On Feb. 11, President Trump issued a new executive order regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Darrell West from Brookings wrote a brief analysis of the order, Caleb Watney from R Street critiqued it on Lawfare, and major media outlets have provided some reporting and commentary on the rollout. Rather than repeat what the order says or what others have said about it, below are three compliments and three concerns based on my initial review of the order. The president actually issued the order. No one is really sure exactly how transformative AI will be--there is a lot of potential in AI, but there is also a lot of hype.

Better Language Models and Their Implications "Our model, called GPT-2 (a successor to GPT), was trained simply to predict the next word in 40GB of Internet text. Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper." AI Researchers Debate the Ethics of Sharing Potentially Harmful Programs The debate has been wide-ranging and sometimes contentious. It even turned into a bit of a meme among AI researchers, who joked that they've had an amazing breakthrough in the lab, but the results were too dangerous to share at the moment.

Amy Webb, futurist, NYU professor, and award-winning author, has spent much of the last decade researching, discussing, and meeting with people and organizations about artificial intelligence. "We've reached a fever pitch in all things AI," she says. Now it's time to step back to see where it's going. This is the task of her new book, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, where she takes a bird's-eye view of trends that, she warns, have put the development of technology on a dangerous path. In the US, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Apple (the "G-MAFIA") are hamstrung by the relentless short-term demands of a capitalistic market, making long-term, thoughtful planning for AI impossible. In China, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu are consolidating and mining massive amounts of data to fuel the government's authoritarian ambitions.

Popular video sharing app TikTok has received the largest ever fine from a US regulator for violating children's privacy, resulting in login issues for many of its users. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged that the Musical.ly TikTok agreed to pay $5.7 million (£4.3m) on Wednesday to settle the case. As part of the settlement, TikTok's operators are required to remove any videos made by children under 13-years-old. Since the announcement of the settlement, some TikTok users reported being locked out of their accounts.

A Nasa robot being tested in the most Mars-like environment on Earth has found samples that could help humanity find alien life, scientists say. The rover pulled up soil samples from beneath the Earth that contained strange and highly specialised microbes that were spread out in patches. The unusual discoveries appear to have developed to deal with the very limited amounts of water and nutrients in the soil, as well as its chemistry. The discovery not only shows that the lander will successfully be able to search for any potential life on Mars or elsewhere, but also shows the first time these particular hardy microbes – which could be similar to any currently living on the red planet – have been discovered. The findings have been published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology and scientists say they will help the search for signs of life when future missions head to Mars.

The Northern District of California confirmed this approach by invalidating claims directed to automatically generating an "ensemble" of machine learning models under § 101 stating that it was directed towards "mathematical processes that not only could be performed by humans but also go to the general abstract concept of predictive analytics rather than any specific application."

A new DoD plan for incorporating artificial intelligence into its operations that anticipates that it will have a significant impact on its civilian workforce, along with its military and contractor personnel. The strategy document mirrors projections of the potential impact on workers contained in other administration plans including the President's Management Agenda. None of those documents project a potential number of jobs lost but each concludes that some will be overtaken by artificial intelligence. "AI is poised to transform every industry, and is expected to impact every corner of the department, spanning operations, training, sustainment, force protection, recruiting, healthcare, and many others . . . AI can help us better maintain our equipment, reduce operational costs, and improve readiness," it says.

Whetstone, a software tool that sharpens the output of artificial neurons, has enabled neural computer networks to process information up to a hundred times more efficiently than the current industry standard, say the Sandia National Laboratories researchers who developed it. The aptly named software, which greatly reduces the amount of circuitry needed to perform autonomous tasks, is expected to increase the penetration of artificial intelligence into markets for mobile phones, self-driving cars and automated interpretation of images. "Instead of sending out endless energy dribbles of information," Sandia neuroscientist Brad Aimone said, "artificial neurons trained by Whetstone release energy in spikes, much like human neurons do." The largest artificial intelligence companies have produced spiking tools for their own products, but none are as fast or efficient as Whetstone, says Sandia mathematician William Severa. "Large companies are aware of this process and have built similar systems, but often theirs work only for their own designs. Whetstone will work on many neural platforms."

In 1985, the TV film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future presented a science fictional cyberpunk world where an evil media company tried to create an artificial intelligence based on a reporter's brain to generate content to fill airtime. There were somewhat unintended results. Replace "reporter" with "redditors," "evil media company" with "well meaning artificial intelligence researchers," and "airtime" with "a very concerned blog post," and you've got what Ars reported about last week: Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2), a Franken-creation from researchers at the non-profit research organization OpenAI. Unlike some earlier text-generation systems based on a statistical analysis of text (like those using Markov chains), GPT-2 is a text-generating bot based on a model with 1.5 billion parameters. With or without guidance, GPT-2 can create blocks of text that look like they were written by humans.

Emergence of the utility of 3D point cloud data in critical vision tasks (e.g., ADAS) urges researchers to pay more attention to the robustness of 3D representations and deep networks. To this end, we develop an attack and defense scheme, dedicated to 3D point cloud data, for preventing 3D point clouds from manipulated as well as pursuing noise-tolerable 3D representation. A set of novel 3D point cloud attack operations are proposed via pointwise gradient perturbation and adversarial point attachment / detachment. We then develop a flexible perturbation-measurement scheme for 3D point cloud data to detect potential attack data or noisy sensing data. Extensive experimental results on common point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the validity of the proposed 3D attack and defense framework.