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How a fiery attack on Sam Altman's home unfolded

The Guardian

Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock infrastructure summit on 11 March in Washington DC. Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock infrastructure summit on 11 March in Washington DC. How a fiery attack on Sam Altman's home unfolded Molotov cocktail attack on OpenAI CEO's home comes amid growing discontent against artificial intelligence I n the early hours of 10 April, a man approached the gate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's house in San Francisco and hurled a molotov cocktail at the building before fleeing. Federal and California state authorities have charged Moreno-Gama with a range of crimes including attempted arson and attempted murder. His parents issued a statement this week saying that their son had recently suffered a mental health crisis.


Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It's Like to Own a Cybertruck

WIRED

WIRED spoke to seven Tesla Cybertruck owners about their most controversial purchase and why they're proud to drive it. Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US President Donald Trump's return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck . The blunt angles and steel doors look futuristic, for sure, but only if the future looks a lot like . Cybertruck owners see things differently. "To me, it's just a vehicle that I love," says Andrew Castillo, a stock trader from Los Angeles. "It has no political affiliations at all to me." They've arrived for a meetup organized by Michael Goldman, who runs the 53,000-person Facebook group Cybertruck Owners Only. Though suspicious of the media, they're eager to set the record straight about the car that they love.


Engineering fantasy into reality

Robohub

"One of the dreams I had as a kid was about the first day of school, and being able to build and be creative, and it was the happiest day of my life. And at MIT, I felt like that dream became reality," says Ballesteros. Growing up in the suburban town of Spring, Texas, just outside of Houston, Erik Ballesteros couldn't help but be drawn in by the possibilities for humans in space. It was the early 2000s, and NASA's space shuttle program was the main transport for astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Ballesteros' hometown was less than an hour from Johnson Space Center (JSC), where NASA's mission control center and astronaut training facility are based.


WavePulse: Real-time Content Analytics of Radio Livestreams

Mittal, Govind, Gupta, Sarthak, Wagle, Shruti, Chopra, Chirag, DeMattee, Anthony J, Memon, Nasir, Ahamad, Mustaque, Hegde, Chinmay

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Radio remains a pervasive medium for mass information dissemination, with AM/FM stations reaching more Americans than either smartphone-based social networking or live television. Increasingly, radio broadcasts are also streamed online and accessed over the Internet. We present WavePulse, a framework that records, documents, and analyzes radio content in real-time. While our framework is generally applicable, we showcase the efficacy of WavePulse in a collaborative project with a team of political scientists focusing on the 2024 Presidential Elections. We use WavePulse to monitor livestreams of 396 news radio stations over a period of three months, processing close to 500,000 hours of audio streams. These streams were converted into time-stamped, diarized transcripts and analyzed to track answer key political science questions at both the national and state levels. Our analysis revealed how local issues interacted with national trends, providing insights into information flow. Our results demonstrate WavePulse's efficacy in capturing and analyzing content from radio livestreams sourced from the Web. Code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://wave-pulse.io}.


The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation

Brundage, Miles, Avin, Shahar, Clark, Jack, Toner, Helen, Eckersley, Peter, Garfinkel, Ben, Dafoe, Allan, Scharre, Paul, Zeitzoff, Thomas, Filar, Bobby, Anderson, Hyrum, Roff, Heather, Allen, Gregory C., Steinhardt, Jacob, Flynn, Carrick, hÉigeartaigh, Seán Ó, Beard, SJ, Belfield, Haydn, Farquhar, Sebastian, Lyle, Clare, Crootof, Rebecca, Evans, Owain, Page, Michael, Bryson, Joanna, Yampolskiy, Roman, Amodei, Dario

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of AI, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. After analyzing the ways in which AI may influence the threat landscape in the digital, physical, and political domains, we make four high-level recommendations for AI researchers and other stakeholders. We also suggest several promising areas for further research that could expand the portfolio of defenses, or make attacks less effective or harder to execute. Finally, we discuss, but do not conclusively resolve, the long-term equilibrium of attackers and defenders.


WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments

Pan, Yichen, Kong, Dehan, Zhou, Sida, Cui, Cheng, Leng, Yifei, Jiang, Bing, Liu, Hangyu, Shang, Yanyi, Zhou, Shuyan, Wu, Tongshuang, Wu, Zhengyang

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

For web agents to be practically useful, they must adapt to the continuously evolving web environment characterized by frequent updates to user interfaces and content. However, most existing benchmarks only capture the static aspects of the web. To bridge this gap, we introduce WebCanvas, an innovative online evaluation framework for web agents that effectively addresses the dynamic nature of web interactions. WebCanvas contains three main components to facilitate realistic assessments: (1) A novel evaluation metric which reliably capture critical intermediate actions or states necessary for task completions while disregarding noise caused by insignificant events or changed web-elements. (2) A benchmark dataset called Mind2Web-Live, a refined version of original Mind2Web static dataset containing 542 tasks with 2439 intermediate evaluation states; (3) Lightweight and generalizable annotation tools and testing pipelines that enables the community to collect and maintain the high-quality, up-to-date dataset. Building on WebCanvas, we open-source an agent framework with extensible modules for reasoning, providing a foundation for the community to conduct online inference and evaluations. Our best-performing agent achieves a task success rate of 23.1% and a task completion rate of 48.8% on the Mind2Web-Live test set. Additionally, we analyze the performance discrepancies across various websites, domains, and experimental environments. We encourage the community to contribute further insights on online agent evaluation, thereby advancing this field of research.


Generative AI and US Intellectual Property Law

Poland, Cherie M

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapidity with which generative AI has been adopted and advanced has raised legal and ethical questions related to the impact on artists rights, content production, data collection, privacy, accuracy of information, and intellectual property rights. Recent administrative and case law challenges have shown that generative AI software systems do not have independent intellectual property rights in the content that they generate. It remains to be seen whether human content creators can retain their intellectual property rights against generative AI software, its developers, operators, and owners for the misappropriation of the work of human creatives, given the metes and bounds of existing law. Early signs from various courts are mixed as to whether and to what degree the results generated by AI models meet the legal standards of infringement under existing law.


Split-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Two Question-Answering-based Classifications

Arora, Jatin, Park, Youngja

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we address the NER problem by splitting it into two logical sub-tasks: (1) Span Detection which simply extracts entity mention spans irrespective of entity type; (2) Span Classification which classifies the spans into their entity types. Further, we formulate both sub-tasks as question-answering (QA) problems and produce two leaner models which can be optimized separately for each sub-task. Experiments with four cross-domain datasets demonstrate that this two-step approach is both effective and time efficient. Our system, SplitNER outperforms baselines on OntoNotes5.0, WNUT17 and a cybersecurity dataset and gives on-par performance on BioNLP13CG. In all cases, it achieves a significant reduction in training time compared to its QA baseline counterpart. The effectiveness of our system stems from fine-tuning the BERT model twice, separately for span detection and classification. The source code can be found at https://github.com/c3sr/split-ner.


TBCOV: Two Billion Multilingual COVID-19 Tweets with Sentiment, Entity, Geo, and Gender Labels

Imran, Muhammad, Qazi, Umair, Ofli, Ferda

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The widespread usage of social networks during mass convergence events, such as health emergencies and disease outbreaks, provides instant access to citizen-generated data that carry rich information about public opinions, sentiments, urgent needs, and situational reports. Such information can help authorities understand the emergent situation and react accordingly. Moreover, social media plays a vital role in tackling misinformation and disinformation. This work presents TBCOV, a large-scale Twitter dataset comprising more than two billion multilingual tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic collected worldwide over a continuous period of more than one year. More importantly, several state-of-the-art deep learning models are used to enrich the data with important attributes, including sentiment labels, named-entities (e.g., mentions of persons, organizations, locations), user types, and gender information. Last but not least, a geotagging method is proposed to assign country, state, county, and city information to tweets, enabling a myriad of data analysis tasks to understand real-world issues. Our sentiment and trend analyses reveal interesting insights and confirm TBCOV's broad coverage of important topics.


VPN++: Rethinking Video-Pose embeddings for understanding Activities of Daily Living

Das, Srijan, Dai, Rui, Yang, Di, Bremond, Francois

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Many attempts have been made towards combining RGB and 3D poses for the recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADL). ADL may look very similar and often necessitate to model fine-grained details to distinguish them. Because the recent 3D ConvNets are too rigid to capture the subtle visual patterns across an action, this research direction is dominated by methods combining RGB and 3D Poses. But the cost of computing 3D poses from RGB stream is high in the absence of appropriate sensors. This limits the usage of aforementioned approaches in real-world applications requiring low latency. Then, how to best take advantage of 3D Poses for recognizing ADL? To this end, we propose an extension of a pose driven attention mechanism: Video-Pose Network (VPN), exploring two distinct directions. One is to transfer the Pose knowledge into RGB through a feature-level distillation and the other towards mimicking pose driven attention through an attention-level distillation. Finally, these two approaches are integrated into a single model, we call VPN . We show that VPN is not only effective but also provides a high speed up and high resilience to noisy Poses. VPN, with or without 3D Poses, outperforms the representative baselines on 4 public datasets.