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'The world is not prepared:' How AI energy thirst might tap into geothermal power

Popular Science

Tech companies champing at the bit to create the latest, greatest generative AI models face an uncomfortable dilemma. Data-hungry models like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini rely on troves of digital material in data centers that require massive amounts of energy for processing and constant cooling. Some estimates suggest this swelling energy demand could account for nine percent of all US electricity by the end of the decade. That's up from around four percent today, a steep increase experts attribute in part to Big Tech's brewing generative AI arms race. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar aren't ready to meet demand alone. Instead, much of the new energy could come from fossil fuel sources which could undermine many of these companies' ambitious "net zero" and carbon neutral pledges.


Fox News AI Newsletter: Holy See calls for end to autonomous weapons

FOX News

Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier has the latest on the pros and cons of the bombshell developments on'Special Report.' The Vatican flag flies outside the United Nations headquarters on Sept. 25, 2015, in New York City. 'PROPER HUMAN CONTROL': A delegation representing the Holy See urged the United Nations this week to put a moratorium on autonomous weapons designed to kill without human decision-making. 'INSANE': Canva is facing pushback from customers over plans to increase subscription prices by more than 300% in some instances. United Nations Headquarters in New York City is seen flanked by Hamas and Hezbollah fighters.


Nvidia shares slump amid reports US is ramping up antitrust investigation

The Guardian

Shares in the AI chip designer Nvidia have continued to slide overnight after a report said US authorities were ramping up an investigation into whether the company had breached competition laws. The company's shares fell 2.4% in after-hours trading, exacerbating a near-10% drop in the regular trading session that slashed its value by 279bn ( 212bn) to 2.6tn, marking the largest one-day drop in history for a US company. Overnight, the US Department of Justice sent subpoenas to Nvidia and other tech companies, in a move that will force recipients to provide information under law, Bloomberg reported. Officials are said to be concerned the company has made it harder for clients to switch to other semiconductor suppliers and is penalising buyers that refuse to exclusively use Nvidia's AI chips. Such a move would signal an escalation of the US antitrust investigation, and brings the government a step closer to launching a formal complaint against Nvidia. The sell-off on Tuesday came amid a wider sell-off on markets sparked by weak US manufacturing data that raised broader concerns about the outlook for the country's economy among investors.


Ukraine's losses outweigh Kursk gains, as Russia on cusp of taking key town

Al Jazeera

Kyiv, Ukraine – Svitlana Menyaylo doesn't want to hear a word about the success of Ukrainian forces in the western Russian region of Kursk. Since August 6, Ukrainian soldiers have occupied dozens of Russian villages on more than 1,000 square kilometres (620 square miles) and are digging in to repel an imminent Russian counteroffensive. But for Menyaylo, a seamstress from the besieged town of Pokrovsk in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, the very presence of Ukrainian troops in Kursk feels like treason. Pokrovsk, the administrative centre of a heavily industrialised agglomeration with a pre-war population of almost 400,000, is likely to be taken over by advancing Russian troops soon. They are less than 10km (6 miles) east of it – and keep inching in every minute after months of heavy bombardment and "meat marches", frontal attacks on Ukrainian positions that have cost Russian generals tens of thousands of servicemen.


The Japanese Robot Controversy Lurking in Israel's Military Supply Chain

WIRED

Activists in Japan earlier this year accused one of the country's largest robotics manufacturers of profiting off the war in Gaza, accusing it of violating its own company policies in aiding the Israeli defense industry. At a protest outside the headquarters of FANUC Corporation earlier this summer, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) protesters demanded the Japanese conglomerate cut off ties with Israel and all the defense companies that contribute to Israel's military. "We also call on FANUC not to be further complicit in genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity," Taizo Imano, one of the protest organizers, said in June. Specifically, Imano and the rest of the BDS activists believe Japan is breaching its own export controls. If true, it would significantly alter how Israel acquires high-end machinery for its defense sector.


Major political shake-up starts in Ukraine; arms chief, ministers quit

Al Jazeera

A major shake-up of the government is under way in Ukraine after at least six ministers resigned and a presidential aide was fired. Among those who quit late on Tuesday was Minister for Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin who was in charge of weapons production. He said he expected to take another role in defence. Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna as well as the justice, environment and reintegration ministers also resigned, as did the head of Ukraine's State Property Fund, Vitaliy Koval. About a third of the positions in the cabinet are now vacant.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 922

Al Jazeera

At least 51 people were killed and 271 injured when two Russian ballistic missiles hit a military academy and a nearby hospital in Ukraine's central town of Poltava in the deadliest single attack in the war this year. The missiles hit shortly after the air raid alert sounded when many people were on their way to a bomb shelter, the Ministry of Defence said in a statement. A woman and her eight-year-old son were killed after the Zaporizhia region hotel where they were staying was hit in a Russian missile attack. Her husband and daughter were injured, Ukrainian authorities said. Ukraine's Ministry of Energy said three employees were injured in a Russian drone attack on a power facility in the northern region of Chernihiv.


Nteasee: A mixed methods study of expert and general population perspectives on deploying AI for health in African countries

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for health has the potential to significantly change and improve healthcare. However in most African countries, identifying culturally and contextually attuned approaches for deploying these solutions is not well understood. To bridge this gap, we conduct a qualitative study to investigate the best practices, fairness indicators, and potential biases to mitigate when deploying AI for health in African countries, as well as explore opportunities where artificial intelligence could make a positive impact in health. We used a mixed methods approach combining in-depth interviews (IDIs) and surveys. We conduct 1.5-2 hour long IDIs with 50 experts in health, policy, and AI across 17 countries, and through an inductive approach we conduct a qualitative thematic analysis on expert IDI responses. We administer a blinded 30-minute survey with case studies to 672 general population participants across 5 countries in Africa and analyze responses on quantitative scales, statistically comparing responses by country, age, gender, and level of familiarity with AI. We thematically summarize open-ended responses from surveys. Our results find generally positive attitudes, high levels of trust, accompanied by moderate levels of concern among general population participants for AI usage for health in Africa. This contrasts with expert responses, where major themes revolved around trust/mistrust, ethical concerns, and systemic barriers to integration, among others. This work presents the first-of-its-kind qualitative research study of the potential of AI for health in Africa from an algorithmic fairness angle, with perspectives from both experts and the general population. We hope that this work guides policymakers and drives home the need for further research and the inclusion of general population perspectives in decision-making around AI usage.


The Design of an LLM-powered Unstructured Analytics System

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LLMs demonstrate an uncanny ability to process unstructured data, and as such, have the potential to go beyond search and run complex, semantic analyses at scale. We describe the design of an unstructured analytics system, Aryn, and the tenets and use cases that motivate its design. With Aryn, users can specify queries in natural language and the system automatically determines a semantic plan and executes it to compute an answer from a large collection of unstructured documents using LLMs. At the core of Aryn is Sycamore, a declarative document processing engine, built using Ray, that provides a reliable distributed abstraction called DocSets. Sycamore allows users to analyze, enrich, and transform complex documents at scale. Aryn also comprises Luna, a query planner that translates natural language queries to Sycamore scripts, and the Aryn Partitioner, which takes raw PDFs and document images, and converts them to DocSets for downstream processing. Using Aryn, we demonstrate a real world use case for analyzing accident reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and discuss some of the major challenges we encountered in deploying Aryn in the wild.


Domain Decomposition-based coupling of Operator Inference reduced order models via the Schwarz alternating method

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents and evaluates an approach for coupling together subdomain-local reduced order models (ROMs) constructed via non-intrusive operator inference (OpInf) with each other and with subdomain-local full order models (FOMs), following a domain decomposition of the spatial geometry on which a given partial differential equation (PDE) is posed. Joining subdomain-local models is accomplished using the overlapping Schwarz alternating method, a minimally-intrusive multiscale coupling technique that works by transforming a monolithic problem into a sequence of subdomain-local problems, which communicate through transmission boundary conditions imposed on the subdomain interfaces. After formulating the overlapping Schwarz alternating method for OpInf ROMs, termed OpInf-Schwarz, we evaluate the method's accuracy and efficiency on several test cases involving the heat equation in two spatial dimensions. We demonstrate that the method is capable of coupling together arbitrary combinations of OpInf ROMs and FOMs, and that speed-ups over a monolithic FOM are possible when performing OpInf ROM coupling.