Deep Learning
SpaceX backs Anthropic with data centre deal amidst Musk's OpenAI lawsuit
SpaceX backs Anthropic with data centre deal amidst Musk's OpenAI lawsuit Anthropic has reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk's SpaceX, marking a detente with its one-time critic and a boost for both companies in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race. Under the agreement announced on Wednesday, Anthropic will use the full computing power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month. That's enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes - as the Dario Amodei-led company seeks to boost the capacity of its Claude Pro and Claude Max AI assistants for subscribers. The tool allows AI systems to review work between sessions, spot patterns, and update files that store user preferences and other context. Available as a research preview, "dreaming" comes with software for managing agents, or AI programmes that perform tasks with little human involvement.
Canadian officials claim OpenAI violated federal and provincial privacy laws
Philippe Dufresne, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, has found OpenAI was not compliant with Canadian federal and provincial privacy laws in the training of its AI models. Following an investigation, Dufresne and his counterparts in Alberta, Quebec and British Columbia say OpenAI's approach to things like data collection and consent stepped on multiple laws, including Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which governs how companies collect and use personal information during the normal course of business. The commissioners participating in the investigation identified multiple privacy issues with OpenAI's approach, including that the company gathered vast amounts of personal information without adequate safeguards to prevent use of that information to train its models, and that it failed to acquire consent to collect and use that personal information in the first place. Warnings in ChatGPT note that interactions with the AI could be used in training, but third-party data OpenAI has purchased or scraped also includes personal details people likely aren't even aware of. The fact that ChatGPT users have no way to access, correct or delete that data was another issue that the commissioners identified, according to a summary of the investigation's findings, along with OpenAI's lackluster attempts to acknowledge the inaccuracy of some of ChatGPT's responses.
Former OpenAI board member says Elon Musk offered her sperm donations
A former OpenAI board member has explained how her unconventional personal relationship with Elon Musk evolved into having four of his children. Shivon Zilis testified in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California for hours on Wednesday as part of Musk's lawsuit trying to reverse OpenAI's change to a for-profit company. The focus of Zilis's appearance was her direct involvement in early talks with Musk around the company becoming a for-profit, but also how she worked for and became involved with Musk as she advised OpenAI. I still really wanted to be a mum and Elon made the offer around that time and I accepted, she said, explaining Musk in 2020 had offered to donate sperm. He was encouraging everyone around him at that time to have kids and he'd noticed I did not.
Using AI for Just 10 Minutes Might Make You Lazy and Dumb, Study Shows
New research suggests that reliance on AI assistants can have a negative impact on people's ability to think and problem solve. Using AI chatbots for even just for 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on people's ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA. Researchers tasked people with solving various problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension, through an online platform that paid them for their work. They conducted three experiments, each involving several hundred people. Some participants were given access to an AI assistant capable of solving the problem autonomously.
A Lo-Fi Rebellion Against A.I.
As slick, machine-generated visuals become ubiquitous, artists and designers are embracing a style of handmade imperfection. Two and a half years ago, Christine Tyler Hill, a designer and artist in Burlington, Vermont, began working as a crossing guard in her neighborhood. The city paid her twenty dollars an hour, but the real draw was the chance to get to know local families and "be more enmeshed with my very immediate, outside-my-door community," she told me recently. She was tired of staring at a screen doing design work, and new clients were getting harder to come by, in part, she surmised, because of the rise of generative artificial intelligence . She began documenting her crossing-guard shifts on Instagram, posting mini comics about the frigid weather, the charming habits of commuting children, and the beauty of an overflowing trash can.
Google just bought a stake in the maker of Eve Online to train its AI models
The company behind the long-running space sim has entered into a partnership with Google in which the search giant will take a minority stake. In exchange, Google's DeepMind will train its AI technology on the game, according to a report by . CCP Games, the dev who made and maintains, has also been rebranded as Fenris Creations . This happened just after the company purchased the rights to the game back from Korean developer Pearl Abyss. Google's investment is in the millions of dollars, according to Fenris Creations Chief Executive Officer Hilmar Veigar Pรฉtursson.
I Am Begging AI Companies to Stop Naming Features After Human Processes
Anthropic announced "dreaming" for AI agents to sort through "memories" at its developer conference. Anthropic just announced a new feature called "dreaming" at the company's developer conference in San Francisco. It's part of Anthropic's recently launched AI agent infrastructure designed to help users manage and deploy tools that automate software processes. This "dreaming" aspect sorts through the transcript of what an agent recently completed and attempts to glean insights to improve the agent's performance. Folks using AI agents often send them on multistep journeys, like visiting a few websites or reading multiple files, to complete online tasks.
Hackers Hate AI Slop Even More Than You Do
Hackers and other cybercriminals are complaining about "AI shit" flooding platforms where they discuss cyberattacks and other illegal activity. "I'm disappointed that you are working to incorporate AI garbage into the site," one annoyed person, posting anonymously, said in an online message. "No-one is asking for this--we want you to improve the site, stop charging for new features." Only, this is not a regular internet user moaning about AI being forced into their favorite app . Instead, they are complaining about a cybercrime forum's plans to introduce more generative AI.
SOC-ICNN: From Polyhedral to Conic Geometry for Learning Convex Surrogate Functions
Liu, Kang, Hu, Jianchen, Peng, Wei
Classical ReLU-based Input Convex Neural Networks (ICNNs) are equivalent to the optimal value functions of Linear Programming (LP). This intrinsic structural equivalence restricts their representational capacity to piecewise-linear polyhedral functions. To overcome this representational bottleneck, we propose the SOC-ICNN, an architecture that generalizes the underlying optimization class from LP to Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP). By explicitly injecting positive semi-definite curvature and Euclidean norm-based conic primitives, our formulation introduces native smooth curvature into the representation while preserving a rigorous optimization-theoretic interpretation. We formally prove that SOC-ICNNs strictly expand the representational space of ReLU-ICNNs without increasing the asymptotic order of forward-pass complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SOC-ICNN substantially improves function approximation, while delivering competitive downstream decision quality. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SOC-ICNN-4B18/.
Analysis and Explainability of LLMs Via Evolutionary Methods
Gallagher, Shannon K., Rallapalli, Swati, Brooks, Tyler, Loughin, Chuck, Sezgin, Michele, Yurko, Ronald
Evolutionary methods have long been useful for analysis and explanation in genetics, biology, ecology, and related fields. In this work, we extend these methods to neural networks, specifically large language models (LLMs), to better analyze and explain relationships among models. We show how relating weights to genotypes and output text to phenotypes can improve our understanding of model lineage, important datasets, the roles of different model layers, and visualization of model relationships. We demonstrate this in a controlled experiment, where our estimated evolutionary trees reliably recover the topology of the ground-truth training tree. We further identify the most important weight layers according to weight differences and show through phenotypic experiments that one training dataset appears to contribute more useful information than the others. Finally, we generate an unsupervised evolutionary tree of black-box foundation models. Throughout, we provide visualizations that support a clearer understanding of evolutionary relationships among LLMs.