Lifeboat Foundation

JULIEN CROCKETT: Let’s start with the tension at the heart of AI: we understand and talk about AI systems as if they are both mere tools and intelligent actors that might one day come alive. Alison, you’ve argued that the currently popular AI systems, LLMs, are neither intelligent nor dumb—that those are the wrong categories by which to understand them. Rather, we should think of them as cultural technologies, like the printing press or the internet. Why is a “cultural technology” a better framework for understanding LLMs?

Awkward.

“The prevalence and harms of online misinformation is a perennial concern for internet platforms, institutions and society at large,” reads the paper. “The rise of generative AI-based tools, which provide widely-accessible methods for synthesizing realistic audio, images, video and human-like text, have amplified these concerns.”

The study, first caught by former Googler Alexios Mantzarlis and flagged in the newsletter Faked Up, focused on media-based misinformation, or bad information propagated through visual mediums like images and videos. To narrow the scope of the research, the study focused on media that was fact-checked by the service ClaimReview, ultimately examining a total of 135,838 fact-check-tagged pieces of online media.

Continue reading “Even Google’s Own Researchers Admit AI Is Top Source of Misinformation Online” »

How can rapidly emerging #AI develop into a trustworthy, equitable force? Proactive policies and smart governance, says Salesforce.

These initial steps ignited AI policy conversations amid the acceleration of innovation and technological change. Just as personal computing democratized internet access and coding accessibility, fueling more technology creation, AI is the latest catalyst poised to unlock future innovations at an unprecedented pace. But with such powerful capabilities comes large responsibility: We must prioritize policies that allow us to harness its power while protecting against harm. To do so effectively, we must acknowledge and address the differences between enterprise and consumer AI.

Enterprise versus consumer AI

Continue reading “How AI is poised to unlock innovations at unprecedented pace” »

From pocket-sized AI models to a warp drive breakthrough, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.

In the early 2010s, LightSquared, a multibillion-dollar startup promising to revolutionize cellular communications, declared bankruptcy. The company couldn’t figure out how to prevent its signals from interfering with those of GPS systems.

From Google and OpenAI’s latest AI releases to Waymo notching 50K robotaxi rides a week, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.

The delicate nature of quantum information means it does not travel well. A quantum Internet therefore needs devices known as quantum repeaters to swap entanglement between quantum bits, or qubits, at intermediate points. Several researchers have taken steps towards this goal by distributing entanglement between multiple nodes.

In 2020, for example, Xiao-Hui Bao and colleagues in Jian-Wei Pan’s group at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) entangled two ensembles of rubidium-87 atoms in vapour cells using photons that had passed down 50 km of commercial optical fibre. Creating a functional quantum repeater is more complex, however: “A lot of these works that talk about distribution over 50,100 or 200 kilometres are just talking about sending out entangled photons, not about interfacing with a fully quantum network at the other side,” explains Can Knaut, a PhD student at Harvard University and a member of the US team.

SpaceX’s Starlink has expanded its satellite internet coverage to include the entire US and announced an upcoming ‘Direct to Cell’ service.

One of the main barriers involves how to connect objects to the internet in places where there is no mobile network infrastructure. The answer seems to lie with low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, although the solution presents its own challenges.

A new study led by Guillem Boquet and Borja Martínez, two researchers from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) working in the Wireless Networks (WINE) group of the university’s Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), has examined possible ways to improve the coordination between the billions of connected objects on the surface of the Earth and the satellites in its atmosphere.

The paper is published in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal.