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DOGE Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations

WIRED

A young man with no government experience who has yet to even complete his undergraduate degree is working for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and has been tasked with using artificial intelligence to rewrite the agency's rules and regulations. Christopher Sweet was introduced to HUD employees as being originally from San Francisco and most recently a third-year at the University of Chicago, where he was studying economics and data science, in an email sent to staffers earlier this month. "I'd like to share with you that Chris Sweet has joined the HUD DOGE team with the title of special assistant, although a better title might be'Al computer programming quant analyst,'" Scott Langmack, a DOGE staffer and chief operating officer of an AI real estate company, wrote in an email widely shared within the agency and reviewed by WIRED. "With family roots from Brazil, Chris speaks Portuguese fluently. Please join me in welcoming Chris to HUD!" Sweet's primary role appears to be leading an effort to leverage artificial intelligence to review HUD's regulations, compare them to the laws on which they are based, and identify areas where rules can be relaxed or removed altogether.


Blair's net zero intervention invites scrutiny of his institute's donors

The Guardian > Energy

In little more than 1,600 words voicing his scepticism over net zero policies, Tony Blair this week propelled himself and his increasingly powerful institute back into the national debate. In the past eight years, the former prime minister has built a global empire employing more than 900 people across more than 40 countries, providing policy advice to monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. But while Blair's thinktank has brought him influence in his post-Downing Street career, it has also renewed scrutiny on his political views and how they are shaped by his commercial relationships. The Labour MP James Frith said on Wednesday: "I give congratulations to the marketing department at the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), who have managed to time it brilliantly to get maximum coverage." Patrick Galey, the head of fossil fuel investigations at the nongovernmental organisation Global Witness, said: "Blair's well-documented links to petrostates and oil and gas companies ought to alone be enough to disqualify this man as an independent and reliable arbiter of what's possible or commonsense in the energy transition."


Ministers to amend data bill amid artists' concerns over AI and copyright

The Guardian

Artists including Paul McCartney and Tom Stoppard have thrown their weight behind a campaign against the changes in a series of high-level interventions. The government's commitments will be made in amendments to the data bill, which has become a vehicle for campaigners against the changes and is due to return to the Commons on Wednesday next week. The move has already been dismissed by critics. Ed Newton-Rex, a the British composer and prominent campaigner against the government proposals, said there was a "ton of evidence" showing the mooted changes were "terrible for creators". He added: "We don't need an impact assessment to tell us this."


A Tariff Standoff With China, Power Outages, and the End of Christmas

WIRED

President Trump's tariff standoff with China has caused chaos, confusion, and major delays for companies of all shapes and sizes. As everyone waits to see what happens next, some businesses that depend on international trade are already feeling major impacts, saying that they might not meet their production deadlines. And one of those deadlines is pretty important: Christmas. Today on the show, we're joined by WIRED's senior business editor Louise Matsakis to talk through the latest on tariffs. Mentioned in this episode: Donald Trump Is Already Ruining Christmas by Zeyi Yang OpenAI Adds Shopping to ChatGPT in a Challenge to Google by Reece Rogers The Agonizing Task of Turning Europe's Power Back On by Natasha Bernal Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.


Samsung says US tariffs will affect prices and demand for smartphones and memory chips

Engadget

During an earnings call, Samsung's chief financial officer Soon-cheol Park told reporters that "ongoing uncertainty surrounding US tariff policies continues to pose a potential risk of demand slowdown." According to Financial Times, Park said that US tariff policies and stronger export controls against artificial intelligence products are expected to have an impact on product demand in the second half of the year. In addition to a downward trend on sales, the company also expects tariffs to raise prices for the components it uses on its mobile phones, which will have further impact on its revenue. Samsung's call discussed its results for the first quarter of 2025, which ended on March 31. The company posted KRW 79.14 trillion in revenue ( 55.6 billion), an all-time quarterly high mostly due to strong Galaxy S25 sales. It also posted KRW 6.7 trillion ( 4.7 billion) in profit, which is slightly lower than the previous quarter's KRW 6.5 trillion ( 4.6 billion).


New Trump-linked consulting firm launches in DC to navigate crypto, AI : 'Trust, connected voice'

FOX News

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responds to economic uncertainty, breaking down President Donald Trumps fiscal and cryptocurrency goals on My View with Lara Trump. A new government relations firm led in part by a former Trump lawyer has launched in Washington, D.C., with the aim of advocating for clients in the crypto and artificial intelligence space that has gained momentum since Trump's election and inauguration. NexusOne Consulting, founded by attorney Jeff Ifrah of Ifrah Law, former Trump administration attorney Jim Trusty and former Trump Commerce Department official Ross Branson, opened its doors this week, marketing itself as a firm "focused on shaping federal policy and regulatory frameworks for clients in the emerging technologies sector, including AI, cryptocurrency and social media." Fox News Digital spoke to Ifrah, who outlined what he believed was a gap in the crypto and AI consulting space heading into the next four years of the Trump administration. "I think primarily before the Trump administration, there wasn't really a need. It wasn't like the industry was searching out D.C.-based advocates on a federal level," Ifrah said.


Adaptive Replication Strategies in Trust-Region-Based Bayesian Optimization of Stochastic Functions

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We develop and analyze a method for stochastic simulation optimization relying on Gaussian process models within a trust-region framework. We are interested in the case when the variance of the objective function is large. We propose to rely on replication and local modeling to cope with this high-throughput regime, where the number of evaluations may become large to get accurate results while still keeping good performance. We propose several schemes to encourage replication, from the choice of the acquisition function to setup evaluation costs. Compared with existing methods, our results indicate good scaling, in terms of both accuracy (several orders of magnitude better than existing methods) and speed (taking into account evaluation costs).


Fane at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Zero-Shot Entity Framing with Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding how news narratives frame entities is crucial for studying media's impact on societal perceptions of events. In this paper, we evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in classifying framing roles. Through systematic experimentation, we assess the effects of input context, prompting strategies, and task decomposition. Our findings show that a hierarchical approach of first identifying broad roles and then fine-grained roles, outperforms single-step classification. We also demonstrate that optimal input contexts and prompts vary across task levels, highlighting the need for subtask-specific strategies. We achieve a Main Role Accuracy of 89.4% and an Exact Match Ratio of 34.5%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings emphasize the importance of tailored prompt design and input context optimization for improving LLM performance in entity framing.


Jekyll-and-Hyde Tipping Point in an AI's Behavior

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Trust in AI is undermined by the fact that there is no science that predicts -- or that can explain to the public -- when an LLM's output (e.g. ChatGPT) is likely to tip mid-response to become wrong, misleading, irrelevant or dangerous. With deaths and trauma already being blamed on LLMs, this uncertainty is even pushing people to treat their 'pet' LLM more politely to 'dissuade' it (or its future Artificial General Intelligence offspring) from suddenly turning on them. Here we address this acute need by deriving from first principles an exact formula for when a Jekyll-and-Hyde tipping point occurs at LLMs' most basic level. Requiring only secondary school mathematics, it shows the cause to be the AI's attention spreading so thin it suddenly snaps. This exact formula provides quantitative predictions for how the tipping-point can be delayed or prevented by changing the prompt and the AI's training. Tailored generalizations will provide policymakers and the public with a firm platform for discussing any of AI's broader uses and risks, e.g. as a personal counselor, medical advisor, decision-maker for when to use force in a conflict situation. It also meets the need for clear and transparent answers to questions like ''should I be polite to my LLM?''


Mitigating the Structural Bias in Graph Adversarial Defenses

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in addressing various graph structure-related downstream tasks. However, recent studies have found that current GNNs are susceptible to malicious adversarial attacks. Given the inevitable presence of adversarial attacks in the real world, a variety of defense methods have been proposed to counter these attacks and enhance the robustness of GNNs. Despite the commendable performance of these defense methods, we have observed that they tend to exhibit a structural bias in terms of their defense capability on nodes with low degree (i.e., tail nodes), which is similar to the structural bias of traditional GNNs on nodes with low degree in the clean graph. Therefore, in this work, we propose a defense strategy by including hetero-homo augmented graph construction, k NN augmented graph construction, and multi-view node-wise attention modules to mitigate the structural bias of GNNs against adversarial attacks. Notably, the hetero-homo augmented graph consists of removing heterophilic links (i.e., links connecting nodes with dissimilar features) globally and adding homophilic links (i.e., links connecting nodes with similar features) for nodes with low degree. T o further enhance the defense capability, an attention mechanism is adopted to adaptively combine the representations from the above two kinds of graph views. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the defense and debiasing effect of the proposed strategy on benchmark datasets. Y leveraging the strong learning capability of the message-passing mechanism, i.e., neighborhood aggregations, graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in a variety of graph prediction tasks, such as node classification, link prediction, graph clustering, etc. [1]-[4]. Specifically, besides ego features, each node in the graph can further utilize the information from its neighbors by aggregating the features of the neighboring nodes. This success underscores the vast potential of GNNs in fields such as social network analysis, recommendation systems, and bioin-formatics, demonstrating their promising prospects for future applications.