Strengths: The deep information maximization objective combined with noise contrastive estimation (InfoNCE) is a fairly new unsupervised learning loss that has yet to be thoroughly explored in deep reinforcement learning. The main value of the paper is the study of the representations learned when optimizing the InfoNCE loss and how those representations can be used for continual learning. Moreover, the paper introduces a novel architecture that uses the action information as part of the InfoNCE loss. These two ideas are novel and, to my knowledge, they haven't been presented in the literature before. In terms of significance, there has been growing interest in the representations learned by the InfoNCE loss in the context of reinforcement learning; see, Oord, Li, and Vinyals (2018), Anand et.

Perplexity, an AI search engine that has courted controversy by lifting liberally from news articles and skirting web-scraping rules, this week promised to serve as a reliable source for live information on the tightly contested US presidential election. Perplexity promised that its Election Information Hub would serve as "an entry point for understanding key issues, voting intelligently, and tracking election results." "There is only one AI that can do this," Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas posted on X. Srinivas appeared to troll the publisher of The New York Times by posting a message on X offering to help while Times Tech Guild workers strike during contract negotiations; he later posted that the offer was for infrastructure rather than AI-generated content. Perplexity's tool did not end up making any gaffes last night, providing mostly accurate voting information and also accurately tracking the results as they came in--but largely because it dialed down the use of AI. Perplexity is currently finalizing a funding round worth 500 million that would give the company a valuation of 9 billion, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to WIRED yesterday.

Perplexity, a company that describes its product as "a free AI search engine," has been under fire over the past few days. Shortly after Forbes accused it of stealing its story and republishing it across multiple platforms, Wired reported that Perplexity has been ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt, Technology website The Shortcut also accused the company of scraping its articles. Now, Reuters has reported that Perplexity isn't the only AI company that's bypassing robots.txt Reuters said it saw a letter addressed to publishers from TollBit, a startup that pairs them up with AI firms so they can reach licensing deals, warning them that "AI agents from multiple sources (not just one company) are opting to bypass the robots.txt

Earlier this week, WIRED published a story about the AI-powered search startup Perplexity, which Forbes has accused of plagiarism. In it, my colleague Dhruv Mehrotra and I reported that the company was surreptitiously scraping, using crawlers to visit and download parts of websites from which developers had tried to block it, in violation of its own publicly stated policy of honoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Our findings, as well as those of the developer Robb Knight, identified a specific IP address almost certainly linked to Perplexity and not listed in its public IP range, which we observed scraping test sites in apparent response to prompts given to the company's public-facing chatbot. According to server logs, that same IP visited properties belonging to Condé Nast, the media company that owns WIRED, at least 822 times in the past three months--likely a significant undercount, because the company retains only a small portion of its records. We also reported that the chatbot was bullshitting, in the technical sense.

Considering Perplexity's bold ambition and the investment it's taken from Jeff Bezos's family fund, NVIDIA, and famed investor Balaji Srinivasan, among others, it's surprisingly unclear what the AI search startup actually is. Earlier this year, speaking to WIRED, Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's CEO, described his product--a chatbot that gives natural-language answers to prompts and can, the company says, access the internet in real time--as an "answer engine." A few weeks later, shortly before a funding round valuing the company at a billion dollars was announced, he told Forbes, "It's almost like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid." More recently, after Forbes accused Perplexity of plagiarizing its content, Srinivas told the AP it was a mere "aggregator of information." The Perplexity chatbot itself is more specific.

Aravind Srinivas credits Google CEO Sundar Pichai for giving him the freedom to eat eggs. Srinivas remembers the moment seven years ago when an interview with Pichai popped up in his YouTube feed. His vegetarian upbringing in India had excluded eggs, as it had for many in the country, but now, in his early twenties, Srinivas wanted to start eating more protein. Here was Pichai, a hero to many aspiring entrepreneurs in India, casually describing his morning: waking up, reading newspapers, drinking tea--and eating an omelet. Srinivas shared the video with his mother.

"The robotic technology already exists," said Sharan Srinivas, an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering and the Department of Marketing. "Our goal is to best utilize this technology through efficient planning. To do this, we're asking questions like'given a list of items to pick, how do you optimize the route plan for the human pickers and robots?' or'how many items should a robot pick in a given tour?

The bleak and all-too-common spectacle of roadkill was upsetting to Vedant Srinivas -- particularly when his uncle and cousin's beloved German Shepherd-Rottweiler mix was fatally hit by a car. More importantly, the losses made the high school student wonder if he could do something about it. What if Srinivas could stop the pet owners' broken hearts, save wildlife and deflect the economic impacts caused by the collisions? This month his efforts were rewarded. The sophomore from Eastlake High School in Sammamish, Wash., brought home a $5,000, first place grand award for the category of Environmental Engineering from the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).

You would think something as numerical as income tax law would be similar to mathematical logic, but it is not, Protzenko says, because it is not written with the precision and clarity that would "make it amenable to a very mathematical reading of it." For example, that law does not mention a number may need to be rounded into whole cents. "The law won't tell you what you're supposed to do with rounding numbers and that can lead to ambiguity and a lack of specification of what's supposed to happen," he says. Healthcare law is also very complex. Faisal Khan, senior legal counsel at healthcare law firm Nixon Gwilt Law in Vienna, VA, says, "Software for HIPAA compliance must incorporate algorithms that target and hit on all the top-level statutory requirements and implementing regulations.' To make that happen, Khan says, "There must be a team of compliance-related input as many of the regulations essentially function as guidelines for companies to adhere to." That means a process or ...

With the objective of establishing an ecosystem that will have "zero tolerance" for non-compliance with regulations, the corporate affairs ministry is betting big on AI and data analytics to deal with shell companies. Using these technologies, the ministry is developing an advanced MCA 21 portal. Used for submitting requisite filings under the companies law and managing a repository of data on corporates in India, the portal will enable authorities to weed out entities that do not comply with regulations. Typically, shell companies are floated for illegal activities like money laundering, and a zero tolerance approach to this, enabled by AI, can put a stop to these practices. It would make it "almost impossible for a shell company to survive," points out Corporate Affairs Secretary, Injeti Srinivas.