chat: AI news

"Knowledge discovery from data typically includes solving some type of an optimization problem that can be efficiently addressed using algorithms belonging to the class of evolutionary and bio-inspired computation .  "In this chapter, we give an overview of the various kinds of evolutionary algorithms, such as genetic algorithms, evolutionary strategy, evolutionary and genetic programming, differential evolution, and coevolutionary algorithms, as well as several other bio-inspired approaches, like swarm intelligence and artificial immune systems.  "After elaborating on the methodology, we provide numerous examples of applications in astronomy and geoscience and show how these algorithms can be applied within a distributed environment, by making use of parallel computing, which is essential when dealing with Big Data."

"While conventional recommendation algorithms usually prioritize optimizing a single objective, it is now evident that considering additional metrics is crucial for improving the overall user experience .  "Despite the importance of considering multiple objectives, conventional recommendation models face the challenge of balancing these objectives, which can sometimes conflict with each other. To tackle this challenge, there is a growing interest in multi-objective recommender systems (MORS) that consider multiple objectives simultaneously and provide a more personalized and varied set of recommendations.  "MORS can optimize recommendations based on various metrics, including accuracy, diversity, novelty, and user satisfaction, leading to more efficient and personalized recommendation systems.  "The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic review study to assess the current state of research in the field of MORS and identify potential avenues for future ex...

"Swarm intelligence is a subfield of AI that draws inspiration from the collective behavior of social insects, such as ants, bees, and termites .  "These creatures can accomplish complex tasks, such as finding food or building intricate nests, through decentralized control and simple individual interactions.  "Similarly, swarm intelligence in AI involves the coordination of separate units (like drones, satellites or spacecraft) that work together to achieve common goals without the need for a central authority. "In essence, swarm intelligence enables a group of autonomous agents to act as a cohesive unit, sharing information and making collective decisions in real time.  "This approach leverages decentralized control, automation and self-organization —fundamental principles that make swarm intelligence efficient, highly scalable and resilient.  "One idea a colleague shared with me to enable a swarm:  "They need to  Collaborate,  Communicate (APIs) an...

The Biden administration on Friday hosted telco execs to chat about China's recent attacks on the sector, amid revelations that US networks may need mass rebuilds to recover. Details of the extent of China's attacks came from senator Mark R Warner, who on Thursday gave both The Washington Post and The New York Times insights into info he's learned in his role as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Warner told the Post, "my hair is on fire," given the severity of China's attacks on US telcos.  The attacks, which started well before the US election, have seen Middle Kingdom operatives establish a persistent presence —and may require the replacement of "literally thousands and thousands and thousands" of switches and routers.

"Last September, Amazon and Anthropic announced a strategic collaboration, which included Anthropic naming Amazon Web Services (AWS) its primary cloud provider and Amazon making a $4 billion investment in Anthropic.  "That announcement was underpinned by the rapid adoption of the Claude family of models on AWS, following its addition to Amazon Bedrock in April of last year.  "Today [11/22/2024], Amazon and Anthropic are deepening their collaboration. Anthropic is now naming AWS its primary training partner, in addition to continuing to be its primary cloud provider, and will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models .  "Both companies will continue to work closely to keep advancing Trainium's hardware and software capabilities. "This next phase of the collaboration will even further enhance the already premium performance, security, and privacy Amazon Bedrock provides for customers running Claude models.  "A...

"At KubeCon North America, SUSE announced a significant rebranding effort, several new product offerings, and the launch of SUSE AI, a secure platform for deploying and running generative AI (gen AI) applications .  "SUSE has renamed its entire portfolio to make product names more descriptive and customer-friendly. Notable changes include: Rancher, SUSE's Kubernetes offering, is now SUSE Rancher. Liberty Linux, the company's Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)/CentOS clone and support offering, becomes SUSE Multi Linux Support. Harvester is rebranded as SUSE Virtualization. Longhorn is now SUSE Storage. "While Rancher is a well-known Kubernetes management service and program, nothing about the name said "SUSE." The others had even less of a connection with the parent company. Besides, when I say Harvester or Longhorn, do you think virtualization and storage?"

"Leading technology companies are dramatically expanding their AI capabilities by building multibillion-dollar 'super clusters' packed with unprecedented numbers of Nvidia's AI processors .  "Elon Musk's xAI recently constructed Colossus, a supercomputer containing 100,000 Nvidia Hopper chips, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims his company operates an even larger system for training advanced AI models.  "The push toward massive chip clusters has helped drive Nvidia's quarterly revenue from $7 billion to over $35 billion in two years, making it the world's most valuable public company. "Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a call with analysts following its earnings Wednesday that there was still plenty of room for so-called AI foundation models to improve with larger-scale computing setups.  "He predicted continued investment as the company transitions to its next-generation AI chips, called Blackwell, which are several times ...

"Mathematicians have to be radically honest about what they don’t understand and what they think .  "That might help them see, for example, that an object is defined the wrong way. Or that a different definition will make a theory simpler. Or that this is not the important notion, that one is. "There’s something about honesty, about being radically candid, about trying to find ways to articulate what you really feel —it’s super hard. It takes practice. "When you do math, you’re exposed to the human thought process in a way that is really pure. It’s not just about understanding things, but about understanding things in a very childish, deep, naïve , super clear, obvious way. It’s very good training for creativity. It’s a scaffold for your imagination. "When I look at my own life, and the way I managed to overcome personal challenges, I realize that my ability to think in a mathematical way helped. From an emotional standpoint, we all need math."

"I think sign language is a language. It’s a form of learned communication that involves movement, but not the movement of the larynx. "Although, I wanted my colleagues to separate out the difference between moving the oral musculature and signing to try to pull apart what’s going on in the brain with those two behaviors.  "When I talk to people who study sign language, they say it’s almost impossible. It’s hard to not move the mouth and sign at the same time. And so I think because of that, there is a connection behaviorally and evolutionarily in speech and signing in humans. "What’s interesting is when you teach gorillas and chimpanzees to sign, I don’t see good evidence that they’re moving their oral musculature. And so in them, maybe it’s not as connected, evolutionarily —but in humans, it is. But that would mean that the oral movement part in humans came after the signing. And why might that be the case? "It goes back to what I was saying earlier, the brai...

“I think the industrial base requires implementing software and robotics into our factories to solve these supply chain issues and, frankly, compete globally,” he [CEO Blake Herren] said. Beyond hypersonics and rockets, the company has also had conversations with autonomous systems providers, satellite manufacturers, and space propulsion companies.  Earlier this week, the company announced it was partnering with reentry capsule developer SpaceWorks to develop 3D-printed reentry vehicle aeroshells —the structure that encapsulates the spacecraft and provides the thermal protection —to enable the DOD to test hypersonic tech. The tech is still early, in that there are still tech challenges involved with scaling it to print larger structures, Herren admits, but “once it’s fully developed, I see this as changing the way we make large-scale composites.”   “It’s going to take some capital and time to scale up to the very large systems that this can be used for … But right now, it’s s...

Due to popular demand, here is a list of the fedi-services that are part of the infosec.* family: 1 - https://infosec.exchange - Glitch-soc fork of Mastodon (this instance does not block threads.net) 2 - https://relay.infosec.exchange - Activitypub relay 3 - https://video.infosec.exchange - Peertube instance (like youtube) 4 - https://infosec.press - WriteFreely blog* 5 - https://pixel.infosec.exchange - Pixelfed instance (like instagram) 6 - https://matrix.infosec.exchange - Synapse (with sliding sync) homeserver* 7 - https://infosec.place - Akkoma instance (like mastodon) 8 - https://infosec.town - iceshrimp instance (like mastodon) 9 - https://infosec.pub - Lemmy instance (like reddit) 10 - https://fedia.io - General interest mbin instance (also like reddit) 11 - https://fedia.social - General interst Iceshrimp instance 12 - https://elk.infosec.exchange - Elk web interface for Mastodon 13 - https://books.infosec.exchange - Bookworym instance (like goodreads...

Some theories compare the brain to a computer, with neurons as stand-ins for transistors. Other theories believe the brain to be non-algorithmic, and that consciousness perhaps has a quantum quality. But one theory in particular is gaining some experimental traction as of late. It explores how human consciousness could be explained through the electromagnetic fields — known as “ephaptic fields” —produced by neurons through synaptic firing. These fields are what allow an electroencephalogram (EEG), for example, to pick up brain activity. “The ‘ephaptic’ in ephaptic coupling simply means touching ,” Tamlyn Hunt, an affiliate guest in psychology at University of California Santa Barbara’s META lab, wrote in an opinion article published in Scientific American . “Though not well-known, the effects of ephaptic fields result from the textbook electric and magnetic interactions that power our cells.”

A trickle is becoming a flood for Bluesky, the social media company that has seen spectacular growth since the presidential election .  On Tuesday, the microblogging platform hit 20 million users, after averaging 1 million new users per day over the past five days. According to a Nov. 13 post by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, the site had 6 million users in late August, nearly 11 million in late October and hit 15 million users on Nov. 15.  It added another 5 million users in just five days, with the explosive growth seen since Nov. 5, the day of the election, accelerating.

 

"While we may be unable to study the true evolution of human language, perhaps a simulation could provide some insights .  "That’s where AI comes in — a fascinating field of research called emergent communication, which I have spent the last three years studying. "To simulate how language may evolve, we give AI agents simple tasks that require communication, like a game where one robot must guide another to a specific location on a grid without showing it a map.  "We provide (almost) no restrictions on what they can say or how —we simply give them the task and let them solve it however they want. "Because solving these tasks requires the agents to communicate with each other, we can study how their communication evolves over time to get an idea of how language might evolve." 

HarperCollins, one of the biggest publishers in the world, made a deal with an “artificial intelligence technology company” and is giving authors the option to opt in to the agreement or pass, 404 Media can confirm .  A spokesperson for HarperCollins told 404 Media in a statement:  “HarperCollins has reached an agreement with an artificial intelligence technology company to allow limited use of select nonfiction backlist titles for training AI models to improve model quality and performance. While we believe this deal is attractive, we respect the various views of our authors, and they have the choice to opt in to the agreement or to pass on the opportunity. "HarperCollins has a long history of innovation and experimentation with new business models. Part of our role is to present authors with opportunities for their consideration while simultaneously protecting the underlying value of their works and our shared revenue and royalty streams. This agreement, with its limited s...

Unifying nature’s fundamental forces —gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces —was a goal that eluded Albert Einstein .  If Langlands’ theories help make it happen, the cosmic symmetry will come with a poetic touch: Langlands’ office in Princeton is the same one Einstein occupied during the later part of his two decades at the Institute for Advanced Studies, until his death in 1955. “He’s like a modern-day Einstein,” says Frenkel, author of Love and Math, a book about the Langlands Program. “But everybody knows about Einstein and nobody knows about Langlands. Why is that?” That kind of talk makes Langlands cringe. He’s sure of his achievements but skeptical about their value in the real world. Pure math is an adventure of the mind, unconcerned with applications.  He’s even uncomfortable with the program that bears his name, believing its expansion into the field of differential geometry —a branch that uses calculus to study the properties of geometric sh...

A group of nine mathematicians has proved the geometric Langlands conjecture, a key component of one of the most sweeping paradigms in modern mathematics. The proof represents the culmination of three decades of effort, said Peter Scholze, a prominent mathematician at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics who was not involved in the proof. “It’s wonderful to see it resolved.” The Langlands program, originated by Robert Langlands in the 1960s, is a vast generalization of Fourier analysis, a far-reaching framework in which complex waves are expressed in terms of smoothly oscillating sine waves. The Langlands program holds sway in three separate areas of mathematics: number theory, geometry and something called function fields. These three settings are connected by a web of analogies commonly called mathematics’ Rosetta stone. Now, a new set of papers has settled the Langlands conjecture in the geometric column of the Rosetta stone. “In none of the [other] settings has a result as comp...

 

As the use of digital products and services grows, so does the amount of energy and water used, and e-waste produced. Growing levels of digitization demand more energy, which raises greenhouse gas emissions.   AI programmes need servers that run around the clock. These servers and the data centres that house them use a lot of electricity. In addition, even more energy is required to cool the data centers. These and other issues were debated at a high-level COP29 roundtable on digitization for climate action. 

Tinkering is not just about our mental thoughts, and often involves a physical component.   Children often engage in discovery learning by touching objects (hopefully not the hot stove), and figuring out how things work by taking them into their own hands. For example, “thinkering” is a word introduced by Michael Ondaatje in the book, The English Patient . It refers to the creation and understanding of concepts in the mind while one is tinkering with the hands. When we physically engage with things, especially with our hands and through touch , we generate a great variety of sensory images in our minds. We connect our sensory experiences with our mental thoughts and generate visual representations of what is often an abstract concept.  These images allow us to better understand our world, and also generate creative thoughts that shape new inventions and ways to solve old problems. 

"Microglia, the innate immune cells of the brain, influence Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression and are potential therapeutic targets.   "However, microglia exhibit diverse functions, the regulation of which is not fully understood, complicating therapeutics development.  "To better define the transcriptomic phenotypes and gene regulatory networks associated with AD, we enriched for microglia nuclei from 12 AD and 10 control human dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (7 males and 15 females, all aged >60 years) before single-nucleus RNA sequencing.  "Here we describe both established and previously unrecognized microglial molecular phenotypes, the inferred gene networks driving observed transcriptomic change, and apply trajectory analysis to reveal the putative relationships between microglial phenotypes.  "We identify microglial phenotypes more prevalent in AD cases compared with controls.  "Further, we describe the heterogeneity in microglia subclusters ...

"Without education, you're not going anywhere in this world."  —Malcolm X

O'REILLY's Radar trends to watch :  Little Language Models is an educational program that teaches young children about probability, artificial intelligence, and related topics. It’s fun and playful and can enable children to build simple models of their own. Grafana and NVIDIA are working on a large language model for observability , apparently given the awkward name LLo11yPop . The model aims to answer natural language questions about system status and performance based on telemetry data. Google is open-sourcing SynthID, a system for watermarking text so AI-generated documents can be traced to the LLM that generated them. Watermarks do not affect the accuracy or quality of generated documents. SynthID watermarks resist some tampering, including editing. Mistral has released two new models, Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B. These are small models, designed to work on resource-limited “edge” systems. Unlike many of Mistral’s previous small models, these are not ope...

"Short-term change in the direction of a magnetic field (or another parameter) describes a closed curve in this space —just like my circular path on the globe. Because this parameter space is usually curved, this leaves traces in the wave function. "'The geometric phase can therefore be regarded as the best answer the system can offer to the question ‘What path in parameter space did the system take?' Berry wrote in his 1988 Scientific American article . 'In this sense it is a kind of quantum memory .' "Berry had thus revealed a profound connection between quantum systems and geometry, which turned out to be extremely valuable.  "The Berry phase, named after him, can be used to explain phenomena such as the quantum Hall effect, which occurs in certain solids and raised many questions before Berry’s discovery. "All of this is extremely exciting. For me, however, the most impressive thing is that Berry established the new research field of geomet...

The late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s estate has recreated his voice using AI in partnership with Eleven Labs .  The singer-songwriter’s voice can now read to ElevenReader app users their choice of audiobooks, articles, poetry, PDFs, and more through what Eleven calls the Iconic Listening Experience, Billboard reported.  Garcia’s voice is available in 32 different languages. This is not the first voice added to the list of personalities available to use through the AI company’s app, as its repertoire also includes Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier.  Garcia’s recent vocal replication was possible through a collaboration between Garcia’s estate and ElevenLabs.  The Jerry Garcia Foundation, co-founded by his daughter Keelin Garcia, is also considering Garcia’s voice model for narrated documentaries or audio art exhibits.  

Elon Musk’s influence on a Donald Trump administration could lead to tougher safety standards for artificial intelligence, according to a leading scientist who has worked closely with the world’s richest person on addressing AI’s dangers. Max Tegmark said Musk’s support for a failed AI bill in California underlined the billionaire’s continued concern over an issue that did not feature prominently in Trump’s campaign. However, Musk has warned regularly that unrestrained development of AI —broadly, computer systems performing tasks that typically require human intelligence —could be catastrophic for humanity.  Last year, he was one of more than 30,000 signatories to a letter calling for a pause in work on powerful AI technology.

Artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI are seeking to overcome unexpected delays and challenges in the pursuit of ever-bigger large language models by developing training techniques that use more human-like ways for algorithms to think. A dozen AI scientists, researchers and investors told Reuters they believe that these techniques, which are behind OpenAI's recently released o1 model, could reshape the AI arms race, and have implications for the types of resources that AI companies have an insatiable demand for, from energy to types of chips. OpenAI declined to comment for this story.  After the release of the viral ChatGPT chatbot two years ago, technology companies, whose valuations have benefited greatly from the AI boom, have publicly maintained that “scaling up” current models through adding more data and computing power will consistently lead to improved AI models.

Amid a rising tide of low-cost weaponized adversary drones menacing American troops abroad, the US military is pulling out all the stops to protect its forces from the ever-present threat of death from above .  But between expensive munitions, futuristic but complicated directed energy weapons, and its own growing drone arsenal, the Pentagon is increasingly eyeing an elegantly simple solution to its growing drone problem: reinventing the gun. At the Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX) event in August, the US Defense Department tested an artificial intelligence-enabled autonomous robotic gun system developed by fledgling defense contractor Allen Control Systems dubbed the Bullfrog . Consisting of a 7.62-mm M240 machine gun mounted on a specially designed rotating turret outfitted with an electro-optical sensor, proprietary AI, and computer vision software, the Bullfrog was designed to deliver small arms fire on drone targets with far more precision than the average US servi...

"Google has launched an experimental new AI tool called Learn About, which is different from the chatbots we’re used to, like Gemini and ChatGPT .  "It’s built on the LearnLM AI model that Google introduced this spring, saying it’s grounded in educational research and tailored to how people learn. The answers it provides have more visual and interactive elements with educational formatting. "We tested Learn About and Google Gemini with a simple prompt: 'How big is the universe?' Both answered that 'the observable universe' is 'about 93 billion light-years in diameter.' "However, while Gemini opted to show a Wikipedia-provided diagram of the universe and a two-paragraph summary with links to sources, Learn About emphasized an image from the educational site Physics Forums and added related content that was similarly focused more on learning than simply offering facts and definitions."

A few months ago, Anthropic quietly hired its first dedicated "AI welfare" researcher, Kyle Fish, to explore whether future AI models might deserve moral consideration and protection, reports AI newsletter Transformer .  While sentience in AI models is an extremely controversial and contentious topic, the hire could signal a shift toward AI companies examining ethical questions about the consciousness and rights of AI systems. Fish joined Anthropic's alignment science team in September to develop guidelines for how y and other companies should approach the issue.    The news follows a major report co-authored by Fish before he landed his Anthropic role: Titled " Taking AI Welfare Seriously  [pdf]," the paper warns that AI models could soon develop consciousness or agency —traits that some might consider requirements for moral consideration. But the authors do not say that AI consciousness is a guaranteed future development.

AI cats trying to prompt herder…

"Recent research in artificial cell production holds promise for the development of delivery agents with therapeutic effects akin to real cells.  "To succeed in these applications, these systems need to survive the circulatory conditions.  "In this review we present strategies that, inspired by the endurance of red blood cells, have enhanced the viability of large, cell-like vehicles for in vivo therapeutic use, particularly focusing on giant unilamellar vesicles.   "Insights from red blood cells can guide modifications that could transform these platforms into advanced drug delivery vehicles, showcasing biomimicry’s potential in shaping the future of therapeutic applications."

"Biologically inspired artificial vision research has led to innovative robotic vision systems with low optical aberration, wide field of view, and compact form factor. However, challenges persist in object detection and recognition against complex backgrounds and varied lighting.  "Inspired by the feline eye, which features a vertically elongated pupil and tapetum lucidum, this study introduces an artificial vision system designed for superior object detection and recognition in a monocular framework.   "Using a slit-like elliptical aperture and a patterned metal reflector beneath a hemispherical silicon photodiode array, the system reduces excessive light and enhances photosensitivity. This design achieves clear focus under bright light and enhanced sensitivity in dim conditions.  "Theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate the system’s ability to filter redundant information and detect camouflaged objects in diverse lighting, representing a substantial adv...

"We use an analytical method to determine the inertial characteristics of 22 species across the full range of elbow and wrist flexion and extension.  "We find that wing morphing allows birds to substantially change their roll and yaw inertia but has a minimal effect on the position of the centre of gravity.  "With the addition of inertial characteristics, we derived a novel metric of pitch agility and estimated the static pitch stability, revealing that the agility and static margin ranges are reduced as body mass increases.   "These results provide quantitative evidence that evolution selects for both stable and unstable flight, in contrast to the prevailing narrative that birds are evolving away from stability."  

"We show that the swooping trajectories of perching Harris’ hawks (Parabuteo unicinctus) minimize neither time nor energy alone, but rather minimize the distance flown after stalling.  "By combining motion capture data from 1,576 flights with flight dynamics modelling, we find that the birds’ choice of where to transition from powered dive to unpowered climb minimizes the distance over which high lift coefficients are required.  "Time and energy are therefore invested to provide the control authority needed to glide safely to the perch, rather than being minimized directly as in technical implementations of autonomous perching under nonlinear feedback control and deep reinforcement learning.  "Naive birds learn this behaviour on the fly, so our findings suggest a heuristic principle that could guide reinforcement learning of autonomous perching ." 

"We show how biological and engineered jumpers have key differences in their jump energetics .  "The jump height of a biological jumper is limited by the work its linear motor (muscle) can produce in a single stroke. By contrast, the jump height of an engineered device can be far greater because its ratcheted or rotary motor can ‘multiply work’ during repeated strokes or rotations.  "As a consequence of these differences in energy production, biological and engineered jumpers should have divergent designs for maximizing jump height.  "Following these insights, we created a device that can jump over 30 metres high, to our knowledge far higher than previous engineered jumpers and over an order of magnitude higher than the best biological jumpers." 

Let two large models debate the answer to a given question, with the judge (a simpler model or a human) left to recognize the more accurate answer .  In theory, the process allows the two agents to poke holes in each other’s arguments until the judge has enough information to discern the truth.  The approach was first proposed six years ago, but two sets of findings released earlier this year —one in February from the AI startup Anthropic and the second in July from Google DeepMind —offer the first empirical evidence that debate between two LLMs helps a judge (human or machine) recognize the truth. “These works have been very important in what they’ve set out and contributed,” [Julian] Michael said.  They also offer new avenues to explore. To take one example, Michael and his group reported in September that training AI debaters to win —and not just to converse, as in the past two studies —further increased the ability of non-expert judges to recognize the truth. 

On November 9, the organizers of Aaron Swartz Day are celebrating his life with a guest-packed podcast featuring those carrying on the work around issues close to his heart . Hosts Lisa Rein and Andre Vinicus Leal Sobral will speak to:  Ryan Shapiro, co-founder of the national security  transparency non-profit Property of the People Nathan Dyer of SecureDrop, Newsroom Support Engineer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Tracey Jaquith, Founding Coder and TV Architect at the Internet Archive Tracy Rosenberg, co-founder of the Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project and Oakland Privacy Brewster Kahle founder of the Internet Archive Ryan Sternlicht, VR developer, educator, researcher, advisor, and maker Grant Smith Ellis, Chairperson of the Board, MassCann and Legal Intern at the Parabola Center Michael “Mek” Karpeles, Open Library, Internet Archive The podcast will start at 2 p.m. PT/10 p.m. UTC. Please read the official page of the Aaron Swartz Day and I...

According to Jerry Hug, the chief executive of AiAdvertising, the company wasn’t looking for a new investor until Parscale broached the idea .  “Brad is one of the smartest marketing minds on the planet,” said Hug. “And he approached us wanting to help accelerate the growth of the company with what I would call very friendly, patient capital.” In April, Dunn purchased a 40.6 percent stake in AiAdvertising for $5 million through a Dunn family investment vehicle called Hexagon Partners. Hexagon also has the right to invest another $4.25 million. Parscale consulted with Dunn on the deal, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hug told me that AiAdvertising will use artificial intelligence to build targeted ad campaigns. “Personalization is the key to success in digital advertising going forward,” he said.

Saudi Arabia is planning a new artificial intelligence project with backing of as much as $100 billion as it seeks to develop a technological hub to rival the neighboring United Arab Emirates, people familiar with the matter said. The state-backed entity will invest in data centers, startups and other infrastructure to develop artificial intelligence, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing plans that aren’t yet public.  The initiative, called Project Transcendence , will also focus on  Recruiting new talent to the kingdom,  Developing the local ecosystem and  Encouraging tech companies to put resources in the country,  they said… 

Propagandists in China, Iran and Russia are using artificial intelligence to create content designed to deceive Americans ahead of the November presidential election, federal intelligence officials said Monday [Sep 24 report] . In a conference call about foreign election interference efforts organized by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, officials said the U.S. intelligence community, or IC, has concluded that AI has made it easier to create disinformation but has not fundamentally changed the way those actors operate. 

Someone moved the UK's oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why. Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet -1A was put high above Africa's east coast to relay communications for British forces. When the spacecraft ceased working a few years later, gravity might have been expected to pull it even further to the east, out over the Indian Ocean. But today, curiously, Skynet -1A is actually half a planet away, in a position 22,369 miles (36,000km) above the Americas. 

Rhesus macaque fugitives broke out of Alpha Genesis, a company that breeds primates for medical testing and research, and are on the loose in a part of the state [South Carolina] known as the Lowcountry. Authorities have urged residents to keep their doors and windows securely closed and to report any sightings immediately.  The escaped monkeys are young females, weighing about 7lbs (3.2kg) each, according to the Yemassee Police Department. Police said on Thursday that the company had located the skittish  group and "are working to entice them with food." 

The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted —and later deleted —a skit to Douyin (Chinese TikTok) boasting that WeChat automatically records user activity and shares it with law enforcement .  The short video skit warned against sharing pornography and engaging in other unspecified “illegal activity” on WeChat.  CDT has translated the skit in full:      Liang Yong (LY): Woah, cool!     Boss Fei (F): What’s up, Liang Yong?     LY: Boss Fei, WeChat has started automatically reporting illegal activity     F: Yes, that’s right! If you use WeChat to send pornographic videos or engage in other illegal activity, the app will screenshot and record evidence, and then share it with law enforcement agencies. Trying to delete it afterwards is pointless.     LY: Technology is the new black magic: it leaves criminals with nowhere to hide. The video was deleted after going briefly viral. Although algorithmic surveillance ...

The head of a company specializing in cryptocurrency was kidnapped and held for ransom in downtown Toronto during rush hour Wednesday.   Police were called about a kidnapping in the area of University Avenue and Richmond Street W. just before 6 p.m., says a spokesperson with the Toronto Police Service. The suspects forced the victim into a vehicle and made a demand for money, the spokesperson said. The man was later located in Centennial Park in Etobicoke uninjured. CBC Toronto has learned the victim is Dean Skurka, the president and CEO of Toronto-based financial firm WonderFi. He was released after a ransom of $1 million was paid electronically , a source close to the investigation said.  Skurka told CBC Toronto via email on Thursday that he had been involved in an "incident" Wednesday but is safe. "The safety and security of all of WonderFi's employees are paramount," Skurka said in the email.  "Client funds and data remain safe, and were not impacted by...

"We are not anti-technology.   "We want technology that benefits people, and in order to do that we also have to expose how it can invade people’s privacy, surveil them, steal their work, steal their bodily autonomy and harass them, destroy any sense of a shared reality, value robotic plagiarism over human creativity, and undermine workers .  "We will hold companies, people, and politicians who accelerate towards this future to account.  "But there is another side to this coin.  "We have, and will continue to champion and amplify people, groups, movements, and ideas that use technology to make our lives better, are fighting back against anti-human uses of technology, and serve to challenge, decentralize, or redistribute power from concentrated big tech companies to the masses." 

Law enforcement officers are warning other officials and forensic experts that iPhones which have been stored securely for forensic examination are somehow rebooting themselves, returning the devices to a state that makes them much harder to unlock, according to a law enforcement document obtained by 404 Media . The exact reason for the reboots is unclear, but the document authors, who appear to be law enforcement officials in Detroit, Michigan, hypothesize that Apple may have introduced a new security feature in iOS 18 that tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have been disconnected from a cellular network for some time.  After being rebooted, iPhones are generally more secure against tools that aim to crack the password of and take data from the phone.

"Digitizing and aggregating data meaningfully changes the privacy context and the risks to people. Your municipal government storing your marriage certificate and voter information in some basement office filing cabinet is not even remotely the same as a private company digitizing all the data, labeling it, piling it all together, making it searchable," said Justin Sherman, a Duke professor who studies data brokers .  "Policymakers need to get with the times and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records —which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws —has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder," Sherman said.  "Protecting citizens of all political stripes, targets and survivors of gendered violence, public servants who are targets for doxing and death threats, military service members, and everyone in between d...

"The encrypted messaging app, Signal, has become a newsroom staple for communicating with sources, accepting tips, and talking to colleagues.   "While it’s a practical tool for anyone concerned with the security and privacy of their conversations, journalists are particularly interesting targets and would benefit from locking down Signal. "If you’re not yet using it, learn how to get started here . "Signal makes it easy to have a secure conversation: It looks and feels identical to your default text messaging app, but security experts so often recommend it because of what it does in the background. "Signal offers end-to-end encryption , meaning only conversational participants can read the messages. While regular phone calls or text messages allow your phone company to unscramble your conversations, even the team behind Signal can’t listen to them. "You don’t need to take their word for it. Signal is open source , meaning the code is availa...

"Codeberg is a democratic community-driven, non-profit software development platform operated by Codeberg e.V. and centered around Codeberg.org, a Forgejo-based software forge. "On Codeberg you can develop your own Free Software projects, contribute to other projects, browse through inspiring and useful free software, share your knowledge or build your projects a home on the web using Codeberg Pages, just to name a few. "Codeberg is not a for-profit corporation but an open community of free software enthusiasts providing a humane, non-commercial and privacy-friendly alternative to commercial services such as GitHub." 

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has moved forward with regulations establishing a smartphone-based national digital ID and tracking system, disregarding objections from organizations like the Identity Project. These new rules are based on the REAL-ID Act of 2005 and set the standards for how states will issue digital versions of driver’s licenses or ID cards, which will be accepted by the TSA and other federal agencies for certain official purposes. However, these rules do not extend to airline travel, where no ID is legally required, despite the TSA’s misleading statements to the contrary. Under the TSA’s new regulations, digital IDs can only be issued to individuals who already possess a physical driver’s license or state-issued ID card. Additionally, individuals are still obligated by state laws to carry their physical ID while driving, even if they have a digital ID on their smartphone.  This shift is not primarily about improving driver’s license technolo...

"A Project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation "We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an independent non-profit working to protect online privacy for over thirty years. This is Surveillance Self-Defense: our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying. "Read the BASICS to find out how online surveillance works. Dive into our TOOL GUIDES for instructions to installing our pick of the best, most secure applications. We have more detailed information in our FURTHER LEARNING sections. If you’d like a guided tour, look for our list of common SECURITY SCENARIOS ." 

"The past 3 years of work in NLP [Natural Language Processing] have been characterized by the development and deployment of ever larger language models, especially for English.  "BERT, its variants, GPT-2/3, and others, most recently Switch-C, have pushed the boundaries of the possible both through architectural innovations and through sheer size.  "Using these pretrained models and the methodology of fine-tuning them for specific tasks, researchers have extended the state of the art on a wide array of tasks as measured by leaderboards on specific benchmarks for English.  "We provide recommendations including  Weighing the environmental and financial costs first,  Investing resources into curating and carefully documenting datasets rather than ingesting everything on the web,  Carrying out pre-development exercises evaluating how the planned approach fits into research and development goals and supports stakeholder values, and  Encouraging research dir...

"A Shoggoth is a perfect metaphor for AIs because no one knows what Shoggoths are.   "So, everyone can agree that 'AI is a Shoggoth ' means that AI is the thing that they already think AI is. (Apologies to the readers who propelled At the Mountains of Madness to the 776,464th place on Amazon’s best-selling list.)  In particular, Farrell and Shalizi call markets and democracies 'Shoggoths.'  "Wikipedia says that 'Cthulhu Mythos media ​​most commonly portray shoggoths as intelligent to some degree, but deal with problems using only their great size and strength': a description that almost seems lifted from the ' Stochastic Parrots ' paper. "Scott Alexander describes how the metaphors of Agent, Genie, or Oracle are not a good match for (non fine-tuned / RLHF’ed) language models like GPT-3. Rather they are best captured as what Janus called a Simulator and Scott  [Alexander] calls 'an unmasked Shoggoth.'  "In both the marke...

 

Plans by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to build an AI data centre in the US that runs on nuclear power were thwarted in part because a rare species of bee was discovered on land earmarked for the project, according to people familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg had planned to strike a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide emissions-free electricity for a new data centre supporting his artificial intelligence ambitions. However, the potential deal faced multiple complications including environmental and regulatory challenges , these people said. The discovery of the rare bee species on a location next to the plant where the data centre was to be built would have complicated the project, Zuckerberg told a Meta all-hands meeting last week, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

Google said while it was not clear whether Google Maps was involved in the incident, it had also made improvements so similar incidents did not occur in future. It said its teams were working on improvements to the timing of audio to provide enhanced guidance in situations such as those in this case. A spokesperson said: "This will involve an amended audio prompt as a driver approaches a junction where they would cross an overpass —'after the overpass, turn right'. "We hope that this will provide clearer guidance for drivers and help reduce the risk that they make an incorrect turn." TomTom recommended users updated their systems after it recently implemented additional safeguards to "limit drivers’ confusion where possible". It said this had been done by timing the verbal commands closer to the actual exit, and after passing the off-slip road. 

Mr. Benford [BoE’s Chief Data Officer] stressed the need for AI governance to ensure an ethical, safe, and effective use of AI.   Underscoring the significance of data to AI solutions, he advocated that the new wave of AI solutions is a reason to double down on strengthening data foundations.   In particular, the BoE is broadening the scope of its data governance framework to better address unstructured data. In addition to data governance, the BoE is working towards AI literacy for everyone at the BoE and AI fluency for its expert data professionals. The BoE is developing its use of AI through a series of targeted experiments which it is using to build its AI strategy. 

Eukaryotes invented organization, if we use the literal definition of “organize”: to be furnished with organs.   Inside a eukaryotic cell are self-contained, membrane-bound bundles that perform special functions, called organelles.   All eukaryotic cells —animal, plant, fungus or protist —have a nucleus that encloses and protects DNA.  Nearly all of them have mitochondria, which produce energy to fuel biochemical reactions. Any eukaryotic lineages that lack mitochondria used to have them and then lost them sometime in evolutionary history.  And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured additional organelles that  Assemble proteins,  Store water,  Turn sunlight into energy,  Digest biomolecules,  Get rid of waste, and more.  If prokaryotes are a loose pile of papers on the floor, eukaryotes are a sophisticated filing system that binds pages into packets and labels them.  “They’ve got the endoplasmic ...