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The Download: AI to detect child abuse images, and what to expect from our 2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch list

MIT Technology Review

Plus: OpenAI's parental controls have come into force Generative AI has enabled the production of child sexual abuse images to skyrocket. Now the leading investigator of child exploitation in the US is experimenting with using AI to distinguish AI-generated images from material depicting real victims, according to a new government filing. The Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Crimes Center, which investigates child exploitation across international borders, has awarded a $150,000 contract to San Francisco-based Hive AI for its software, which can identify whether a piece of content was AI-generated. The need to cut emissions and adapt to our warming world is growing more urgent. This year, we've seen temperatures reach record highs, as they have nearly every year for the last decade. Climate-fueled natural disasters are affecting communities around the world, costing billions of dollars.


Botanical time machines: AI is unlocking a treasure trove of data held in herbarium collections

AIHub

In 1770, after Captain Cook's Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef and was held up for repairs, botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander collected hundreds of plants. One of those pressed plants is among 170,000 specimens in the herbarium at the University of Melbourne. Worldwide, more than 395 million specimens are housed in herbaria. Together they comprise an unparalleled record of Earth's plant and fungal life over time. We wanted to find a better, faster way to tap into this wealth of information.


Marissa Mayer Is Dissolving Her Sunshine Startup Lab

WIRED

After seven rocky years, the company's assets will be sold to Dazzle, a new AI firm that Mayer founded. Sunshine cofounder and CEO Marissa Mayer speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in 2023. Sunshine, the consumer AI startup founded by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in 2018, has seen brighter days. The small startup is shutting down, and its assets are being sold to a new entity incorporated by Mayer called Dazzle, according to an email viewed by WIRED. Mayer sent the email to Sunshine shareholders on September 17, informing them that Dazzle has officially incorporated and is ready to acquire Sunshine's holdings.


Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It

The New Yorker

In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again. Berners-Lee is building tools that aim to resist the Big Tech platforms, give users control over their own data, and prevent A.I. from hollowing out the open web. Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on "Jeopardy!," Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989, but people informed of this often respond with a joke: Wasn't that Al Gore? Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you're reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He's the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called "the gentle singularity"--or else buries us in slop--that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness. Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain. An emeritus professor at Oxford and M.I.T., he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Rosemary Leith, live in a stout greige house older than the Republic. On the summer morning when I visited, geese honked and cicadas whined. Leith, an investor and a nonprofit director who co-founded a dot-com-era women's portal called Flametree, greeted me at the door. "We're basically guardians of the house," she said, showing me its antique features. I almost missed Berners-Lee in the converted-barn kitchen, standing, expectantly, in a blue plaid shirt. He shook my hand, then glanced at Leith. Minutes later, he and I were gliding across a pond behind the house. Berners-Lee is bronzed and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and faraway blue eyes, the right one underscored by an X-shaped wrinkle. A twitchier figure emerged when he spoke.


OpenAI Adds Parental Safety Controls for Teen ChatGPT Users. Here's What to Expect

WIRED

OpenAI Adds Parental Safety Controls for Teen ChatGPT Users. OpenAI's review process for teenage ChatGPT users who are flagged for suicidal ideation includes human moderators. Parents can expect an alert about alarming prompts within hours. Starting today, OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT safety tools intended for parents to use with their teenagers. This worldwide update includes the ability for parents, as well as law enforcement, to receive notifications if a child--in this case, users between the ages of 13 and 18--engages in chatbot conversations about self harm or suicide.





Magnificent Seven is passe, but what can take its place?

The Japan Times

Magnificent Seven is passe, but what can take its place? Oracle is among some of the firms expected to thrive in an artificial intelligence future. Wall Street's most powerful collection of stocks, the Magnificent Seven, is looking a tad dated. Make way for the Great Eight. It has been almost three years since OpenAI's ChatGPT made artificial intelligence the center of the global economy, and in that time one trade has dominated the U.S. stock market: Buy the Mag Seven.