Machine Learning Research
Reasoning for No Reason: Anthropic finds chain-of-thought reasoning traces may omit key influences
Does a reasoning model’s chain of thought explain how it arrived at its output? Researchers found that often it doesn’t.
Responsible AI
Machine Learning Research
LLM Rights Historical Wrongs: Stanford and Princeton researchers fine-tune a language model to identify racial discrimination in property
In Northern California, old property deeds may still include racial clauses: language, made illegal decades ago, that was designed to ban people of color from owning or living in certain homes.
Tech & Society
Did GPT-4o Train on O’Reilly Books?: Study shows OpenAI’s model can identify verbatim excerpts from paywalled books
A study co-authored by tech-manual publisher Tim O’Reilly shows that OpenAI trained GPT-4o on parts of his company’s books that were not made freely available.
Tech & Society
Grok’s Fixation on South Africa: xAI blames unnamed, unauthorized employee for chatbot introducing "white genocide" into conversations
An unauthorized update by an xAI employee caused the Grok chatbot to introduce South African politics into unrelated conversations, the company said.
Business
EU Loosens AI Regulations: European regulators move to relax some AI Act rules on developers’ liability, other provisions
The European Union made an abrupt U-turn away from its stringent AI regulations. Meta promptly adjusted to the loosening restrictions.
Business
AI Insights from Big Pharma: Johnson & Johnson reveals its revised AI strategy
The world’s biggest pharmaceutical company by revenue shed light on its AI strategy.
Machine Learning Research
The User Is Always… a Genius!: OpenAI pulls GPT-4o update after users report sycophantic behavior
OpenAI’s most widely used model briefly developed a habit of flattering users, with laughable and sometimes worrisome results.
Business
The Fall and Rise of Sam Altman: Inside Sam Altman’s brief ouster from OpenAI
A behind-the-scenes account provides new details about the abrupt firing and reinstatement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in November 2023.
Machine Learning Research
Ordinary LLMs Implicitly Take Reasoning Steps: Anthropic experiment finds Claude shows signs of unprompted reasoning
Even without explicit training in reasoning, large language models “think” in ways that may be more deliberate than previously understood.
Tech & Society
Chatbot Use Creates Emotional Bonds: ChatGPT may ease loneliness but increase dependence, studies suggest
A pair of papers investigate how increasingly human-like chatbots affect users’ emotions.
Tech & Society
LLM Support for Tutors: GPT-4 boosts remote tutors’ performance in real time, study finds
Students benefit from tutoring, but training tutors is expensive. A study shows that large language models can boost tutors’ effectiveness in real time.
Business
Some AI-Generated Works Are Copyrightable: U.S. Copyright Office says that no new laws are needed for AI-generated works
The United States Copyright Office determined that existing laws are sufficient to decide whether a given AI-generated work is protected by copyright, making additional legislation unnecessary.