Government
TSMC unveils 100 billion in new U.S. investment, joined by Trump
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's top producer of AI chips, plans to invest an additional 100 billion in U.S. plants that will boost its chip output on American soil and support President Donald Trump's goal of increasing domestic manufacturing. TSMC Chief Executive Officer C.C. Wei joined Trump at the White House on Monday to unveil the company's vision for expanding a U.S. footprint that got its start in 2020 during the president's first term in office. Trump said the move means "the most powerful AI chips in the world will be made right here in America." "Without the semiconductors, there is no economy powering everything from AI to automobiles to advanced manufacturing," Trump said from the Roosevelt Room.
Melania Trump to speak for the first time on Capitol Hill in roundtable focused on punishing revenge porn
Fox News' Charlie Hurt and Rachel Campos-Duffy discuss inauguration fashion for this week's installment of their pop culture round-up on'Fox & Friends Weekend'. First lady Melania Trump will speak on Capitol Hill Monday for the first time since returning to the White House, participating in a roundtable with lawmakers from both chambers of Congress focused on punishing online abuse and revenge pornography. The roundtable discussion will focus on online protection and the "Take it Down Act," a bill introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., that would make it a federal crime to publish, or threaten to publish, nonconsensual intimate imagery, including "digital forgeries" crafted by artificial intelligence. The bill also would require social media companies and similar websites to put procedures in place to remove such content within 48 hours of notice from the victim. First lady Melania Trump will speak on Capitol Hill for the first time since returning to the White House, participating in a roundtable with lawmakers from both chambers of Congress focused on punishing online abuse and revenge pornography.
The Download: DeepSeek for fortune telling, and the second private moon landing
As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that have deep roots in Chinese culture. Across Chinese social media, users are sharing AI-generated readings, experimenting with fortune-telling prompt engineering, and revisiting ancient spiritual texts--all with the help of DeepSeek. The surge in AI fortune-telling comes during a time of pervasive anxiety and pessimism in Chinese society. And as spiritual practices remain hidden underground thanks to the country's regime, computers and phone screens are helping younger people to gain a sense of control over their lives. Are you interested in learning more about DeepSeek?
UK unions call for action to protect creative industry workers as AI develops
Action is needed to protect workers in creative industries amid huge changes in technology and artificial intelligence, unions have urged. The TUC said there was an urgent need to put in place "proper guardrails" for workers ranging from artists, writers and journalists to teachers and academics. The TUC called for transparency of AI training data to ensure workers know whether their data or image are being used, an opt-in system to protect creative work from commercial data mining unless workers give their permission and consent, and for measures to ensure creative workers are paid fairly for their work when their creative work is used to train AI models. The report also called for an independent regulator to oversee the integration of AI into society and work. The transformative potential of AI was huge, but without adequate regulation, "rapacious tech bosses" would be able to exploit creative workers and cash in on their work, the TUC warned.
Lossy Neural Compression for Geospatial Analytics: A Review
Gomes, Carlos, Wittmann, Isabelle, Robert, Damien, Jakubik, Johannes, Reichelt, Tim, Martone, Michele, Maurogiovanni, Stefano, Vinge, Rikard, Hurst, Jonas, Scheurer, Erik, Sedona, Rocco, Brunschwiler, Thomas, Kesselheim, Stefan, Batic, Matej, Stier, Philip, Wegner, Jan Dirk, Cavallaro, Gabriele, Pebesma, Edzer, Marszalek, Michael, Belenguer-Plomer, Miguel A, Adriko, Kennedy, Fraccaro, Paolo, Kienzler, Romeo, Briq, Rania, Benassou, Sabrina, Lazzarini, Michele, Albrecht, Conrad M
Over the past decades, there has been an explosion in the amount of available Earth Observation (EO) data. The unprecedented coverage of the Earth's surface and atmosphere by satellite imagery has resulted in large volumes of data that must be transmitted to ground stations, stored in data centers, and distributed to end users. Modern Earth System Models (ESMs) face similar challenges, operating at high spatial and temporal resolutions, producing petabytes of data per simulated day. Data compression has gained relevance over the past decade, with neural compression (NC) emerging from deep learning and information theory, making EO data and ESM outputs ideal candidates due to their abundance of unlabeled data. In this review, we outline recent developments in NC applied to geospatial data. We introduce the fundamental concepts of NC including seminal works in its traditional applications to image and video compression domains with focus on lossy compression. We discuss the unique characteristics of EO and ESM data, contrasting them with "natural images", and explain the additional challenges and opportunities they present. Moreover, we review current applications of NC across various EO modalities and explore the limited efforts in ESM compression to date. The advent of self-supervised learning (SSL) and foundation models (FM) has advanced methods to efficiently distill representations from vast unlabeled data. We connect these developments to NC for EO, highlighting the similarities between the two fields and elaborate on the potential of transferring compressed feature representations for machine--to--machine communication. Based on insights drawn from this review, we devise future directions relevant to applications in EO and ESM.
Interval Regression: A Comparative Study with Proposed Models
Nguyen, Tung L, Hocking, Toby Dylan
Regression models are essential for a wide range of real-world applications. However, in practice, target values are not always precisely known; instead, they may be represented as intervals of acceptable values. This challenge has led to the development of Interval Regression models. In this study, we provide a comprehensive review of existing Interval Regression models and introduce alternative models for comparative analysis. Experiments are conducted on both real-world and synthetic datasets to offer a broad perspective on model performance. The results demonstrate that no single model is universally optimal, highlighting the importance of selecting the most suitable model for each specific scenario.
Generate, Discriminate, Evolve: Enhancing Context Faithfulness via Fine-Grained Sentence-Level Self-Evolution
Li, Kun, Zhang, Tianhua, Li, Yunxiang, Luo, Hongyin, Moustafa, Abdalla, Wu, Xixin, Glass, James, Meng, Helen
Improving context faithfulness in large language models is essential for developing trustworthy retrieval augmented generation systems and mitigating hallucinations, especially in long-form question answering (LFQA) tasks or scenarios involving knowledge conflicts. Existing methods either intervene LLMs only at inference without addressing their inherent limitations or overlook the potential for self-improvement. In this paper, we introduce GenDiE (Generate, Discriminate, Evolve), a novel self-evolving framework that enhances context faithfulness through fine-grained sentence-level optimization. GenDiE combines both generative and discriminative training, equipping LLMs with self-generation and self-scoring capabilities to facilitate iterative self-evolution. This supports both data construction for model alignment and score-guided search during inference. Furthermore, by treating each sentence in a response as an independent optimization unit, GenDiE effectively addresses the limitations of previous approaches that optimize at the holistic answer level, which may miss unfaithful details. Experiments on ASQA (in-domain LFQA) and ConFiQA (out-of-domain counterfactual QA) datasets demonstrate that GenDiE surpasses various baselines in both faithfulness and correctness, and exhibits robust performance for domain adaptation.
Measuring Political Preferences in AI Systems: An Integrative Approach
Measuring Political Preferences in AI Systems - A n Integrative Approach David Rozado Political biases in Large Language Model (LLM) - based artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as OpenAI ' s ChatGPT or Google ' s Gemini, have been previously reported . While several prior studies have attempted to quantify these biases using political orientation tests, such approaches are limited by potential tests ' calibration biases and constrained response formats that do not reflect real - world human - AI interaction s. This study employs a multi - method approach to assess political bias in leading AI systems, integrating four complementary methodologies: (1) linguistic comparison of AI - generated text with the language used by Republican and Democratic U.S. Congress mem bers, (2) analysis of political viewpoints embedded in AI - generated policy recommendations, (3) sentiment analysis of AI - generated text toward politically affiliated public figures, and (4) standardized political orientation testing. Results indicate a con sistent left - leaning bias across most contemporary AI systems, with arguably varying degrees of intensity. However, this bias is not an inherent feature of LLMs; prior research demonstrates that fine - tuning with politically skewed data can realign these mo dels across the ideological spectrum. The presence of systematic political bias in AI systems poses risks, including reduced viewpoint diversity, increased societal polarization, and the potential for public mistrust in AI technologies. To mitigate these r isks, AI systems should be designed to prioritize factual accuracy while maintaining neutrality on most lawful normative issues. Furthermore, independent monitoring platforms are necessary to ensure transparency, accountability, and responsible AI developm ent. Introduction Recent advancements in AI technology, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, represent one of the most significant technological breakthroughs in recent decades. The ability of AI systems to understand and generate human - like natural language has unlocked new possibilities for automation, human - computer interaction, content generation, and information retrieval. However, th ese impressive capabilities ha ve also raised concerns abo ut the potential biases that such systems might harbor [1], [2], [3], [4] . Preliminary evidence has suggested that AI systems exhibit political biases in the textual content they generate [2], [5], [6] .
Hate Speech and Sentiment of YouTube Video Comments From Public and Private Sources Covering the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Hofmann, Simon, Sommermann, Christoph, Kraus, Mathias, Zschech, Patrick, Rosenberger, Julian
This study explores the prevalence of hate speech (HS) and sentiment in YouTube video comments concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict by analyzing content from both public and private news sources. The research involved annotating 4983 comments for HS and sentiments (neutral, pro-Israel, and pro-Palestine). Subsequently, machine learning (ML) models were developed, demonstrating robust predictive capabilities with area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) scores ranging from 0.83 to 0.90. These models were applied to the extracted comment sections of YouTube videos from public and private sources, uncovering a higher incidence of HS in public sources (40.4%) compared to private sources (31.6%). Sentiment analysis revealed a predominantly neutral stance in both source types, with more pronounced sentiments towards Israel and Palestine observed in public sources. This investigation highlights the dynamic nature of online discourse surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict and underscores the potential of moderating content in a politically charged environment.
Holistically Evaluating the Environmental Impact of Creating Language Models
Morrison, Jacob, Na, Clara, Fernandez, Jared, Dettmers, Tim, Strubell, Emma, Dodge, Jesse
As the performance of artificial intelligence systems has dramatically increased, so too has the environmental impact of creating these systems. While many model developers release estimates of the power consumption and carbon emissions from the final training runs for their latest models, there is comparatively little transparency into the impact of model development, hardware manufacturing, and total water usage throughout. In this work, we estimate the real-world environmental impact of developing a series of language models, ranging from 20 million to 13 billion active parameters, trained on up to 5.6 trillion tokens each. When accounting for hardware manufacturing, model development, and our final training runs, we find that our series of models released 493 metric tons of carbon emissions, equivalent to powering about 98 homes in the United States for one year, and consumed 2.769 million liters of water, equivalent to about 24.5 years of water usage by a person in the United States, even though our data center is extremely water-efficient. We measure and report the environmental impact of our model development; to the best of our knowledge we are the first to do so for LLMs, and we find that model development, the impact of which is generally not disclosed by most model developers, amounted to 50% of that of training. By looking at detailed time series data for power consumption, we also find that power usage throughout training is not consistent, fluctuating between 15% and 85% of our hardware's maximum power draw, with negative implications for grid-scale planning as demand continues to grow. We close with a discussion on the continued difficulty of estimating the environmental impact of AI systems, and key takeaways for model developers and the public at large. In recent years, the field of artificial intelligence has progressed at an unprecedented pace, driven in large part by the development and deployment of large language and multimodal models.