A couple of months ago, Vice-President J. D. Vance made an appearance in Washington at the American Dynamism summit, an annual event put on by the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Members of Congress, startup founders, investors, and Defense Department officials sat in the audience. They gave Vance a standing ovation as he walked onstage, while Alabama's "Forty Hour Week (For a Livin')" played in the background. "You're here, I hope, because you love your country," Vance told the crowd. "You love its people, the opportunities that it's given you, and you recognize that building things--our capacity to create new innovation in the economy--cannot be a race to the bottom."

We introduce a novel paradigm in compiler optimization powered by Large Language Models with compiler feedback to optimize the code size of LLVM assembly. The model takes unoptimized LLVM IR as input and produces optimized IR, the best optimization passes, and instruction counts of both unoptimized and optimized IRs. Then we compile the input with generated optimization passes and evaluate if the predicted instruction count is correct, generated IR is compilable, and corresponds to compiled code. We provide this feedback back to LLM and give it another chance to optimize code. This approach adds an extra 0.53% improvement over -Oz to the original model. Even though, adding more information with feedback seems intuitive, simple sampling techniques achieve much higher performance given 10 or more samples.

We present a new NLP task and dataset from the domain of the U.S. civil procedure. Each instance of the dataset consists of a general introduction to the case, a particular question, and a possible solution argument, accompanied by a detailed analysis of why the argument applies in that case. Since the dataset is based on a book aimed at law students, we believe that it represents a truly complex task for benchmarking modern legal language models. Our baseline evaluation shows that fine-tuning a legal transformer provides some advantage over random baseline models, but our analysis reveals that the actual ability to infer legal arguments remains a challenging open research question.

Questions that loom large for the wider application of artificial intelligence (AI) in Defense Department operations often center on trust. How does the operator know if the AI is wrong, that it made a mistake, that it didn't behave as intended? Answers to questions like that come from a technical discipline known as Responsible AI (RAI). It's the subject of a report issued by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in mid-November called Responsible AI Guidelines in Practice, which addresses a requirement in the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to ensure that the DoD has "the ability, requisite resourcing, and sufficient expertise to ensure that any artificial intelligence technology…is ethically and reasonably developed." DIU's RAI guidelines provide a framework for AI companies, DOD stakeholders and program managers that can help to ensure that AI programs are built with the principles of fairness, accountability, and transparency at each step in the development cycle of an AI system, according to Jared Dunnmon, technical director of the artificial intelligence/machine learning portfolio at DIU.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most powerful technological forces in this era and, while it began in the data centre, it's moving quickly to the edge. NVIDIA's Charlie Boyle says that one of the biggest things the sector is seeing – which started at the end of 2020 but accelerated into 2021 – is the idea of an AI centre of excellence for companies and institutions. "There's a big change from what we were seeing a few years ago. Previously, when people worked on AI, it would tend to start small, getting some results and would grow over time," he explains. "We are engaging with a lot of customers today, who have realised that starting very small and growing organically may not get them the results they need in the next couple of years. Before, an individual researcher or a small team may procure one or two systems, a little bit of infrastructure, some networking and storage. "Now, we are seeing that more at a strategic level inside of the company where, in order to achieve even basic results, management is realising it needs a critical mass of infrastructure to carry out the experiment to drive the applications that they need.

Economists are disputing President Donald Trump administration's justification of rescinding a 2015 law that protects U.S. waters, saying it is based on flawed analysis. The Water of the United States (WOTUS) rule was imposed by President Barack Obama to further protect bodies of water. The law broadened the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers over U.S. waters -- more than what the agencies had under the Clean Water Act. Trump and EPA Chief Scott Pruitt have been adamant about repealing the rule. In June, the administration submitted a proposal to rescind WOTUS, limiting the extent of the Clean Air Act.

Last month, synthetic biologists at Ginkgo Bioworks raised their glasses--filled with genetically modified beer--to cele brate the launch of a new automated lab. By applying engineering principles to biology, and with the help of some nifty robotic equipment, Ginkgo has created a factory for churning out exotic life-forms, the likes of which have never before been seen on this planet. The home brew they were drinking was an example of the potential applications of synthetic biology, a new field that builds on recent progress in genetic assembly methods. Scientists can now manufacture snippets of synthetic DNA and slip them into organisms, giving those critters strange capabilities. For example, the brewer's yeast used to make the beer for the launch party had genes from an orange tree added to its own DNA.

The University of New South Wales has announced a partnership with outsourcing giant Tata Consultancy Services that will see the pair undertake joint research in areas such as machine learning, virtual reality (VR), robotics, data analytics, and cloud computing. Under the memorandum of understanding, UNSW said the organisations will work together on ideas which stem from pure technology research and give them real-world applications, with the agreement also opening up the prospect of exchanges of scholars and internships for UNSW students at Tata Consultancy's global research facilities. The memorandum was signed by Tata Consultancy's CTO Ananth Krishnan and UNSW's deputy vice-chancellor enterprise professor Brian Boyle at the consultancy firm's Asia-Pacific Summit in Sydney. "There is a lot that UNSW and Tata Consultancy Services can offer each other," Boyle said. "UNSW excels in taking our research breakthroughs and partnering with industry to make a significant global impact. Working with TCS will build on UNSW's strong international links and help accelerate innovation by opening up new opportunities around the world."

BBC Worldwide has teamed up with artificial intelligence start-up Thoughtly to explore how machine learning can help it understand which genres of content are most in demand in which territories. Following an initial trial of Thoughtly's technology, the pair have completed a detailed analysis looking at synopses and descriptions of programming alongside data mining to figure out how best to categorise individual programme titles. Thoughtly's flagship platform, Ellipse, is designed to map themes, generate summaries and identify anomalies in text. It was originally designed to assist researchers in academic institutions to draw insights from very large volumes of text, such as helping medical researchers identify unexpected anomalies in large clinical data sets or help scientific researchers navigate unstructured text for automated screening of'noisy' data sets. BBC Worldwide is using the technology to identify themes that are under or over-represented in its content, to identify recurring and possibly unseen patterns across the various genres in it catalogue, identify which themes have grown and which have declined over the years and generally build a deeper understanding of its content with the objective of matching it with the most relevant audiences both for the BBC itself and for its client broadcasters, according to David Boyle, EVP of insight.

Microsoft's future depends in part on its development of fringe technology like augmented reality and artificial intelligence, according to Vice President Stephen Boyle. "HoloLens is not right for everybody, but HoloLens is going to change industries in a way that most of us, and certainly I'm one of them, can't yet fully imagine," Boyle said of the augmented reality system. HoloLens developer kits are available now and have already begun to ship in North America. "We're going to see manufacturing, education, retail experiences change as a result of augmented reality," Boyle said. When it comes down to it, Boyle explained, a technology like HoloLens is just a platform that needs solutions that solve customers' problems.