Media
Elon Musk's Alternate Grok Reality
Amid a scandal over nonconsensual sexual images, Musk says his AI chatbot is a force for "truth and beauty." Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. In much of the world, Grok and its parent company both appear to be in serious trouble. After Grok, X's AI chatbot, has been used to generate sexualized and violent images of women and children, the social media company has faced a wave of backlash and censure, with new nationwide bans on accessing Grok in place and other consequences on the way. On Monday, the EU threatened to fine X under its broad Digital Services Act if it didn't act "quickly" to fix Grok, in the words of one regulator.
Abandoned pigs rescued on Tennessee's Looney Islands
Abandoned pigs rescued on Tennessee's Looney Islands The animals are in good hands thanks to patience and a'pig whisperer.' A team from Young-Williams Animal Center in Knoxville, Tennessee and Knox County Rescue worked together to save the abandoned pigs. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A team from the Young-Williams Animal Center in Knoxville recently rescued two pigs stranded on a group of islands in the Tennessee River. After receiving multiple calls about the animals that appeared to be abandoned on Looney Islands, the team worked with the Knoxville Fire Department and Knox County Rescue to get to the islands.
Revealed: The popular workplace trends putting your career at risk - so, are you guilty of sending 'spamplications' or producing 'workslop'?
Bill and Hillary Clinton declare themselves ABOVE THE LAW as they defy Epstein subpoena with astonishing letter slamming Trump's'cruel agenda' Vicious whispers expose the uncomfortable truth about Tulsi Gabbard... and what it means for her future Lawyer shows why he's most forgiving husband in America after glamorous teacher wife, 25, cheated on him with boy, 17, in marital home Iran's Islamic rulers are teetering on collapse. America must give them a final shove. Here's what I am advising Trump's team: MARK DUBOWITZ Waitress wearing a crash helmet'who started fatal Swiss resort inferno' was among the 40 to die in the tragedy Restaurant server sparks outrage after'infuriating' move on customer's bill: '15% wasn't good enough, apparently' Jolene needs surgery to cure her crippling disease. Doctors say they're too busy... but approved euthanasia in ONE HOUR How much do you know about history's most infamous serial killer? Take our Jack the Ripper quiz in this week's The Crime Desk newsletter But now this tiny detail in this disgraceful new picture has made me realise she may be the most deluded woman in the world.
The Morning After: Apple will use Gemini to power Siri AI
Apple and Google have confirmed that Gemini's models power the new version of Siri and other generative AI features. Here's part of it: "Apple determined that Google's Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards." In June, it was reported that Apple was considering partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic for Siri (the voice assistant can currently tap ChatGPT for certain queries as part of Apple Intelligence). Two months later, Google emerged as a contender. Another report suggested Apple might build the new Siri using a custom version of Gemini -- and that it would pay Google around $1 billion a year for the privilege.
'Genius' chimpanzee Ai dies in Japan at 49
'Genius' chimpanzee Ai dies in Japan at 49 Studies involving Ai, a genius chimpanzee who has died at the age of 49, are said to have revealed various aspects of the chimpanzee mind. Ai, a genius chimpanzee that could recognize more than 100 Chinese characters and the English alphabet, has died at the age of 49, Japanese researchers have said. Ai, whose name meant love in Japanese, took part in studies on perception, learning and memory that advanced our understanding of primate intelligence, the Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior at Kyoto University said in a statement. She died Friday from multiple organ failure and ailments related to old age, the school said. Aside from mastering Chinese characters and the alphabet, Ai could also identify the Arabic numerals from zero to nine and 11 colors, primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa said in 2014.
Online Markov Decision Processes with Terminal Law Constraints
Moreno, Bianca Marin, Brégère, Margaux, Gaillard, Pierre, Oudjane, Nadia
Traditional reinforcement learning usually assumes either episodic interactions with resets or continuous operation to minimize average or cumulative loss. While episodic settings have many theoretical results, resets are often unrealistic in practice. The infinite-horizon setting avoids this issue but lacks non-asymptotic guarantees in online scenarios with unknown dynamics. In this work, we move towards closing this gap by introducing a reset-free framework called the periodic framework, where the goal is to find periodic policies: policies that not only minimize cumulative loss but also return the agents to their initial state distribution after a fixed number of steps. We formalize the problem of finding optimal periodic policies and identify sufficient conditions under which it is well-defined for tabular Markov decision processes. To evaluate algorithms in this framework, we introduce the periodic regret, a measure that balances cumulative loss with the terminal law constraint. We then propose the first algorithms for computing periodic policies in two multi-agent settings and show they achieve sublinear periodic regret of order $\tilde O(T^{3/4})$. This provides the first non-asymptotic guarantees for reset-free learning in the setting of $M$ homogeneous agents, for $M > 1$.
Detecting LLM-Generated Text with Performance Guarantees
Zhou, Hongyi, Zhu, Jin, Yang, Ying, Shi, Chengchun
Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok have been deeply integrated into our daily life. They now support a wide range of tasks -- from dialogue and email drafting to assisting with teaching and coding, serving as search engines, and much more. However, their ability to produce highly human-like text raises serious concerns, including the spread of fake news, the generation of misleading governmental reports, and academic misconduct. To address this practical problem, we train a classifier to determine whether a piece of text is authored by an LLM or a human. Our detector is deployed on an online CPU-based platform https://huggingface.co/spaces/stats-powered-ai/StatDetectLLM, and contains three novelties over existing detectors: (i) it does not rely on auxiliary information, such as watermarks or knowledge of the specific LLM used to generate the text; (ii) it more effectively distinguishes between human- and LLM-authored text; and (iii) it enables statistical inference, which is largely absent in the current literature. Empirically, our classifier achieves higher classification accuracy compared to existing detectors, while maintaining type-I error control, high statistical power, and computational efficiency.
U.K.'s Starmer escalates threats against X, calls Grok 'shameful'
U.K.'s Starmer escalates threats against X, calls Grok'shameful' U.K.'s prime minister escalated threats against Elon Musk's X, vowing to enforce a law that bans the sexualization of people's images without consent and calling such content generated by Grok disgusting and shameful. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer escalated his threats against Elon Musk's X on Monday, vowing to enforce a law that banned the sexualization of people's images without their consent and calling such content generated by Grok "disgusting and shameful." From this week, the government will enforce the offense established in last year's Data Act, which made the creation of nonconsensual intimate images illegal. Starmer told members of Parliament on Monday, "if X cannot control Grok, we will -- and we'll do it fast because if you profit from harm and abuse, you lose the right to self regulate." Starmer accused X of protecting "abusive users" instead of the women and children whose images have been exploited, describing it as a "total distortion of priorities."