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Musk v. Altman Kicks Off, DOJ Guts Voting Rights Unit, and Is the AI Job Apocalypse Overhyped?

WIRED

In this episode of “Uncanny Valley,” we get into how the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial goes way beyond their rivalry and could have major implications both for OpenAI and also the AI industry at large.


Are insurance apps watching you?

FOX News

Insurance apps often collect driving, location and health data in exchange for premium discounts. Adjusting app permissions can help limit what information is shared.


Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in The Presence of Missing Values

Neural Information Processing Systems

Anomaly detection methods typically require fully observed data for model training and inference and cannot handle incomplete data, while the missing data problem is pervasive in science and engineering, leading to challenges in many important applications such as abnormal user detection in recommendation systems and novel or anomalous cell detection in bioinformatics, where the missing rates can be higher than 30\% or even 80\%. In this work, first, we construct and evaluate a straightforward strategy, ''impute-then-detect'', via combining state-of-the-art imputation methods with unsupervised anomaly detection methods, where the training data are composed of normal samples only. We observe that such two-stage methods frequently yield imputation bias from normal data, namely, the imputation methods are inclined to make incomplete samples ''normal, where the fundamental reason is that the imputation models learned only on normal data and cannot generalize well to abnormal data in the inference stage. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end method that integrates data imputation with anomaly detection into a unified optimization problem. The proposed model learns to generate well-designed pseudo-abnormal samples to mitigate the imputation bias and ensure the discrimination ability of both the imputation and detection processes. Furthermore, we provide theoretical guarantees for the effectiveness of the proposed method, proving that the proposed method can correctly detect anomalies with high probability. Experimental results on datasets with manually constructed missing values and inherent missing values demonstrate that our proposed method effectively mitigates the imputation bias and surpasses the baseline methods significantly.


You Won't Believe How Much Power MSI's Cubi NUC AI 3MG Packs in a 0.5 Liter Chassis

PCWorld

Explore how MSI's line-up - from Mini PCs to powerful workstations - adapts to every level of performance need. Most modern workplace AI doesn't require a full tower PC or a dedicated GPU. The MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG proves that with a design that fits in the palm of your hand, weighs just over a pound, and starts at $569 for barebones configurations. This compact little system is shorter than a credit card and takes up just 0.5 liters in volume - the size of a small paperback book. The beating heart of this tiny powerhouse is an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H Panther Lake CPU with up to 16 cores and a high clock-speed, even with such a compact design.


Elon Musk Seemingly Admits xAI Has Used OpenAI's Models to Train Its Own

WIRED

Elon Musk Seemingly Admits xAI Has Used OpenAI's Models to Train Its Own While answering questions under oath, Musk argued it's standard practice for AI labs to use their competitors' models. While testifying on Thursday in federal court, Elon Musk seemed to indicate that his AI lab may have used OpenAI's models to train xAI's own. He touched upon the topic while sitting on the witness stand answering cross-examination questions from an OpenAI attorney amid his ongoing legal battle against the ChatGPT-maker . Do you know what distillation is? It means to use one AI model to train another AI model.


Dynamics of Supervised and Reinforcement Learning in the Non-Linear Perceptron

Neural Information Processing Systems

The ability of a brain or a neural network to efficiently learn depends crucially on both the task structure and the learning rule.Previous works have analyzed the dynamical equations describing learning in the relatively simplified context of the perceptron under assumptions of a student-teacher framework or a linearized output. While these assumptions have facilitated theoretical understanding, they have precluded a detailed understanding of the roles of the nonlinearity and input-data distribution in determining the learning dynamics, limiting the applicability of the theories to real biological or artificial neural networks.Here, we use a stochastic-process approach to derive flow equations describing learning, applying this framework to the case of a nonlinear perceptron performing binary classification. We characterize the effects of the learning rule (supervised or reinforcement learning, SL/RL) and input-data distribution on the perceptron's learning curve and the forgetting curve as subsequent tasks are learned.In particular, we find that the input-data noise differently affects the learning speed under SL vs. RL, as well as determines how quickly learning of a task is overwritten by subsequent learning. Additionally, we verify our approach with real data using the MNIST dataset.This approach points a way toward analyzing learning dynamics for more-complex circuit architectures.


OpenAI Rolls Out 'Advanced' Security Mode for At-Risk Accounts

WIRED

OpenAI is rolling out Advanced Account Security for people concerned that their ChatGPT or Codex accounts could be potential targets of phishing attacks. For anyone who fears their ChatGPT and Codex accounts might be targeted by attackers, OpenAI announced on Thursday that it is adding an optional new level of account protection that adds an extra layer of security. Dubbed Advanced Account Security, the feature enforces strict access controls that would make account takeover attacks very difficult. Such measures are not a new idea in the realm of account security. Google, for example, has offered its Advanced Protection account security tier for nearly a decade . But as mainstream AI services rapidly proliferate around the world, there is a pressing need for an array of basic protections to be put in place.


Sam Altman's ChatGPT Couldn't Stop Obsessing Over Goblins

Mother Jones

OpenAI desires less regulation, but it still doesn't know how its chatbot works. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. OpenAI admitted it had to develop a specific instruction in the code of its latest model of ChatGPT to stop it from repeatedly referencing "goblins, gremlins, and other creatures." In an explanation posted Wednesday, the company said the "strange habit" came from its chatbot personality feature --specifically for users who chose the "Nerdy" personality. You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human.


Drago: Primal-Dual Coupled Variance Reduction for Faster Distributionally Robust Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the penalized distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem with a closed, convex uncertainty set, a setting that encompasses learning using $f$-DRO and spectral/$L$-risk minimization. We present Drago, a stochastic primal-dual algorithm which combines cyclic and randomized components with a carefully regularized primal update to achieve dual variance reduction. Owing to its design, Drago enjoys a state-of-the-art linear convergence rate on strongly convex-strongly concave DRO problems witha fine-grained dependency on primal and dual condition numbers. The theoretical results are supported with numerical benchmarks on regression and classification tasks.


Xbox Ally X gets performance boost from Microsoft's DLSS alternative

PCWorld

PCWorld reports on Microsoft's Auto SR, an AI-enhanced upscaling technology that provides significant performance boosts for gaming handhelds like the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. Early testing demonstrates impressive results, with Auto SR delivering up to 50% framerate improvements in games like Borderlands 3 by leveraging integrated NPU chips. Currently available through Windows Insider builds with 11 supported games, this OS-level tool represents Microsoft's answer to Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR for low-power gaming systems. The Asus ROG Xbox Ally is more powerful than the aging Steam Deck, even if you go for the cheaper, non-X variant. But it's still based on an AMD laptop chip with integrated graphics.