Militia leader Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted for his role in the January 6 attack, is asking potential new members and supporters to send money. Stewart Rhodes announced last week that he is relaunching the Oath Keepers, his anti-government militia which virtually disappeared after dozens of its members--including Rhodes--were arrested for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol . Rhodes, speaking to the Gateway Pundit this week, says that he sees the relaunched group as playing a role in combating what he labeled an "insurrection by the left" on the streets of US cities. "Right now, under federal statutes, president Trump can call us up as the militia if he sees it necessary, especially for three purposes: to repel invasions, to suppress insurrections, and to execute the laws of the union," Rhodes said. But in the days since Rhodes announced their return, experts, former members, and online chatter suggest there is little to no interest in restarting what was, at one point, one of the largest militias in America with a leaked database listing 38,000 supposed members in 2021. This hasn't stopped Rhodes from asking potential new members and supporters to send money in support of the cause.

The first wave of major generative AI tools largely were trained on "publicly available" data--basically, anything and everything that could be scraped from the internet. Now, sources of training data are increasingly restricting access and pushing for licensing agreements. With the hunt for additional data sources intensifying, new licensing startups have emerged to keep the source material flowing. The Dataset Providers Alliance, a trade group formed this summer, wants to make the AI industry more standardized and fair. To that end, it has just released a position paper outlining its stances on major AI-related issues.

A dangerous, new group of synthetic opioids called nitazenes are rapidly spreading across the U.S. LONDON, Ohio – A dangerous, new group of synthetic opioids called "nitazenes" is rapidly spreading across the U.S. In Ohio, the state's Attorney General Dave Yost issued a warning about the prevalence of nitazenes as the Buckeye state saw an increase in the illicit drug. The drug, nicknamed "Frankestein opioids," can be 1.5 to 40 times more potent than fentanyl. It is not approved for medical use anywhere in the world but is currently being made in clandestine labs, according to a bulletin from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI). At BCI, forensic experts are sounding the alarm after tracking a year-over-year increase in nitazenes. In the first quarter of 2022, BCI reported 143 nitazene cases in Ohio, up from 27 cases in the same quarter of 2021.

Google is spinning out dozens of employees from its artificial-intelligence research division into a new group focused on machine learning, as part of a push to make "substantial gains" in AI, Insider has learned. The group will be "the new center of gravity" for how Google applies machine learning to its own products, according to a memo sent to staff recently, a copy of which Insider reviewed. It will sit inside Google's core division, which builds the technical infrastructure behind Google's flagship products. The move underscores the growing importance of machine learning -- in which algorithms are trained with large data sets and improve through experience -- for the future of Google's business. CEO Sundar Pichai has made huge bets on AI, once calling the technology more profound than fire or electricity.

We present a Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme based on merges and splits of groups that is capable of efficiently sampling from the posterior distribution of network partitions, defined according to the stochastic block model (SBM). We demonstrate how schemes based on the move of single nodes between groups systematically fail at correctly sampling from the posterior distribution even on small networks, and how our merge-split approach behaves significantly better, and improves the mixing time of the Markov chain by several orders of magnitude in typical cases. We also show how the scheme can be straightforwardly extended to nested versions of the SBM, yielding asymptotically exact samples of hierarchical network partitions.

McDonald's (MCD) is one of the oldest and most popular fast food restaurant chains in the world and as with any other establishments that have been around as long, the company is constantly seeking ways to improve its service and the experience it gives customers. The 79-year-old restaurant has now announced the acquisition of Apprente, in a bid to improve its service using automated voice commands. Founded in 2017, Apprente is a Silicon Valley startup which focuses on the use of artificial intelligence to analyze and improve orders placed via a drive-through. Proper use of this technology could significantly improve McDonald's service by reducing service time considerably. If all goes according to plan, McDonald's hopes to also apply Apprente's technology to orders placed using the company's mobile app as well as its order kiosks.

It was with a strangely deflated feeling in his gut that Harvard biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi made his way to Cancun for a scientific conference in December. Strange because a major advance had just been made in his field, something that might normally make him happy. Deflated because the advance hadn't been made by him or by any of his fellow academic researchers. It had been made by a machine. DeepMind, an AI company that Google bought in 2014, had outperformed all the researchers who'd submitted entries to the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) conference, which is basically a fancy science contest for grown-ups. Every two years, researchers working on one of the biggest puzzles in biochemistry, known as the protein folding problem, try to prove how good their predictive powers are by submitting a prediction about the 3D shapes that certain proteins will take.

Investors are not shying away from investing in new emerging, technologies. Both blockchain and artificial intelligence are grabbing massive amounts of investment attention. The recent one is Singapore's investment company Temasek that is setting new groups to explore opportunities in these two technologies. As per an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg, the company is creating so-called "experimental pods" to focus on these two areas, which it sees as long-term trends impacting multiple industries and geographies. The new group will be overseen by Chia Song Hwee, the chief operating officer of key management arm Temasek International.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it was reorganizing part of the company to better position itself as one of the significant players in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. The company has created a new organization that combines its research group, one of the largest in the technology industry, and a number of products that rely on artificial intelligence, including its Bing search engine and Cortana virtual assistant. The new artificial intelligence and research group at Microsoft will have more than 5,000 employees. Microsoft also said that one of its top executives, Qi Lu, has left the company to recuperate from a serious bicycling accident that occurred several months ago. Once he recovers, Mr. Lu will continue to act as an adviser to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, and Bill Gates, its co-founder, Mr. Nadella said in an email to company employees Thursday.

Google has established a new organization to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) startups, according to a new report. The new effort shows Google taking its experience with venture capital and applying it to AI, a type of computing that it has been increasingly using across its applications. The new organization will be separate from Google parent company Alphabet's funding activity within GV (formerly Google Ventures) and CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), Axios reported on Friday. Google itself has also made venture investments on its own. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai in the past year has started positioning the company as being "AI first" as opposed to being "mobile first."