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Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

WIRED

In its early days, the AI initiative known as Project Maven had its fair share of skeptics at the Pentagon. Today, many of them are true believers. The rise of AI warfare speaks to the biggest moral and practical question there is: Who--or what--gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost? In 2018, more than 3,000 Google workers protested the company's involvement in "the business of war" after finding out the company was part of Project Maven, then a nascent Pentagon effort to use computer vision to rifle through copious video footage taken in America's overseas drone wars. They feared Project Maven's AI could one day be used for lethal targeting. In my yearslong effort to uncover the full story of Project Maven for my book,, I learned that is exactly what happened, and that the undertaking was just as controversial inside the Pentagon. Today, the tool known as Maven Smart System is being used in US operations against Iran . How the US military's top brass moved from skepticism about the use of AI in war to true believers has a lot to do with a Marine colonel named Drew Cukor. In early September 2024, during the cocktail hour at a private retreat for tech investors and defense leaders, Vice Admiral Frank "Trey" Whitworth found his way to Drew Cukor. Now Project Maven's founding leader and his skeptical successor were standing face-to-face. Three years earlier, Whitworth had been the Pentagon's top military official for intelligence, advising the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and running one of the most sensitive and potentially lethal parts of any military process: targeting.


Dad loses custody of autistic son after fighting sex change, gets support from Elon Musk

FOX News

Alexandre Rocha, a French father in Iceland, claims he lost parental rights after opposing his autistic son's sex reassignment, alleging courts prioritized ideology over his rights.


NEWT GINGRICH, JASON HAYES: There's a nuclear solution to recharging American industry

FOX News

Small modular reactors and microreactors could power AI data centers and factories, but outdated rules and public fears are stalling America's nuclear energy future.


White House unveils its first national AI framework, pushes Congress to act 'this year'

FOX News

The White House unveiled its first federal AI policy framework Friday, with officials Michael Kratsios and David Sacks urging Congress to pass a national standard this year.


Nuclear fusion advances, but challenges remain for power grid

FOX News

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Gamified math. Video read-alouds. Why parents are saying no to screens in class

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Kate Brody's 7-year-old son plays at home in North Hollywood on March 14. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Early childhood experts say excessive screen time displaces hands-on learning and peer interaction critical to development. At least 11 states have considered legislation limiting technology in the classroom this year.



Federated Multi-Task Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Federated learning poses new statistical and systems challenges in training machine learning models over distributed networks of devices. In this work, we show that multi-task learning is naturally suited to handle the statistical challenges of this setting, and propose a novel systems-aware optimization method, MOCHA, that is robust to practical systems issues. Our method and theory for the first time consider issues of high communication cost, stragglers, and fault tolerance for distributed multi-task learning. The resulting method achieves significant speedups compared to alternatives in the federated setting, as we demonstrate through simulations on real-world federated datasets.


WATCH: Wall-climbing robot swarms crawl US Navy warships as China's fleet surges

FOX News

Navy robots from Gecko Robotics will inspect U.S. warships in $71 million effort to reduce maintenance delays as only 60% of fleet remains operational amid China's naval expansion.