI ethics. Yet, the practical meaning of what a good use of AI and a purpose 'for good' entails in its development and implementation is unclear.   "What is often missing is an understanding that spells out in practice what it means for the process of development and deployment of AI systems to serve the public interest, let alone a holistic view on the conditions for AI to best serve the collective well-being."   

"Meta is 'working with the public sector to adopt Llama across the US government,' according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "The comment, made during his opening remarks for Meta’s Q3 earnings call on Wednesday, raises a lot of important questions:  Exactly which parts of the government will use Meta’s AI models?  What will the AI be used for?  Will there be any kind of military-specific applications of Llama?  Is Meta getting paid for any of this? "When I asked Meta to elaborate , spokesperson Faith Eischen told me via email that ' we’ve partnered with the US State Department to see how Llama could help address different challenges —from expanding access to safe water and reliable electricity, to helping support small businesses.'  "She also said the company has 'been in touch with the Department of Education to learn how Llama could help make the financial aid process more user friendly for students and are in discussions with others about how Llama ...

Google is building a bunch of AI products, and it’s using AI quite a bit as part of building those products, too.   “More than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers,” CEO Sundar Pichai said on the company’s third quarter 2024 earnings call. It’s a big milestone that marks just how important AI is to the company. AI is helping Google make money as well. Alphabet reported $88.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, with Google Services (which includes Search) revenue of $76.5 billion, up 13 percent year-over-year, and Google Cloud (which includes its AI infrastructure products for other companies) revenue of $11.4 billion, up 35 percent year-over-year. Operating incomes were also strong. Google Services hit $30.9 billion, up from $23.9 billion last year, and Google Cloud hit $1.95 billion, significantly up from last year’s $270 million. The results indicate that, while many people feel Google isn’t as reliable as it once was, t...

"This assignment invites undergraduate students to create spells , a poem based on a wish, and prompt an LLM to write a spell of its own, then reflect on their input and LLM output compared to their original compositions.   "Students analyzed the function of language and intent in manual and LLM composition, drawing together meaning and expression, and how LLM technology replicates or revises that expression.   "This assignment can be adapted to most rhetoric, composition, and cultural studies courses." 

The Open Source Initiative announced the release of what it’s calling a “stable version” of the Open Source AI Definition, which it says “ensures freedoms to use, study, share, and modify AI systems.”   The announcement was made on Monday morning at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh by Stefano Maffulli, OSI’s executive director.  The Definition defines the qualifications that must be present for an AI system to meet OSI approval, although it’s not clear yet whether OSI plans to launch an approval process for such software. “The co-design process that led to version 1.0 of the Open Source AI Definition was well-developed, thorough, inclusive and fair,” OSI’s chairperson, Carlo Piana, said in a statement. “It adhered to the principles laid out by the board, and the OSI leadership and staff followed our directives faithfully. The board is confident that the process has resulted in a definition that meets the standards of Open Source as defined in the Open Source Definitio...

Phones of Donald Trump, JD Vance and others were targeted in aggressive spying operation. A U.S. government panel plans to investigate how Chinese hackers breached several U.S. telecommunications networks , seeking to spy on prominent Americans, including former President Donald Trump and associates of Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. The probe by the Cyber Safety Review Board will examine the lapses that allowed the hackers, who are believed to be working for a Chinese intelligence agency, to orchestrate a series of intrusions that some Biden administration officials fear amount to a major espionage coup against the U.S. 

"We present a predictive and general approach to investigate near-field energy transfer processes between localized defects in semiconductors, which couples first-principles electronic structure calculations and a nonrelativistic quantum electrodynamics description of photons in the weak-coupling regime .  "The approach is general and can be readily applied to investigate broad classes of defects in solids.  "We apply our approach to investigate an exemplar point defect in an oxide, the F center in MgO, and we show that the energy transfer from a magnetic source, e.g., a rare-earth impurity, to the vacancy can lead to spin nonconserving long-lived excitations that are dominant processes in the near field, at distances relevant to the design of photonic devices and ultrahigh dense memories.   "We also define a descriptor for coherent energy transfer to predict geometrical configurations of emitters to enable long-lived excitations, that are useful to design optical ...

"Why does Google suddenly think that RandomGuy69 on Reddit is the expert on everything?   "Well, in early 2024, Google announced it had joined into a 60 million dollar a year partnership with Reddit.  "What sort of partnership? It was training its language model AI on Reddit’s API. Essentially, training its AI to answer questions by learning from Reddit users. Ohh, sneaky sneaky Google! How convenient, pumping tons of traffic into Reddit and then using it to try and win the AI 'space race.'  "And then, in the spring of 2024 Google rolled out its 'AI Overviews' at the top of search results. These AI answers took content from across the internet and regurgitated it, sometimes word for word. This led to some well-documented comedy, with Google’s AI suggesting that glue could keep cheese from sliding off of pizza, among other things.  "Well, everything hiccups occasionally, right? Especially in its infancy. I have no doubt that Google will refine it...

Some variants of Dijkstra’s algorithm have seen real-world use in software like Google Maps .  The new result probably won’t have such practical applications, for which there are many considerations beyond theoretical optimality guarantees. But it may change how researchers study optimality , prompting them to look beyond the usual worst-case analysis.  Often, algorithms only achieve stronger guarantees at the cost of added complexity.   The new result suggests that simple algorithms with these stronger guarantees might be more widespread than researchers previously thought —the team has already identified two other examples:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04552   https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14638 “The general concept is very compelling,” Tarjan said. “It remains to be seen how far one can take this.” 

"[Marcin] Pulit answered complaints about human job losses by claiming that 'no employee of Radio Kraków was fired.'  "Rather, OFF hosts were 'external collaborators' whose contracts were terminated, and 'not because of AI. '  "Pulit said that a lot of OFF radio's content overlapped with programmes on other Radio Kraków stations, and that 'the listenership range of OFF Radio Kraków was close to zero. This was the basis for the decision to make the change.' "[Mateusz] Demski then implored readers to sign a petition protesting the shift to AI and the threat it poses to journalism, which he had set up 'a little in helplessness, a little in anger.' It has received 16,000 signatures at the time of writing. "But wait, it gets worse. Like I said, the Gen-Z AI trio's gala debut consisted of an interview with none other than Wisława Szymborska, a world-renowned Polish poet and writer who won the 1996 Nobel prize in litera...

"We had two deadlines really close together and I just ran out of steam," says Hannah, a university student. "I felt incredibly stressed and just under enormous pressure to do well. I was really struggling and my brain had completely given up." In her desperation —and also suffering with Covid while facing the deadlines —she said she turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to help her write one of the essays. Hannah, not her real name , is now warning others about the potential consequences of using generative AI to cheat at university. 

OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have said that using internet data to train their AI systems meets the requirements of the "fair use” doctrine.   The doctrine has four factors. The companies argue that those factors — including that they substantially transformed the copyrighted works and were not competing in the same market with a direct substitute for those works —play in their favor. [Suchir] Balaji does not believe these criteria have been met. When a system like GPT-4 learns from data, he said, it makes a complete copy of that data. From there, a company like OpenAI can then teach the system to generate an exact copy of the data, or it can teach the system to generate text that is in no way a copy. The reality, he said, is that companies teach the systems to do something in between. "The outputs aren’t exact copies of the inputs, but they are also not fundamentally novel ,” he said. This week, he posted an essay on his personal website that included what he descr...

Newton-Rex told the newspaper [ Guardian ] that generative AI companies including his former employer Stability AI were using copyrighted contented (sic) to train their models without paying the original creators. "When AI companies call this 'training data,' they dehumanize it. What we're talking about is people's work —their writing, their art, their music," he said. Last year, authors including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George RR Martin sued OpenAI for "systematic theft on a mass scale." Hollywood stars including Pedro Pascal, Jane Fonda, and Mark Hamill last month backed a sweeping AI safety bill in California that was ultimately vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom.  Among other famous signatories to Monday's  statement  were Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, author James Patterson, and actor Kevin Bacon. Other artists have chosen to collaborate with AI: Facebook owner Meta last week announced that Hollywood actor Casey Affleck and horror studio...

Theories and Methodologies °°° AI and the University as a Service Matthew Kirschenbaum, Rita Raley 08 October 2024, pp. 504-515 °°° Untimely Models Holly Dugan, Dolsy Smith 08 October 2024, pp. 516-521 °°° Large Language Games, Therapeutic or Otherwise Junting Huang 08 October 2024, pp. 522-526 °°° AI and the Everyday Writer Timothy Laquintano, Annette Vee 08 October 2024, pp. 527-532 °°° Critical AI Studies and the Foreign Language Disciplines: What Is to Be Done? Eduardo Ledesma 08 October 2024, pp. 533-540 °°° Command Lines for the Humanities Meredith Martin 08 October 2024, pp. 541-547 °°° Generative Theories, Pretrained Responses: Large AI Models and the Humanities Seth Perlow 08 October 2024, pp. 548-552 °°° Inside and outside the Language Machines Aarthi Vadde 08 October 2024,, pp. 553-558 °°° A(I) University in Ruins: What Remains in a World with Large Language Models? Katherine Elkins 08 October 2024,, pp. 559-565 °°° "PMLA is the journal of the Modern Language Associatio...

"We apply novel analyses to the behavior of classical sorting algorithms —short pieces of code studied for many decades.   "To study these sorting algorithms as a model of biological morphogenesis and its competencies, we break two formerly ubiquitous assumptions: top-down control (instead, each element within an array of numbers can exert minimal agency and implement sorting policies from the bottom up), and fully reliable hardware (instead, allowing elements to be 'damaged' and fail to execute the algorithm).  "We quantitatively characterize sorting activity as traversal of a problem space, showing that arrays of autonomous elements sort themselves more reliably and robustly than traditional implementations in the presence of errors.  'Moreover, we find the ability to temporarily reduce progress in order to navigate around a defect, and unexpected clustering behavior among elements in chimeric arrays consisting of two different algorithms."

"What should we be watching for?   "First, AI systems that rely less on centralized control and more on decentralized, emergent behavior —where individual agents or components interact and process information locally.  "Second, AI that adapts continuously, evolving not only its outputs but its own structure in response to environmental feedback, much like Blaise’s self-replicating programs .  "These are the features that will indicate AI moving closer to life-like behavior —systems that don’t just follow instructions but evolve and learn dynamically, exhibiting the traits of autonomous , living systems."

"In this paper we take a step towards understanding how self-replicators arise by studying several computational substrates based on various simple programming languages and machine instruction sets: We show that when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise.  We demonstrate how this occurs due to random interactions and self-modification, and can happen with and without background random mutations.  We also show how increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators.  Finally, we show a counterexample of a minimalistic programming language where self-replicators are possible, but so far have not been observed to arise.  'The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of 'pre-life' dynamics.  "One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked sh...

Researchers from the robotics laboratory at the University of Bristol in England have tested their new teleoperations system at the European Space Agency's (ESA) European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications at Harwell in Oxfordshire.   By controlling a virtual simulation of a rover, they were able to manipulate a robotic arm to dig a sample of pretend lunar regolith (called simulant ).  The process negates the need for camera feeds, which can lag because of the 1.3-second time delay between Earth and the moon.  The signals between the teleoperators and robotic missions on the moon could in future be relayed by satellites belonging to ESA's planned Moonlight project. "This simulation could… help us operate lunar robots remotely from Earth, avoiding the problem of signal delays," said Bristol's Joe Louca in a statement. 

"So for all that investment, did any AI startups really make much money? Probably not. "The AI companies have a few glaring issues: The technology doesn’t… work. Generative AI doesn’t do any of what they claim for it. Generative AI is ridiculously expensive. All of these companies are burning VC cash and not making a profit. End users loathe generative AI with the fire of a thousand suns. "AI startups can’t make a profit selling a product —especially not a product that will let businesses fire most of their employees. This is only a dream. "Offloading the AI startups onto public markets, an acquirer, or some other sucker is going to get dicier ." 

"We identified 260 out of 942 immunologically relevant proteins in plasma that were differentially expressed in individuals with an infection history .  "Of the infection-related proteins, 35 predicted volumetric changes in brain regions vulnerable to infection-specific atrophy. Several of these proteins, including PIK3CG, PACSIN2, and PRKCB, were related to cognitive decline and plasma biomarkers of dementia (Aβ42/40, GFAP, NfL, pTau-181).  "Genetic variants that influenced expression of immunologically relevant infection-related proteins, including ITGB6 and TLR5, predicted brain volume loss.  "Our findings support the role of infections in dementia risk and identify molecular mediators by which infections may contribute to neurodegeneration."

ByteDance also denied reports that the incident caused more than $10m of damage by disrupting an AI training system made up of thousands of powerful graphics processing units (GPU). Aside from firing the person [intern] in August, ByteDance said it had informed the intern's university and industry bodies about the incident. ByteDance operates some of the world's most popular social media apps, including TikTok and its Chinese-equivalent Douyin. It is widely seen as a leader when it comes to algorithm development due to how appealing its apps are to users. Like many of its peers in China and around the world, the social media giant is investing heavily in AI. 

"This work describes a reversible cohesive interface made of thermoplastic elastomer that allows for strong attachment and easy detachment of distributed soft robot modules without direct human handling .  "The reversible joint boasts a modulus similar to materials commonly used in soft robotics, and can thus be distributed throughout soft robot bodies without introducing mechanical incongruities.  " To demonstrate utility, the reversible joint is implemented in two embodiments: a soft quadruped robot that self-amputates a limb when stuck, and a cluster of three soft-crawling robots that fuse to cross a land gap.   "This work points toward future robots capable of radical shape-shifting via changes in mass through autotomy and interfusion, as well as highlights the crucial role that interfacial stiffness change plays in autotomizable biological and artificial systems." 

Artemis astronauts will aspire to do things humans haven’t done before, like building a habitable base to allow for long-term visits and exploring the heavily cratered lunar south pole. Innovators across the world are working on solutions to help them achieve their goals, and to keep them safe.  That includes researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who are developing a set of wearable robotic limbs to help astronauts recover from falls. The so-called SuperLimbs  are designed to extend from a backpack containing the astronauts’ life support system. When the wearer falls over, an extra pair of limbs can extend out to provide leverage to help them stand, conserving energy for other tasks. That could come in handy.   The moon’s partial gravity makes maintaining balance tricky. The 12 astronauts who moonwalked on Apollo missions fell 27 times and had another 21 near misses, according to a University of Michigan study . 

Thirty years or so ago, I, a huge cock of aches moved from Florida to Georgia. I was surprised to see that Georgians used pine needles for garden mulch instead of the cypress mulch we used in Florida. As a huge cock of aches, I enjoy cypress mulch because I can hide easily. I know folks in Georgia are uneasy around huge, Florida cock of aches, but Georgians do provide that pine needle mulch to keep their chiggers moist.

China-based autonomous driving firm Pony AI, backed by carmaker Toyota, filed for an initial public offering in the US on Thursday, in another sign of growing investor interest in new listings and easing regulatory pressures. Activity in the IPO market has picked up pace in recent weeks, buoyed by the US Federal Reserve kicking off its highly anticipated policy-easing cycle and benchmark indexes trading near record high levels. Pony AI, in which Japan’s Toyota owns a 13.4 per cent stake, revealed that its revenue nearly doubled to US$24.7 million in the first half of 2024. Net loss attributable to the company was US$51.3 million in the same period, compared with US$69.4 million last year. The company said it operates a fleet of over 250 robotaxis , which have accumulated over 33.5 million kilometres of autonomous driving mileage, including over 3.9 million kilometres of driverless mileage. 

Blockchain-based identity verification company Worldcoin has dropped the “coin” from its identity and is now called “World.”  Company founder Sam Altman announced the rebranding during a keynote speech on Oct. 17. World, as it’s now known, also revealed a slew of other updates including a new version of its Orb biometric scanning devices, new options for identity verification and partnership integrations with popular apps including FaceTime, WhatsApp, and Zoom.

AWS CEO Matt Garman has harsh words for remote workers: return to the office or quit.   The Amazon executive recently told employees who don’t like the new five-day in-person work policy that, “there are other companies around,” presumably companies they can work for remotely, Reuters reported on Thursday. Amazon’s top boss , Andy Jassy, told employees last month that there will be a full return-to-office starting in 2025, an increase from three days for roughly the last year.

"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 o...

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 ...

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 chemist...

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 f...

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 b...

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 thi...

"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 orig...

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 p...

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. Russi...