Government
Claude 2: ChatGPT rival launches chatbot that can summarise a novel
A US artificial intelligence company has launched a rival chatbot to ChatGPT that can summarise novel-sized blocks of text and operates from a list of safety principles drawn from sources such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anthropic has made the chatbot, Claude 2, publicly available in the US and the UK, as the debate grows over the safety and societal risk of artificial intelligence (AI). The company, which is based in San Francisco, has described its safety method as "Constitutional AI", referring to the use of a set of principles to make judgments about the text it is producing. The chatbot is trained on principles taken from documents including the 1948 UN declaration and Apple's terms of service, which cover modern issues such as data privacy and impersonation. One example of a Claude 2 principle based on the UN declaration is: "Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality and a sense of brotherhood."
Claude 2: ChatGPT rival launches chatbot that can summarise a novel
A US artificial intelligence company has launched a rival chatbot to ChatGPT that can summarise novel-sized blocks of text and operates from a list of safety principles drawn from sources such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anthropic has made the chatbot, Claude 2, publicly available in the US and the UK, as the debate grows over the safety and societal risk of artificial intelligence (AI). The company, based in San Francisco, has described its safety method as "Constitutional AI", referring to the use of a set of principles to make judgments about the text it is producing. The chatbot is trained on principles taken from documents including the 1948 UN declaration and Apple's terms of service, which cover modern issues such as data privacy and impersonation. One example of a Claude 2 principle, based on the UN declaration, is: "Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality and a sense of brotherhood."
Concerns raised over China's new counter-espionage law: 'anyone can be detained'
Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang weighs in on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's upcoming trip to China and the increase in Chinese nationals at the southern border on'The Ingraham Angle.' China has significantly expanded its legal framework to target those expected to or affiliated with threatening national security, putting pressure on the relationship between foreigners in China and Chinese working with foreign entities across all fields. Adding pressure to the already fragile relations, Chinese citizens are called upon to be vigilant against espionage and national security risks as part of a broader whole-of-society approach. The amendment is one of the latest attempts by Chinese lawmakers to control the flow of information among growing national security concerns. Recently, authorities closed its most extensive academic database, the privately owned China National Knowledge Infrastructure for several non-Chinese institutes, also the country's financial database restricted foreign access.
'Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning' Is the Perfect AI Panic Movie
American action movie villains have always acted as a sort of paranoia litmus test, capturing a snapshot of the particular anxieties plaguing the country and its citizens at any given time. In the 1990s and '00s, with the Red Menace long forgotten, movies leaned heavily on the awful "bad Arab" trope, pulling their villains from the Middle East. Other recent smash-'em-ups have made bad guys out of rogue spies, shadowy cyber terrorists, and self-interested arms dealers, all common players in the global news landscape. But for Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning Part One, out this week, writers Bruce Geller, Erik Jendresen, and Christopher McQuarrie (who also directed the movie) made their big bad--known as The Entity--out of a slightly more amorphous fear: that of an all-powerful, all-seeing, sentient AI. It has access to anything with an online network and can use those evil techno powers to manipulate everything from global military superpowers to a grandma with a gun.
Full text: NATO Vilnius summit communique
NATO leaders are holding their annual summit as Ukraine looks to the security alliance for support in its attempt to push back invading Russian forces. The Vilnius communique, however, while emphasising NATO's support for Ukraine, gave no clear timetable on when the country might be able to join the alliance, in a major disappointment for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had travelled to the Lithuanian capital. "Ukraine's future is in NATO," the leaders said in the joint statement on Tuesday. "We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met," the declaration said, without specifying the conditions. The communique also touched on the Asia Pacific, with the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea all attending as NATO allies. It said China was a challenge to NATO's interests, security and values with its "ambitions and coercive policies" triggering a furious response from Beijing. And it accused Beijing and Moscow of "mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order". China has said it wants peace in Ukraine, but has not condemned Russia's full scale invasion since it began in February 2022. NATO is a defensive Alliance. It is the unique, essential and indispensable transatlantic forum to consult, coordinate and act on all matters related to our individual and collective security. We reaffirm our iron-clad commitment to defend each other and every inch of Allied territory at all times, protect our one billion citizens, and safeguard our freedom and democracy, in accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. We will continue to ensure our collective defence from all threats, no matter where they stem from, based on a 360-degree approach, to fulfil NATO's three core tasks of deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security. We adhere to international law and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and are committed to upholding the rules-based international order. This Summit marks a milestone in strengthening our Alliance. We look forward to our valuable exchanges with the Heads of State and Government of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea, as well as the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission at this Summit. We also welcome the engagements with the Foreign Ministers of Georgia and the Republic of Moldova, and with the Deputy Foreign Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as we continue to consult closely on the implementation of NATO's tailored support measures. This is an historic step for Finland and for NATO. For many years, we worked closely as partners; we now stand together as Allies. NATO membership makes Finland safer, and NATO stronger. Every nation has the right to choose its own security arrangements.
Senators leave classified AI briefing confident but wary of 'existential' threat posed by China
Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel weighs in on how artificial intelligence can change the patient-doctor relationship on'America's Newsroom.' Senators left a classified briefing on artificial intelligence Tuesday with a deeper understanding of how AI is already being used to bolster U.S. national security and the looming threat China poses as it deploys its own AI capabilities. "I think, from a military perspective, it's very existential because China's playing for keeps," Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., told Fox News Digital after the closed-door session. So, it's moving quickly, but I think the best we can do right now is get a firm understanding." Tuesday afternoon's briefing was the first-ever classified meeting with senators and key Pentagon officials about AI. Discussion included how the U.S. is using AI to maintain its national security edge and how adversaries like China are using this emerging tool. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters what he learned was "eye-opening." It comes after he told senators in a letter over the weekend that Congress is moving full steam ahead on his AI regulatory framework, which Schumer said Tuesday could take months to develop. HOW AI HAS SHAPED A VITAL NATO ALLY'S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to reporters after a classified Senate briefing on artificial intelligence at the U.S. Capitol July 11, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) "This briefing shows just depth, complexity, but necessity of getting something real done.
AI is making politics easier, cheaper and more dangerous
It's a jarring political advertisement: Images of a Chinese attack on Taiwan lead into scenes of looted banks and armed soldiers enforcing martial law in San Francisco. Those visuals in the Republican National Committee's ad aren't real, and the scenarios are pretty obviously fictional. But thanks to the handiwork of artificial intelligence, the images look like real life. Within days of the ad appearing online in April, Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, introduced legislation to require disclosure of AI-produced content in political advertisements. "This is going too far," she said in an interview.
National Origin Discrimination in Deep-learning-powered Automated Resume Screening
Li, Sihang, Li, Kuangzheng, Lu, Haibing
Many companies and organizations have started to use some form of AIenabled auto mated tools to assist in their hiring process, e.g. screening resumes, interviewing candi dates, performance evaluation. While those AI tools have greatly improved human re source operations efficiency and provided conveniences to job seekers as well, there are increasing concerns on unfair treatment to candidates, caused by underlying bias in AI systems. Laws around equal opportunity and fairness, like GDPR, CCPA, are introduced or under development, in attempt to regulate AI. However, it is difficult to implement AI regulations in practice, as technologies are constantly advancing and the risk perti nent to their applications can fail to be recognized. This study examined deep learning methods, a recent technology breakthrough, with focus on their application to automated resume screening. One impressive performance of deep learning methods is the represen tation of individual words as lowdimensional numerical vectors, called word embedding, which are learned from aggregated global wordword cooccurrence statistics from a cor pus, like Wikipedia or Google news. The resulting word representations possess interest ing linear substructures of the word vector space and have been widely used in down stream tasks, like resume screening. However, word embedding inherits and reinforces the stereotyping from the training corpus, as deep learning models essentially learn a probability distribution of words and their relations from history data. Our study finds out that if we rely on such deeplearningpowered automated resume screening tools, it may lead to decisions favoring or disfavoring certain demographic groups and raise eth ical, even legal, concerns. To address the issue, we developed bias mitigation method. Extensive experiments on real candidate resumes are conducted to validate our study
Robust scalable initialization for Bayesian variational inference with multi-modal Laplace approximations
Bridgman, Wyatt, Jones, Reese, Khalil, Mohammad
For predictive modeling relying on Bayesian inversion, fully independent, or ``mean-field'', Gaussian distributions are often used as approximate probability density functions in variational inference since the number of variational parameters is twice the number of unknown model parameters. The resulting diagonal covariance structure coupled with unimodal behavior can be too restrictive when dealing with highly non-Gaussian behavior, including multimodality. High-fidelity surrogate posteriors in the form of Gaussian mixtures can capture any distribution to an arbitrary degree of accuracy while maintaining some analytical tractability. Variational inference with Gaussian mixtures with full-covariance structures suffers from a quadratic growth in variational parameters with the number of model parameters. Coupled with the existence of multiple local minima due to nonconvex trends in the loss functions often associated with variational inference, these challenges motivate the need for robust initialization procedures to improve the performance and scalability of variational inference with mixture models. In this work, we propose a method for constructing an initial Gaussian mixture model approximation that can be used to warm-start the iterative solvers for variational inference. The procedure begins with an optimization stage in model parameter space in which local gradient-based optimization, globalized through multistart, is used to determine a set of local maxima, which we take to approximate the mixture component centers. Around each mode, a local Gaussian approximation is constructed via the Laplace method. Finally, the mixture weights are determined through constrained least squares regression. Robustness and scalability are demonstrated using synthetic tests. The methodology is applied to an inversion problem in structural dynamics involving unknown viscous damping coefficients.
Artificial Intelligence for Drug Discovery: Are We There Yet?
Hasselgren, Catrin, Oprea, Tudor I.
Drug discovery is adapting to novel technologies such as data science, informatics, and artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate effective treatment development while reducing costs and animal experiments. AI is transforming drug discovery, as indicated by increasing interest from investors, industrial and academic scientists, and legislators. Successful drug discovery requires optimizing properties related to pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, and clinical outcomes. This review discusses the use of AI in the three pillars of drug discovery: diseases, targets, and therapeutic modalities, with a focus on small molecule drugs. AI technologies, such as generative chemistry, machine learning, and multi-property optimization, have enabled several compounds to enter clinical trials. The scientific community must carefully vet known information to address the reproducibility crisis. The full potential of AI in drug discovery can only be realized with sufficient ground truth and appropriate human intervention at later pipeline stages.