Industry
The Only Thing Standing Between Humanity and AI Apocalypse Is … Claude?
The Only Thing Standing Between Humanity and AI Apocalypse Is Claude? As AI systems grow more powerful, Anthropic's resident philosopher says the startup is betting Claude itself can learn the wisdom needed to avoid disaster. Anthropic is locked in a paradox: Among the top AI companies, it's the most obsessed with safety and leads the pack in researching how models can go wrong. But even though the safety issues it has identified are far from resolved, Anthropic is pushing just as aggressively as its rivals toward the next, potentially more dangerous, level of artificial intelligence. Its core mission is figuring out how to resolve that contradiction. Last month, Anthropic released two documents that both acknowledged the risks associated with the path it's on and hinted at a route it could take to escape the paradox.
More Than 800 Google Workers Urge Company to Cancel Any Contracts With ICE and CBP
The campaign is among the largest anti-ICE protests by workers at a single company since federal agents shot and killed two people in Minneapolis last month. More Than 880 employees and contractors working for Google signed a petition this week calling on the company to disclose and cancel any contracts it may have with US immigration authorities . In the letter unveiled on Friday, the workers said they are "vehemently opposed" to Google's dealings with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). "We object to the technology we build being used to power state violence around the world," a Google software engineer, who declined to give their name out of fear of retaliation, told reporters on Friday. "I stand to benefit from other people's suffering, which I find abhorrent and I refuse to be a quiet participant in that system," added a second Google staffer, who went by Alex. Google declined to comment on the petition's demands.
The Brilliant New Movie About Alexander Skarsg em å /em rd Making Dudley Dursley His Toy
Fans of will be happy to hear that there's been another entry into the world of scintillating gay romance. The film stars noted on-screen sex haver Alexander Skarsgård--he's equally provocative in the NC-17-rated --and some guy named Harry Melling, who seems to have been in . Melling plays Colin, a certified beta whose deepest desire is to serve. He gets his wish when he meets Ray (Skarsgård), a toppy, Tom of Finland -esque biker with an attitude so icy it could preserve food. The two enter into a full-time power-exchange relationship that fuels both of their desires, until their connection evolves to a heart-wrenching breaking point. Unlike other recent films about kink that were bound and gagged by their own corniness--think and -- has been lauded as realistic, sophisticated, and smart, and the movie is currently sitting at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes . Still, was it enough to satisfy senior editor Isabelle Kohn and How to Do It columnist Rich Juzwiak? Be a good boy and find out.
A Little Is Enough: Circumventing Defenses For Distributed Learning
Distributed learning is central for large-scale training of deep-learning models. However, it is exposed to a security threat in which Byzantine participants can interrupt or control the learning process. Previous attack models assume that the rogue participants (a) are omniscient (know the data of all other participants), and (b) introduce large changes to the parameters. Accordingly, most defense mechanisms make a similar assumption and attempt to use statistically robust methods to identify and discard values whose reported gradients are far from the population mean. We observe that if the empirical variance between the gradients of workers is high enough, an attacker could take advantage of this and launch a non-omniscient attack that operates within the population variance. We show that the variance is indeed high enough even for simple datasets such as MNIST, allowing an attack that is not only undetected by existing defenses, but also uses their power against them, causing those defense mechanisms to consistently select the byzantine workers while discarding legitimate ones. We demonstrate our attack method works not only for preventing convergence but also for repurposing of the model behavior (``backdooring''). We show that less than 25\% of colluding workers are sufficient to degrade the accuracy of models trained on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 by 50\%, as well as to introduce backdoors without hurting the accuracy for MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets, but with a degradation for CIFAR100.
Ukraine pulls plug on Russian Starlink, beefs up drone defence
Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Ukraine braced for more attacks on its energy infrastructure this week as winter temperatures continued to fall to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), and sought to adapt its defences against Russian drones. On Thursday, Ukraine's energy minister, Denys Shmyal, warned Ukrainians to prepare for more power blackouts in the coming days as Russian air attacks continued.
AI Could Reshape Clinical Trials--and the Business of Pharma
Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? We hear a lot about how AI is accelerating drug discovery. But the number of drugs approved by the FDA has remained constant through the AI revolution, at around 50 per year. "The biggest problem in bringing new medicine to patients hasn't been drug discovery for a long time," says Ben Liu, the founder and CEO of Formation Bio, an AI company working in the biotech space.
Yes, eating carrots can help your eyesight. But it's not a cure-all.
Yes, eating carrots can help your eyesight. The World War II propaganda that touted the veggie wasn't totally wrong, but carrots still won't give you night vision. Carrots' beta-carotene pigment can help support retina health, but the root vegetable still has its limits. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In a British propaganda poster from World War II, an illustration in shadowy tones captures a dramatic nighttime scene: a woman and young girl peer around a black automobile, as if looking for a quick escape.
Robot Talk Episode 143 – Robots for children, with Elmira Yadollahi
Claire chatted to Elmira Yadollahi from Lancaster University about how children interact with and relate to robots. Elmira Yadollahi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Lancaster University. She has a joint PhD in robotics and computer science from EPFL in Switzerland and Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal. Her research tackles explainability in robotics, as well as multimodal perception and explanation methods. Her core expertise is in child-robot interaction, with a focus on expectation management, trust, and AI literacy.