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Why Amazon Dropped Its OpenAI Movie, Data Center Workers Fight Back, and Meta Leaks Employee Data

WIRED

Amazon-owned MGM Studios' decision to drop the OpenAI movie is just part of AI and film industries becoming increasingly intertwined. On, we take a look at where this is all headed. This week on Uncanny Valley, our hosts discuss Amazon's controversial decision to drop Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI's Sam Altman--which reportedly did not paint him in a favorable light. Alongside Google DeepMind's $75 million brand new partnership with indie film studio A24, how much of a dent is AI actually having in the films we see? They also dive into the recent upheaval of workers--from electricians to software engineers--against data centers. Plus: Meta's program to track employees' data gets paused after a massive leak, and Anthropic is now getting along with the government thanks to CEO Dario Amodei no longer being in the room. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected] . It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. We're discussing Amazon's MGM Studios' sudden decision to drop the OpenAI biographical movie just as they were wrapping up production.


Broken Bones, Lawsuits, and NDAs: Inside the Worker Safety Concerns at Stargate Data Center

TIME - Tech

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens.


Time-Based Use Rates and Whole-Home Battery Backups Combine

WIRED

Power companies are pushing aggressive time-based use pricing. Here's how a regular consumer can benefit. I like to keep my home at a cool and comfortable 68 degrees year-round. This preference would be fine if I lived near the Pacific Ocean, or in a small home, or in a newer home that's insulated with modern mineral wool instead of tissue paper and horsehair. I, however, live in a 2,000-plus-square-foot home built in 1906.


The untapped potential AI can't replace in underserved communities like mine

FOX News

Pastor and Project H.O.O.D. founder Corey Brooks says the'honest work' learned through trade schools could be the key out of poverty for many struggling in today's job market wanting to'improve their lives.' The crime of post-60s liberalism is that it created permanent Black underclasses all over America, including on the South Side of Chicago where I live. The schools here are poor. Opportunities have been replaced by government handouts. Violence robs far too many families of their loved ones.


On Debiasing Text Embeddings Through Context Injection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Current advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made it increasingly feasible to build applications leveraging textual data. Generally, the core of these applications rely on having a good semantic representation of text into vectors, via embedding models. However, it has been shown that these embeddings capture and perpetuate biases already present in text. While a few techniques have been proposed to debias embeddings, they do not take advantage of the recent advances in context understanding of modern embedding models. In this paper, we fill this gap by conducting a review of 19 embedding models by quantifying their biases and how well they respond to context injection as a mean of debiasing. We show that higher performing models are more prone to capturing biases, but are also better at incorporating context. Surprisingly, we find that while models can easily embed affirmative semantics, they fail at embedding neutral semantics. Finally, in a retrieval task, we show that biases in embeddings can lead to non-desirable outcomes. We use our new-found insights to design a simple algorithm for top $k$ retrieval, where $k$ is dynamically selected. We show that our algorithm is able to retrieve all relevant gendered and neutral chunks.


How to navigate the green economy: Here are four success stories

Los Angeles Times

No one knows just many green jobs will be created in the United States over the next decade, but there's little disagreement that the demand will create a huge opportunity for the next generation of workers. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, an estimated 800 billion will flow from the federal government over the next 10 years to fund massive clean energy programs, from solar and wind installations to energy-efficient buildings to business and neighborhood microgrid power production. Billions more in state and federal money will help build out an electrified transportation system, including electric cars, trucks, trains and the infrastructure to support them. High school and university educators are reporting increasing interest in "green" careers: jobs that help address global warming and other environmental issues, with enough of a future to pay the bills and then some. Given the drumbeat of bad news on a changing climate, it might even be considered a matter of survival.


A linguistic warning sign for dementia

MIT Technology Review

Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early--when any available treatments are likely to be most effective. The issue has to do with a subtle aspect of language processing: people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) struggle with certain ambiguous sentences in which pronouns could refer to people not referenced in the sentences themselves.For instance, in "The electrician fixed the light switch when he visited the tenant," it is not clear without context whether "he" refers to the electrician or some other visitor. But in "He visited the tenant when the electrician repaired the light switch," "he" and "the electrician" cannot be the same person. And in "The babysitter emptied the bottle and prepared the formula," there is no reference to a person beyond the sentence.


Nest Hello review: Google's smart facial-recognition video doorbell

The Guardian

Google's new Nest Hello is a video doorbell that aims to be smarter than the rest with constant recording, face and object recognition. The Hello is a direct replacement for a wired doorbell, working with an existing chime and requiring constant power, making it one of the high-end options for smart doorbells. That need for power restricts where you can put it, unlike some more flexible options such as the battery-powered Ring Video Doorbell 2, but enables some much more powerful features. The Hello is a simple-looking modern doorbell featuring one large button with a glowing blue ring around it and a camera above it. It's about twice the size of a traditional doorbell and is screwed directly into the wall.


Local search: It's all about mobile - Search Engine Land

#artificialintelligence

Optimizing for local search is important, but if you aren't optimizing for mobile, you're going to miss out on your most important source of local traffic. For years, Google has been improving the relevance of local search, from its "Pigeon Update" to Promoted Pins. And since there are more searches on mobile than desktop, it's no wonder that Google has put a big emphasis on mobile-friendliness in its ranking algorithms. Taken together, that means that Google is putting a high priority on mobile local search -- and so should you. The fact of the matter is, more and more local searches are taking place on mobile.


Gigaom Are There Robot-Proof Jobs?

#artificialintelligence

The following is an excerpt from GigaOm publisher Byron Reese's new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. You can purchase the book here. The Fourth Age explores the implications of automation and AI on humanity, and has been described by Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe as framing "the deepest questions of our time in clear language that invites the reader to make their own choices. Using 100,000 years of human history as his guide, he explores the issues around artificial general intelligence, robots, consciousness, automation, the end of work, abundance, and immortality." When the topic of automation and AI comes up, one of the chief concerns is always technology's potential impact on jobs.