Government
The UK's Answer to Darpa Wants to Rewire the Human Brain
ARIA has a billion-dollar budget and big aspirations for tackling everything from epilepsy to Alzheimer's. The UK's Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) was established in 2023 with the goal of pursuing "high-risk, high-reward" moonshots in sectors ranging from bolstering food security to new ways of ramping up human immunity . With more than £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) worth of government funding earmarked between now and 2030, one of ARIA's most ambitious programs is a £69 million initiative that aims to develop more tailored ways of modulating the human brain. The hope is to eventually address an entire range of disorders, from epilepsy to Alzheimer's. Reports have previously estimated that this suite of neurological conditions costs the UK economy tens of billions of dollars each year.
Outrage as Disneyland launches 'dystopian' technology at park entrances
King Charles tells Congress UK and US'have always found ways to come together' during historic address James Comey indicted AGAIN by Trump's Justice Department over seashell social media'assassination' accusation Justin Baldoni says he's not to blame for Blake Lively's downfall as lawyers brand her a'bully' with a history of flop business ventures at pre-trial hearing How to turbocharge your Ozempic and Mounjaro: Exact time, day of week and WHERE to inject on body... 'rotation' trick and other doctor-approved steps to lose MORE weight and avoid side effects I'm a urologist: Men worried about having a small penis need to know they CAN grow it I tried this 45-minute new size-boosting treatment myself Small print on page 26 of Newsom's billionaire's bill that reveals his real plans and how everyone could be hit Every woman who uses retinol must read this. You won't believe these beauty influencer claims they're just so damaging: DR SHEILA NAZARIAN Matt Damon's wife, 49, is accused of ...
Why Sharing a Screenshot Can Get You Jailed in the UAE
The war in Iran has drawn attention to arrests in the United Arab Emirates over online content, but the legal framework behind that enforcement has existed for years. When Iranian missile and drone attacks on the United Arab Emirates began earlier this year, cybercrime laws also came into focus as the conflict played out in the sky--and online. Authorities announced arrests linked to misleading videos, AI-generated clips, illegal filming, and the spread of misinformation. For many residents, the reaction was one of surprise: How could a screenshot, forwarded video, or social media post become a criminal matter? The answer lies in legal frameworks that were already in place.
Ukrainian drones strike Russia's Tuapse refinery for third time
What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' Ukrainian drones strike Russia's Tuapse refinery for third time NewsFeed Ukrainian drones strike Russia's Tuapse refinery for third time Ukraine has targeted a major Russian oil refinery in the Black Sea port city of Tuapse for the third time in less than two weeks, setting off a fresh blaze and prompting authorities to evacuate local residents. Qatar says using Hormuz Strait as political weapon is'unacceptable' Australia's top diplomat visits China to talk energy security
UAE leaves OPEC in blow to oil cartel amid war on Iran
The United Arab Emirates has announced it's withdrawing from OPEC and OPEC+. Al Jazeera's Michael Appel outlines the significance of the announcement and its likely impact on the energy market. Ukrainian drones strike Russia's Tuapse refinery for third time Qatar says using Hormuz Strait as political weapon is'unacceptable' Australia's top diplomat visits China to talk energy security
Google and the Pentagon sign classified deal to give the Department of Defense unfettered access to its AI models
A source says the contract doesn't give the company any veto power over how the tech is used by the government. Google has signed a deal that allows the US Department of Defense to use its AI models for any lawful government purpose. This is according to a report by, which also notes that the full details of the contract are classified. An anonymous source within the company has suggested that the two entities have agreed that the search giant's AI tech shouldn't be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human oversight and control. However, the contract also reportedly doesn't give Google any right to control or veto anything the government decides to do.
Unlimiformer: Long-Range Transformers with Unlimited Length Input
Since the proposal of transformers (Vaswani et al., 2017), these models have been limited to bounded input lengths, because of their need to attend to every token in the input. In this work, we propose Unlimiformer: a general approach that wraps any existing pretrained encoder-decoder transformer, and offloads the cross-attention computation to a single k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) index, while the returned kNN distances are the attention dot-product scores. This kNN index can be kept on either the GPU or CPU memory and queried in sub-linear time; this way, we can index practically unlimited input sequences, while every attention head in every decoder layer retrieves its top-k keys, instead of attending to every key. We evaluate Unlimiformer on several long-document and book-summarization benchmarks, showing that it can process even 500k token-long inputs from the BookSum dataset, without any input truncation at test time. We demonstrate that Unlimiformer improves pretrained models such as BART (Lewis et al., 2020a) and Longformer (Beltagy et al., 2020) by extending them to unlimited inputs without additional learned weights and without modifying their code. Our code and models are publicly available, and support LLaMA-2 as well2.
The Download: Musk and Altman's legal showdown, and AI's profit problem
Plus: OpenAI has ended its exclusive partnership with Microsoft. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going to court over OpenAI's future Ahead of OpenAI's IPO, the court could rule on whether the company can exist as a for-profit enterprise. It could even oust its leadership. Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, claims he was deceived into bankrolling the firm under false pretenses. Find out how the trial could upend the global AI race . In a celebrated episode, a community of gnomes sneak out at night to steal underpants.