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UK copyright law consultation 'fixed' in favour of AI firms, peer says

The Guardian

"We've got an open consultation but that consultation is fixed and inadequate," she said. The government has proposed four options in its consultation. It describes such an outcome as "the primary object of this consultation". "Why have a preferred choice if it is an open consultation?" said Kidron. "What I say to MPs is, if you are members of a government that has put all its chips on growth, why is that same government undermining creative industries that bring 126bn to the UK economy and is giving away for free the property rights of 2.4 million people who work in those industries? The creative industries impact every constituency, region and nation," she said.


Elon Musk Leads Group Seeking to Buy OpenAI. Sam Altman Says 'No Thank You'

TIME - Tech

A group of investors led by Elon Musk is offering about 97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI, escalating a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that Musk helped found a decade ago. Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to take control of the ChatGPT maker and revert it to its original charitable mission as a nonprofit research lab, according to Musk's attorney Marc Toberoff. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid on Musk's social platform X, saying, "no thank you but we will buy Twitter for 9.74 billion if you want." Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for 44 billion in 2022. Musk and Altman, who together helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it, have been in a long-running feud over the startup's direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.


Corporate Greenwashing Detection in Text - a Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This increased awareness has translated into guidelines, laws, and investments, such as the European Green Deal [84] or the Inflation Reduction Act in the US [106]. Many companies have used the financial incentives offered by states, and the guidelines and legislation to make significant steps towards sustainability [109]. At the same time, this growing attention also generated an advertising opportunity for companies that aim to promote themselves as environmentally aware and responsible. Indeed, some companies have been found to deliberately manipulate their data and statistics to appear more environment-friendly. The Diesel Scandal around the Volkswagen car company is a prominent example [116]. However, such cases are not the norm. More commonly, companies avoid outright data manipulation but present themselves in a misleadingly positive light regarding their environmental impact - a practice called greenwashing.


NDAI Agreements

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study a fundamental challenge in the economics of innovation: an inventor must reveal details of a new idea to secure compensation or funding, yet such disclosure risks expropriation. We present a model in which a seller (inventor) and buyer (investor) bargain over an information good under the threat of hold-up. In the classical setting, the seller withholds disclosure to avoid misappropriation, leading to inefficiency. We show that trusted execution environments (TEEs) combined with AI agents can mitigate and even fully eliminate this hold-up problem. By delegating the disclosure and payment decisions to tamper-proof programs, the seller can safely reveal the invention without risking expropriation, achieving full disclosure and an efficient ex post transfer. Moreover, even if the invention's value exceeds a threshold that TEEs can fully secure, partial disclosure still improves outcomes compared to no disclosure. Recognizing that real AI agents are imperfect, we model "agent errors" in payments or disclosures and demonstrate that budget caps and acceptance thresholds suffice to preserve most of the efficiency gains. Our results imply that cryptographic or hardware-based solutions can function as an "ironclad NDA," substantially mitigating the fundamental disclosure-appropriation paradox first identified by Arrow (1962) and Nelson (1959). This has far-reaching policy implications for fostering R&D, technology transfer, and collaboration.


Educating a Responsible AI Workforce: Piloting a Curricular Module on AI Policy in a Graduate Machine Learning Course

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies begin to permeate diverse fields--from healthcare to education--consumers, researchers and policymakers are increasingly raising concerns about whether and how AI is regulated. It is therefore reasonable to anticipate that alignment with principles of'ethical' or'responsible' AI, as well as compliance with law and policy, will form an increasingly important part of AI development. Yet, for the most part, the conventional computer science curriculum is ill-equipped to prepare students for these challenges. To this end, we seek to explore how new educational content related to AI ethics and AI policy can be integrated into both ethics-and technical-focused courses. This paper describes a two-lecture AI policy module that was piloted in a graduate-level introductory machine learning course in 2024. The module, which includes an in-class active learning game, is evaluated using data from student surveys before and after the lectures, and pedagogical motivations and considerations are discussed. We find that the module is successful in engaging otherwise technically-oriented students on the topic of AI policy, increasing student awareness of the social impacts of a variety of AI technologies and developing student interest in the field of AI regulation. Introduction The explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is widely documented and increasingly evident in everyday life: some responses from the search engine Google now include an "AI Overview" inserted before the first webpage link; companies like Tesla and Waymo have seen success in implementing partial or full autonomous driving in vehicles on live roads; and "Apple Intelligence" was the flagship feature for the launch of Apple's new smartphone in fall 2024. Yet what legal or policy response this technological growth will precipitate is less certain [1, 2]. Nevertheless, it should be expected that the development and enactment of regulatory frameworks for AI will demand AI engineers with a command not only of the technical intricacies of AI models, but also of the policy and regulatory landscape for AI development and compliance [3].


Tractable Transformers for Flexible Conditional Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Non-autoregressive (NAR) generative models are valuable because they can handle diverse conditional generation tasks in a more principled way than their autoregressive (AR) counterparts, which are constrained by sequential dependency requirements. Recent advancements in NAR models, such as diffusion language models, have demonstrated superior performance in unconditional generation compared to AR models (e.g., GPTs) of similar sizes. However, such improvements do not always lead to improved conditional generation performance. We show that a key reason for this gap is the difficulty in generalizing to conditional probability queries unseen during training. As a result, strong unconditional generation performance does not guarantee high-quality conditional generation. This paper proposes Tractable Transformers (Tracformer), a Transformer-based generative model that is more robust to different conditional generation tasks. Unlike existing models that rely solely on global contextual features derived from full inputs, Tracformers incorporate a sparse Transformer encoder to capture both local and global contextual information. This information is routed through a decoder for conditional generation. Empirical results demonstrate that Tracformers achieve state-of-the-art conditional generation performance on text modeling compared to recent diffusion and AR model baselines.


LASP-2: Rethinking Sequence Parallelism for Linear Attention and Its Hybrid

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Linear sequence modeling approaches, such as linear attention, provide advantages like linear-time training and constant-memory inference over sequence lengths. However, existing sequence parallelism (SP) methods are either not optimized for the right-product-first feature of linear attention or use a ring-style communication strategy, which results in lower computation parallelism, limits their scalability for longer sequences in distributed systems. In this paper, we introduce LASP-2, a new SP method to enhance both communication and computation parallelism when training linear attention transformer models with very-long input sequences. Compared to previous work LASP, LASP-2 rethinks the minimal communication requirement for SP on linear attention layers, reorganizes the whole communication-computation workflow of LASP. In this way, only one single AllGather collective communication is needed on intermediate memory states, whose sizes are independent of the sequence length, leading to significant improvements of both communication and computation parallelism, as well as their overlap. Additionally, we extend LASP-2 to LASP-2H by applying similar communication redesign to standard attention modules, offering an efficient SP solution for hybrid models that blend linear and standard attention layers. Our evaluation on a Linear-Llama3 model, a variant of Llama3 with linear attention replacing standard attention, demonstrates the effectiveness of LASP-2 and LASP-2H. Specifically, LASP-2 achieves training speed improvements of 15.2% over LASP and 36.6% over Ring Attention, with a sequence length of 2048K across 64 GPUs. The Code is released as a part of: https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linear-MoE.


PolicySimEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Policy Outcomes through Agent-Based Simulation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the growing adoption of agent-based models in policy evaluation, a pressing question arises: Can such systems effectively simulate and analyze complex social scenarios to inform policy decisions? Addressing this challenge could significantly enhance the policy-making process, offering researchers and practitioners a systematic way to validate, explore, and refine policy outcomes. To advance this goal, we introduce PolicySimEval, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of agent-based simulations in policy assessment tasks. PolicySimEval aims to reflect the real-world complexities faced by social scientists and policymakers. The benchmark is composed of three categories of evaluation tasks: (1) 20 comprehensive scenarios that replicate end-to-end policy modeling challenges, complete with annotated expert solutions; (2) 65 targeted sub-tasks that address specific aspects of agent-based simulation (e.g., agent behavior calibration); and (3) 200 auto-generated tasks to enable large-scale evaluation and method development. Experiments show that current state-of-the-art frameworks struggle to tackle these tasks effectively, with the highest-performing system achieving only 24.5\% coverage rate on comprehensive scenarios, 15.04\% on sub-tasks, and 14.5\% on auto-generated tasks. These results highlight the difficulty of the task and the gap between current capabilities and the requirements for real-world policy evaluation.


Intelligent Legal Assistant: An Interactive Clarification System for Legal Question Answering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rise of large language models has opened new avenues for users seeking legal advice. However, users often lack professional legal knowledge, which can lead to questions that omit critical information. This deficiency makes it challenging for traditional legal question-answering systems to accurately identify users' actual needs, often resulting in imprecise or generalized advice. In this work, we develop a legal question-answering system called Intelligent Legal Assistant, which interacts with users to precisely capture their needs. When a user poses a question, the system requests that the user select their geographical location to pinpoint the applicable laws. It then generates clarifying questions and options based on the key information missing from the user's initial question. This allows the user to select and provide the necessary details. Once all necessary information is provided, the system produces an in-depth legal analysis encompassing three aspects: overall conclusion, jurisprudential analysis, and resolution suggestions.


Elevating Legal LLM Responses: Harnessing Trainable Logical Structures and Semantic Knowledge with Legal Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across numerous domains, yet they experience notable deficiencies in legal question-answering tasks. LLMs often generate generalized responses that lack the logical specificity required for expert legal advice and are prone to hallucination, providing answers that appear correct but are unreliable. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques offer partial solutions to address this challenge, but existing approaches typically focus only on semantic similarity, neglecting the logical structure essential to legal reasoning. In this paper, we propose the Logical-Semantic Integration Model (LSIM), a novel supervised framework that bridges semantic and logical coherence. LSIM comprises three components: reinforcement learning predicts a structured fact-rule chain for each question, a trainable Deep Structured Semantic Model (DSSM) retrieves the most relevant candidate questions by integrating semantic and logical features, and in-context learning generates the final answer using the retrieved content. Our experiments on a real-world legal QA dataset-validated through both automated metrics and human evaluation-demonstrate that LSIM significantly enhances accuracy and reliability compared to existing methods.