EU and US set to announce joint working on AI safety, standards & R&D

April 3, 2024

(TechCrunch) The European Union and the U.S. expect to announce a cooperation on AI at a meeting of the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC) on Friday, according to a senior commission official who was briefing journalists on background ahead of the confab. Read more here.

Anthropic researchers wear down AI ethics with repeated questions

April 2, 2024

(TechCrunch) How do you get an AI to answer a question it’s not supposed to? There are many such “jailbreak” techniques, and Anthropic researchers just found a new one, in which a large language model (LLM) can be convinced to tell you how to build a bomb if you prime it with a few dozen…

Sure, No One Knows What Happens Next. But Past Is Prologue When It Comes To AI

April 2, 2024

(Tech Policy Press) Last month, OpenAI’s ChatGPT began responding with nonsense, and no one could explain why. The internet did its thing, and people poked fun at it, argued with each other, and then over-intellectualized what it means. Amid the chatter and the noise, an article in Fast Company by Chris Stokel-Walker titled “ChatGPT Is Behaving Weirdly (and…

Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed?

March 28, 2024

(The Guardian) A process called biofortification puts nutrients directly into seeds and could reduce global hunger, but it’s not a magic bullet Read more here.

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

March 27, 2024

(Wired) I’m fond of effective altruists. When you meet one, ask them how many people they’ve killed. Read more here.

The power grid has an AI problem

March 24, 2024

(Morning Brew) AI data centers are sprouting up across the United States at a rate not seen since fro-yo took over strip malls in the 2000s. And their staggering growth is causing alarm that the country’s power grid doesn’t have the electricity capacity to absorb them without breaking. Read more here.

The problem of AI ethics

March 23, 2024

(Benedict Evans) Can you write laws, or lay down ethical principles, for a technology that will be used in entirely different ways, for different purposes, in different industries? What does that mean if it’s changing entirely every 18 months? Read more here.

Stability AI CEO resigns because you’re ‘not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI’

March 23, 2024

(TechCrunch) Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and from the unicorn startup‘s board, the buzzy firm said Friday night, making it the second hot AI startup to go through major changes this week. Read more here.

This Week in AI: Midjourney bets it can beat the copyright police

March 16, 2024

(TechCrunch) Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. Last week, Midjourney, the AI startup building image (and…

The delivery rider who took on his faceless boss

March 15, 2024

(Financial Times) On the morning of August 12 2020, the day he decided to fight the Uber Eats algorithm, Armin Samii woke earlier than usual. He dressed, made coffee and sat down at his computer where he remained for the next 16 hours, coding a web application and filming videos to show other couriers how…