In media news today, 'The View' co-host Ana Navarro reveals her COVID tests were false positives, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo stays silent on his own sexual harassment scandal, and The New Yorker hosts a climate change extremist who promotes property damage Meghan McCain spent years irking liberals as the token conservative on "The View," but managed to continue bothering the left on Sunday simply by showing up on NBC's "Meet the Press." McCain walked away from "The View" last month because she enjoyed settling down in Washington, D.C. with her family since the coronavirus pandemic and didn't want to upend her life again for the New York-based program. Meghan McCain irked liberals by appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press." Former CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien responded to video of Todd welcoming McCain to the program with a tweet that scolded "Meet the Press" for offering her a platform. "This young lady is not her father (though she likes to name him frequently). She lies on camera, she has zero value as a guest, certainly she's go no credibility as a political talking head. And yet, Meet the Press fails by allowing her to lie on their air," O'Brien tweeted.

Supervised machine learning provides the learner with a set of input-output examples of the target task. Humans, however, can also learn to perform new tasks from instructions in natural language. Can machines learn to understand instructions as well? We present the Turking Test, which examines a model's ability to follow natural language instructions of varying complexity. These range from simple tasks, like retrieving the nth word of a sentence, to ones that require creativity, such as generating examples for SNLI and SQuAD in place of human intelligence workers ("turkers"). Despite our lenient evaluation methodology, we observe that a large pretrained language model performs poorly across all tasks. Analyzing the model's error patterns reveals that the model tends to ignore explicit instructions and often generates outputs that cannot be construed as an attempt to solve the task. While it is not yet clear whether instruction understanding can be captured by traditional language models, the sheer expressivity of instruction understanding makes it an appealing alternative to the rising few-shot inference paradigm.

Algorithms have long been able to produce basic news stories from press releases or sets of financial data; that's not much of a threat to most humans in the news business. Now, however, artificial intelligence has taken a step further. It's learned to perform a tougher task – to produce convincing-looking fake news. Stringing together a few formulaic passages from a set of numbers is a mechanical job. Inventing a fake news story on a random subject requires imagination; not every human is up to it. The San Francisco-based nonprofit OpenAI, founded by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman, has produced a so-called language model that can do it.

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA – The top U.S. military officer said Saturday that it's problematic that American tech companies don't want to work with the Pentagon but are willing to engage with the Chinese. U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford told the Halifax International Security Forum that the U.S. and its allies are the "good guys." "I have a hard time with companies that are working very hard to engage in the market inside China … then don't want to work with the U.S. military," he said. "I just have a simple expression: "We are the good guys." Earlier this year, thousands signed a petition asking Google's chief executive to cancel Project Maven, which provides the Pentagon with the company's artificially intelligent algorithms to interpret video images and improve the targeting of drone strikes. Google later said it would scuttle the project, according to published reports. Dunford avoided mentioning Google by name, but said companies that share intellectual property with Chinese entrepreneurs are essentially sharing it with the Chinese military. Google is reportedly worked on a mobile version of its search engine that will comply with strict censorship controls in China. "This is not about doing something that's unethical, illegal or immoral," he said. "This is about ensuring that we collectively can defend the values for which we stand.

The ambush in Niger earlier this month that left four U.S. troops dead has been the subject of immense speculation, not only concerning President Trump's public response to the tragedy but also about what actually happened on the ground that day. Asked by Fox News on Capitol Hill if the administration has been forthcoming about the attack, Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., replied, "of course not" and added, "it may require a subpoena." Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday that the attack is under investigation. A dozen U.S. Army soldiers, mostly Green Berets, along with 30 Nigerians, traveled 125 miles north of Niger's capital, Niamey, in unarmored trucks on a routine mission and to meet with local village elders in Tonga Tonga, near the border with Mali, on Oct. 4. U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson was killed when his patrol was ambushed in Niger.

Yemen has halted the United States from conducting Special Operations ground missions against suspected terrorist groups in the country. Senior officials told the New York Times, that the Yemeni ban does not include military drone attacks and also does not affect the American military advisers that are aiding Yemenis and forces from the United Arab Emirates. Besides the loss of a helicopter worth $75 million and the death of several civilians including children, the loss from the "botched" raid, which the White House has repeatedly characterized as a success, also included a member of the Navy's SEAL Team 6, Chief Petty Officer William Owens. Among those killed in the raid conducted on Jan. 29, also includes the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American al-Qaida leader who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. Despite the warnings of several top ex-senior officials including a former CIA and NSA director, who had said that Trump's travel ban could endanger troops and hurt national security, it is still unknown at the time if the Yemeni ban is a form of retribution towards the Trump executive order that disallowed refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries including–Yemen (before being temporarily revoked).

Artificial intelligence will play a big role in the future of U.S. strategy in cyberspace, according to National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers, who told Congress Tuesday that relying primarily on human intelligence "is a losing strategy." "[We're] very much interested in artificial intelligence, machine learning, how we can do cyber at scale [and] at speed," Rogers testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday. "Because if we're just going to take this largely human capital approach to doing business, that is a losing strategy." "It will be both incredibly resource intensive, and it will be very slow," Rogers added. "That is a big area of focus for us."

NSA Chief Says Without Artificial Intelligence, Cyber'Is A Losing Strategy' by Giuseppe Macri, Artificial intelligence will play a big role in the future of U.S. strategy in cyberspace, according to National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers, who told Congress Tuesday that relying primarily on human intelligence "is a losing strategy." "[We're] very much interested in artificial intelligence, machine learning, how we can do cyber at scale [and] at speed," Rogers testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday. "Because if we're just going to take this largely human capital approach to doing business, that is a losing strategy." "It will be both incredibly resource intensive, and it will be very slow," Rogers added. "That is a big area of focus for us."

ISLAMABAD – A U.S. Senate delegation paid a rare visit Sunday to a tribal region along the Afghanistan border that has long been considered a stronghold of al-Qaida, the Taliban and other insurgents. The delegation led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. McCain posted pictures on his Twitter account of the delegation visiting Pakistani helicopter pilots at an air base in Miram Shah. Foreigners are largely banned from the tribal region, where Pakistan has been waging a military offensive to root out insurgents for two years. The U.S. frequently carries out drone strikes in the region targeting Taliban and al-Qaida leaders.