The feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman has become one of the bitterest rivalries in business history, with the Tesla tycoon bidding to buy Altman's OpenAI in an apparent attempt to derail the ChatGPT maker's ascent to becoming one of the world's most important companies. Musk and Altman were among the 11-person team that founded OpenAI in 2015. Created as a counterweight to Google's dominance in artificial intelligence, the project got its initial funding from Musk, who invested 45 million to get it started. Three years later, Musk departed OpenAI. The company initially cited "a potential future conflict for Elon ... as Tesla continues to become more focused on AI," noting the electric vehicle company's ambitions in autonomous driving.

Developing web-based GIS applications, commonly known as CyberGIS dashboards, for querying and visualizing GIS data in environmental research often demands repetitive and resource-intensive efforts. While Generative AI offers automation potential for code generation, it struggles with complex scientific applications due to challenges in integrating domain knowledge, software engineering principles, and UI design best practices. This paper introduces a knowledge-augmented code generation framework that retrieves software engineering best practices, domain expertise, and advanced technology stacks from a specialized knowledge base to enhance Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) for front-end development. The framework automates the creation of GIS-based web applications (e.g., dashboards, interfaces) from user-defined UI wireframes sketched in tools like PowerPoint or Adobe Illustrator. A novel Context-Aware Visual Prompting method, implemented in Python, extracts layouts and interface features from these wireframes to guide code generation. Our approach leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate front-end code by integrating structured reasoning, software engineering principles, and domain knowledge, drawing inspiration from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). A case study demonstrates the framework's capability to generate a modular, maintainable web platform hosting multiple dashboards for visualizing environmental and energy data (e.g., time-series, shapefiles, rasters) from user-sketched wireframes. By employing a knowledge-driven approach, the framework produces scalable, industry-standard front-end code using design patterns such as Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) and frameworks like React. This significantly reduces manual effort in design and coding, pioneering an automated and efficient method for developing smart city software.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) models such as LLMs, GPTs, and Diffusion Models have recently gained widespread attention from both the research and the industrial communities. This survey explores their application in network monitoring and management, focusing on prominent use cases, as well as challenges and opportunities. We discuss how network traffic generation and classification, network intrusion detection, networked system log analysis, and network digital assistance can benefit from the use of GenAI models. Additionally, we provide an overview of the available GenAI models, datasets for large-scale training phases, and platforms for the development of such models. Finally, we discuss research directions that potentially mitigate the roadblocks to the adoption of GenAI for network monitoring and management. Our investigation aims to map the current landscape and pave the way for future research in leveraging GenAI for network monitoring and management.

We present Hookpad Aria, a generative AI system designed to assist musicians in writing Western pop songs. Our system is seamlessly integrated into Hookpad, a web-based editor designed for the composition of lead sheets: symbolic music scores that describe melody and harmony. Hookpad Aria has numerous generation capabilities designed to assist users in non-sequential composition workflows, including: (1) generating left-to-right continuations of existing material, (2) filling in missing spans in the middle of existing material, and (3) generating harmony from melody and vice versa. Hookpad Aria is also a scalable data flywheel for music co-creation -- since its release in March 2024, Aria has generated 318k suggestions for 3k users who have accepted 74k into their songs. More information about Hookpad Aria is available at https://www.hooktheory.com/hookpad/aria

As Generative AI (GenAI) continues to gain prominence and utility across various sectors, their integration into the realm of Internet of Things (IoT) security evolves rapidly. This work delves into an examination of the state-of-the-art literature and practical applications on how GenAI could improve and be applied in the security landscape of IoT. Our investigation aims to map the current state of GenAI implementation within IoT security, exploring their potential to fortify security measures further. Through the compilation, synthesis, and analysis of the latest advancements in GenAI technologies applied to IoT, this paper not only introduces fresh insights into the field, but also lays the groundwork for future research directions. It explains the prevailing challenges within IoT security, discusses the effectiveness of GenAI in addressing these issues, and identifies significant research gaps through MITRE Mitigations. Accompanied with three case studies, we provide a comprehensive overview of the progress and future prospects of GenAI applications in IoT security. This study serves as a foundational resource to improve IoT security through the innovative application of GenAI, thus contributing to the broader discourse on IoT security and technology integration.

Causal language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their size poses significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge distillation, a widely-used technique for transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a small student model, presents a promising approach for model compression. A significant remaining issue lies in the major differences between teacher and student models, namely the substantial capacity gap, mode averaging, and mode collapse, which pose barriers during distillation.s To address these issues, we introduce Temporally Adaptive Interpolated Distillation (TAID), a novel knowledge distillation approach that dynamically interpolates student and teacher distributions through an adaptive intermediate distribution, gradually shifting from the student's initial distribution towards the teacher's distribution. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating TAID's ability to prevent mode collapse and empirically show its effectiveness in addressing the capacity gap while balancing mode averaging and mode collapse. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate TAID's superior performance across various model sizes and architectures in both instruction tuning and pre-training scenarios. These results demonstrate TAID's effectiveness in creating high-performing and efficient models, advancing the development of more accessible AI technologies. Large language models are too large. Causal language models (LMs) are increasingly becoming essential tools across various sectors (Malinka et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023a; He et al., 2024). Scaling data size, model size, and training steps has been the primary approach to improve LM performance (Kaplan et al., 2020; Hoffmann et al., 2022; OpenAI et al., 2024), leading to rapid advancements in both proprietary and open-source LMs (Touvron et al., 2023; Abdin et al., 2024; Yang et al., 2024). This paradox of scale hinders the widespread deployment and use of LMs despite their potential and high demand. Knowledge distillation offers a promising prescription. One promising approach to developing compact yet high-performing models is knowledge distillation (KD) (Hinton et al., 2015).

While deep generative models~(DGMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in capturing complex data distributions, they consistently fail to learn constraints that encode domain knowledge and thus require constraint integration. Existing solutions to this challenge have primarily relied on heuristic methods and often ignore the underlying data distribution, harming the generative performance. In this work, we propose a probabilistically sound approach for enforcing the hard constraints into DGMs to generate constraint-compliant and realistic data. This is achieved by our proposed gradient estimators that allow the constrained distribution, the data distribution conditioned on constraints, to be differentiably learned. We carry out extensive experiments with various DGM model architectures over five image datasets and three scientific applications in which domain knowledge is governed by linear equality constraints. We validate that the standard DGMs almost surely generate data violating the constraints. Among all the constraint integration strategies, ours not only guarantees the satisfaction of constraints in generation but also archives superior generative performance than the other methods across every benchmark.

The rapid advancement of large models, driven by their exceptional abilities in learning and generalization through large-scale pre-training, has reshaped the landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These models are now foundational to a wide range of applications, including conversational AI, recommendation systems, autonomous driving, content generation, medical diagnostics, and scientific discovery. However, their widespread deployment also exposes them to significant safety risks, raising concerns about robustness, reliability, and ethical implications. This survey provides a systematic review of current safety research on large models, covering Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Diffusion Models (DMs), and large-model-based Agents. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) We present a comprehensive taxonomy of safety threats to these models, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, backdoor attacks, jailbreak and prompt injection attacks, energy-latency attacks, data and model extraction attacks, and emerging agent-specific threats. (2) We review defense strategies proposed for each type of attacks if available and summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks for safety research. (3) Building on this, we identify and discuss the open challenges in large model safety, emphasizing the need for comprehensive safety evaluations, scalable and effective defense mechanisms, and sustainable data practices. More importantly, we highlight the necessity of collective efforts from the research community and international collaboration. Our work can serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners, fostering the ongoing development of comprehensive defense systems and platforms to safeguard AI models.

Text-to-image diffusion models have recently enabled the creation of visually compelling, detailed images from textual prompts. However, their ability to accurately represent various cultural nuances remains an open question. In our work, we introduce CultDiff benchmark, evaluating state-of-the-art diffusion models whether they can generate culturally specific images spanning ten countries. We show that these models often fail to generate cultural artifacts in architecture, clothing, and food, especially for underrepresented country regions, by conducting a fine-grained analysis of different similarity aspects, revealing significant disparities in cultural relevance, description fidelity, and realism compared to real-world reference images. With the collected human evaluations, we develop a neural-based image-image similarity metric, namely, CultDiff-S, to predict human judgment on real and generated images with cultural artifacts. Our work highlights the need for more inclusive generative AI systems and equitable dataset representation over a wide range of cultures.

Sam Altman is leaving no room for doubt about his views on an Elon Musk-led bid to take control of OpenAI. In a letter to OpenAI staff Monday, the CEO put the words "bid" and "deal" in scare quotes and said the startup's board has no interest in the offer. "Our structure exists to ensure that no individual can take control of OpenAI," Altman wrote, according to two sources with knowledge of the letter. "Elon runs a competitive AI company, and his actions are not about OpenAI's mission or values." Altman has also told employees that OpenAI's board, which he sits on, has yet to receive an official offer from Musk and the other investors.