The country’s most expensive public infrastructure project finally appears to have the money and legal approval to complete its first leg.
Judges must now consult the AI on every case by law, Beijing’s Supreme Court said in an update on the system published this week, and if they go against its recommendation they must submit a written explanation for why.
The AI has also been connected to police databases and China’s Orwellian social credit system, handing it the power to punish people — for example by automatically putting a thief’s property up for sale online.
Beijing has hailed the new technology for making ‘a significant contribution to the judicial advancement of human civilisation’ — while critics say it risks creating a world in which man is ruled by machine.
A new language model similar in scale to GPT-3 is being made freely available and could help to democratise access to AI.
BLOOM (which stands for BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) has been developed by 1,000 volunteer researchers from over 70 countries and 250 institutions, supported by ethicists, philosophers, and legal experts, in a collaboration called BigScience. The project, coordinated by New York-based startup Hugging Face, used funding from the French government.
The new AI took more than a year of planning and training, which included a final run of 117 days (11th March – 6th July) using the Jean Zay, one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, located in the south of Paris, France.
Elon Musk announced he will walk away from his tumultuous $44 billion offer to buy Twitter, leaving the deal on the verge of collapse. The Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter’s board Friday saying he is terminating the acquisition.
But Twitter isn’t accepting Musk’s declaration. The chair of Twitter’s board, Bret Taylor, tweeted in response that the board is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
Twitter could have pushed for a $1 billion breakup fee that Musk agreed to pay under these circumstances. Instead, it looks ready to fight to complete the deal, which the company’s board has approved and CEO Parag Agrawal has insisted he wants to consummate.
Jun Huang from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.
Founded in 1,890, the University of Chicago (UChicago, U of C, or Chicago) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan, the school holds top-ten positions in various national and international rankings. UChicago is also well known for its professional schools: Pritzker School of Medicine, Booth School of Business, Law School, School of Social Service Administration, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
ON THE PANEL…
Alys Denby, Deputy Editor, CapX
Mark Johnson, Legal and Policy Officer, Big Brother Watch.
Christopher Snowdon, Head of Lifestyle Economics, IEA
Victoria Hewson, Head of Regulatory Affairs, IEA
Leading bipartisan moonshots for health, national security & functional government — senator joe lieberman, bipartisan commission on biodefense, no labels, and the centre for responsible leadership.
Senator Joe Lieberman, is senior counsel at the law firm of Kasowitz Benson Torres (https://www.kasowitz.com/people/joseph-i-lieberman) where he currently advises clients on a wide range of issues, including homeland and national security, defense, health, energy, environmental policy, intellectual property matters, as well as international expansion initiatives and business plans.
Technology won’t be a problem for its future application, but legal and ethical concerns might, warns Beijing-based researcher.
When water vapour spontaneously condenses inside capillaries just 1 nm thick, it behaves according to the 150-year-old Kelvin equation – defying predictions that the theory breaks down at the atomic scale. Indeed, researchers at the University of Manchester have showed that the equation is valid even for capillaries that accommodate only a single layer of water molecules (Nature 588 250).
Condensation inside capillaries is ubiquitous and many physical processes – including friction, stiction, lubrication and corrosion – are affected by it. The Kelvin equation relates the surface tension of water to its temperature and the diameter of its meniscus. It predicts that if the ambient humidity is between 30–50%, then flat capillaries less than 1.5 nm thick will spontaneously fill with water that condenses from the air.
Real world capillaries can be even smaller, but for them it is impossible to define the curvature of a liquid’s meniscus so the Kelvin equation should no longer hold. However, because such tight confinement is difficult to achieve in the laboratory, this had yet to be tested.
