Letters
Amidst rising worry about AI harms both realistic (like job loss) and unrealistic (like human extinction), It’s critical to understand AI’s potential to do tremendous good. Our new specialization is designed to empower people to identify, scope, and build impactful AI projects.
Tech & Society
Enthusiasm for AI is driving top salaries for engineers and executives into the stratosphere. Companies that advertise open AI positions are listing annual pay scales well into six figures. In at least one case, the proposed salary approaches seven figures.
Tech & Society
Tonight at 11: I’m an AI-generated character, and I’ll be bringing you the latest headlines. Indian broadcasters have embraced synthetic news presenters, Nikkei Asia reported. Their counterparts in other Asian countries also rely increasingly on automated anchors.
Tech & Society
Event data recorders, also known as black boxes, got an update for the era of self-driving cars. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers published guidelines for internal devices that track the performance of autonomous road vehicles.
Letters
I’d like to share a part of the origin story of large language models that isn’t widely known. A lot of early work in natural language processing (NLP) was funded by U.S. military intelligence agencies that needed machine translation and speech recognition capabilities.
Tech & Society
China’s internet watchdog proposed sweeping limitations on face recognition — with significant exceptions.
Tech & Society
Anthropic, the startup behind the safety-focused Claude chatbot, teamed up with South Korea’s largest mobile phone provider.
Tech & Society
An upstart supplier of AI chips secured a major customer. Cerebras, which competes with Nvidia in hardware for training large models, signed a $100 million contract with Abu Dhabi tech conglomerate G42. The deal is the first part of a multi-stage plan to build a network of supercomputers.
Tech & Society
Hackers attacked AI models in a large-scale competition to discover vulnerabilities. At the annual Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas, 2,200 people competed to break guardrails around language models, The New York Times reported.
Tech & Society
The New York Times launched a multi-pronged attack on the use of its work in training datasets. The company updated its terms of service to forbid use of its web content and other data for training AI systems.
Tech & Society
The latest robot dog is smarter — and less expensive — than ever. Unitree Robotics of Hangzhou, China, unleashed Go2, a quadruped robot that trots alongside its owner, stands on two legs, jumps, talks, takes photos, and retails for less than a high-end MacBook.
Tech & Society
The latest wave of large language models trained in Chinese is open source for some users. Internet giant Alibaba released large language models that are freely available to smaller organizations.