Industry
AI Is Here to Replace Nuclear Treaties. Scared Yet?
AI Is Here to Replace Nuclear Treaties. The last major nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia just expired. Some experts believe a combination of satellite surveillance, AI, and human reviewers can take its place. For half a century, the world's nuclear powers relied on an intricate and complex series of treaties that slowly and steadily reduced the number of nuclear weapons on the planet. Those treaties are gone now, and it doesn't appear that they'll be coming back anytime soon.
Geekom Geekbook X16 Pro review: Can the mini-PC maker build a great laptop?
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Geekom Geekbook X16 Pro review: Can the mini-PC maker build a great laptop? While many laptops with comparable CPU specifications are either significantly heavier or have plastic cases, the Geekbook offers a balanced combination of performance, mobility, and workmanship. Until now, Geekom was primarily known for its mini PCs. With the Geekbook X16 Pro, the company is now expanding its portfolio to include a notebook. The laptop market is highly competitive and dominated by numerous established manufacturers.
Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review's new AI newsletter, is here
Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review's new AI newsletter, is here Learn how to apply LLMs across industries in 7 weekly editions of our new free newsletter. For years, our newsroom has explored AI's limitations and potential dangers, as well as its growing energy needs . And our reporters have looked closely at how generative tools are being used for tasks such as coding and running scientific experiments . But how is AI being used in fields like health care, climate tech, education, and finance? How are small businesses using it? And what should you keep in mind if you use AI tools at work?
Scaling up Continuous-Time Markov Chains Helps Resolve Underspecification
Modeling the time evolution of discrete sets of items (e.g., genetic mutations) is a fundamental problem in many biomedical applications. We approach this problem through the lens of continuous-time Markov chains, and show that the resulting learning task is generally underspecified in the usual setting of cross-sectional data. We explore a perhaps surprising remedy: including a number of additional independent items can help determine time order, and hence resolve underspecifi-cation. This is in sharp contrast to the common practice of limiting the analysis to a small subset of relevant items, which is followed largely due to poor scaling of existing methods. To put our theoretical insight into practice, we develop an approximate likelihood maximization method for learning continuous-time Markov chains, which can scale to hundreds of items and is orders of magnitude faster than previous methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on synthetic and real cancer data.