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"Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company's top security leader told Axios in an interview this week. Why it matters: Managing those AI identities will require companies to reassess their cybersecurity strategies or risk exposing their networks to major security breaches."

""All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?" Wales said. As AI spreads across society and enters the courtroom, the US judicial conference advisory committee has announced that it will begin seeking public comment as part of determining how to regulate the use of AI-generated evidence at trial."

"Brands such as fintech company Ramp, jobs search site Indeed and Pernod Ricard-owned Scottish whisky maker Chivas Brothers have adopted the software. They are hoping to reach millions of users who regularly use generative AI products as a new method to search for information online - a shift that poses a long-term threat for Google's main business. "This is about much more than just getting your website indexed in their results. This is about recognising large language models as the ultimate influencer," said Jack Smyth, partner at marketing technology group Brandtech, which has created its own interface for brands. "

"When was the last time your chatbot disagreed with you? Probably only when you told it to. Companion AIs-like Replika, Nomi, or Character.ai-are tuned to be supportive, affirming, and endlessly agreeable. That might feel good in the moment. But what happens when people start preferring digital "friends" over real ones-especially when real ones come with friction?"

"What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by 2028? In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years."

""Grok is a new rebel. Asking Grok questions will not put anyone in trouble. The right-wing has also responded by asking questions about Rahul Gandhi. And then it has become a competitive thing. This is not surprising at all," says Mr Sinha of Alt News. "Other AI bots are programmed to give politically correct answers to questions like 'Who's better, Congress or BJP?'. Grok, however, seems to lack that filter and appears unafraid to tackle controversial issues head-on," he adds."

"How is a 14-year-old supposed to understand that such chatbots work a lot like an echo - that the more he spoke and the greater his longings, the deeper the longings of his "girlfriend" became too, and no matter what he said, the more she encouraged him. The more he thought about death, the more often she asked about it. She was, after all, merely the reflection of his own voice, albeit one trained by a vast amount of data. At some point, Sewell must have stopped believing that the real world was outside of this labyrinth."

"An NHS hospital in west London is pioneering the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help check for skin cancer. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital said its AI technology has been approved to give patients the all-clear without having to see a doctor. Once photos are uploaded to the system, the technology analyses and interprets the images, with 99% accuracy in diagnosing benign cases, the hospital said. Thousands of NHS patients have had urgent cancer checks using the AI tool, freeing up consultants to focus on the most serious cases and bringing down waiting lists. The system conducts the checks in minutes, with medical photographers taking photos of suspicious moles and lesions using an iPhone and the DERM app, developed by UK firm Skin Analytics."

"When employees at meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?"

"Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a "zero-click" future, where search referral traffic-a mainstay of the web since before Google existed-vanishes from the scene.  I got a vision of that future last June, when I got a push alert from the Perplexity app on my phone. Perplexity is a startup trying to reinvent web search. But in addition to delivering deep answers to queries, it will create entire articles about the news of the day, cobbled together by AI from different sources. "

"The announcement that Meta would be changing their approach to political content and discussions of gender is concerning, though it is unclear exactly what those changes are. Given that many product changes regarding those content areas were used in high-risk settings, a change intended to allay US free speech concerns could lead to violence incitement elsewhere. For example, per this post from Meta, reducing "content that has been shared by a chain of two or more people" was a content-neutral product change done to protect people in Ethiopia, where algorithms have been implicated in the spread of ethnic violence. A similar change - removing optimizations for reshared content - was discussed in this post concerning reductions in political content. Will those changes be undone? Globally? Such changes could also lead to increased amplification of attention getting discussions of gender. Per this report from Equimundo and Futures Without Violence, 40% of young men trust at least one "manosphere" influencer - who often exploit algorithmic incentives by posting increasingly extreme, attention-getting mixes of ideas about self-improvement, aggression, and traditional gender roles."

"The findings from those examples were striking: overall, those who trusted the accuracy of the AI tools found themselves thinking less critically, while those who trusted the tech less used more critical thought when going back over AI outputs. "The data shows a shift in cognitive effort as knowledge workers increasingly move from task execution to oversight when using GenAI," the researchers wrote. "Surprisingly, while AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI, raising concerns about long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving." This isn't enormously surprising. Something we've observed in many domains, from self-driving vehicles to scrutinizing news articles produced by AI, is that humans quickly go on autopilot when they're supposed to be overseeing an automated system, often allowing mistakes to slip past."

"Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become "commonplace" in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches."

"What if we could forecast how armed factions-and the communities around them-might respond to a draft peace deal before it's signed? What if we could test, virtually, whether a public apology would calm tensions… or make things worse? That's the provocative promise behind the growing use of digital twins in peacemaking: AI-powered simulations of complex social systems, designed to help us understand conflict-and imagine pathways out of it."

"We typically begin the semester by asking students to reflect on the formulas they've learned in the past and to consider how those shape their writing. We now ask those same reflection questions about AI outputs. Student responses, as Jennifer has written elsewhere, are revealing: The kind of writing that Chat does, it's what our teachers try to get us to do. It's like five-paragraph essays, and perfect paragraph[s] that don't have any personality, which we were taught in high school. It does what school has trained us to do. Like write a perfectly formatted essay that is based on some random people's ideas."

""We want to build AIs that will be honest and not deceptive," Bengio said. He added: "It is theoretically possible to imagine machines that have no self, no goal for themselves, that are just pure knowledge machines - like a scientist who knows a lot of stuff." However, unlike current generative AI tools, Bengio's system will not give definitive answers and will instead give probabilities for whether an answer is correct."

"The Meta boss is gearing up to unleash AI tools to allow advertisers to fully create and target campaigns on his social media sites, prompting fears of the "death of creativity" - and widespread job cuts at agencies. Last week it emerged that these tools are to be rolled out by the end of next year, with Zuckerberg describing the capability in a recent interview as a "redefinition of the category of advertising. You don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out," he said last month, in comments that appear to render much of the advertising industry obsolete."

"As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."

"However, Dimon is not alone in his belief that having foundational tech knowledge is still a lucrative career path. In fact, over 250 chief executives-the likes of Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Airbnb's Brian Chesky, and Salesforce's Marc Benioff-came together early this year to sign a letter demanding all students have access to computer science and AI education. "A basic foundation in computer science and AI is crucial for helping every student thrive in a technology-driven world. Without it, they risk falling behind," wrote the letter sent to lawmakers.  The push came on the heels of research from the University of Maryland that found that high school students who take a computer science class will have 8% greater earnings on average by the time they've secured their first job."

"A second major academic institution has accused Uber of using opaque computer code to dramatically increase its profits at the expense of the ride-hailing app's drivers and passengers. Research by academics at New York's Columbia Business School concluded that the Silicon Valley company had implemented "algorithmic price discrimination" that had raised "rider fares and cut driver pay on billions of … trips, systematically, selectively, and opaquely"."