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"But, as he and other modellers warn, much information about how SARS-CoV-2 spreads is still unknown and must be estimated or assumed - and that limits the precision of forecasts. An earlier version of the Imperial model, for instance, estimated that SARS-CoV-2 would be about as severe as influenza in necessitating the hospitalization of those infected. That turned out to be incorrect."

"Our social media platforms are powered by a surveillance-based business model designed to mine, manipulate, and extract our human experiences at any cost, causing a breakdown of our information ecosystem and shared sense of truth worldwide. This extractive business model is not built for us but built to exploit us."

"The announcement also highlights the growing partnership between Meta and Nvidia. Nvidia is a key Meta partner, providing the Facebook parent with computing chips called GPUs to help train its AI models, including the latest version of Llama."

"The model takes a two-pronged approach. First, it focuses on trends present in the region, looking at geostatistics and historical data from Prodes, the annual government monitoring system for deforestation in the Amazon. Understanding what has happened can help make predictions more precise. When already deforested areas are recent, this indicates gangs are operating in the area, so there's a higher risk that nearby forest will soon be wiped out. Second, it looks at variables that put the brakes on deforestation - land protected by Indigenous and quilombola (descendent of rebel slaves) communities, and areas with bodies of water, or other terrain that doesn't lend itself to agricultural expansion, for instance - and variables that make deforestation more likely, including higher population density, the presence of settlements and rural properties, and higher density of road infrastructure, both legal and illegal."

"A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real system - a building, the power grid, a city, even a human being - that mimics the characteristics of the system. A digital twin is more than just a computer model, however. It receives data from sensors in the real system to constantly parallel the system's state."

"Because trends in data only become discernible with time, Masters believes it will be five or 10 years before we have a firm handle on what's going on."

"The algorithm at play is performing what's commonly referred to as predictive policing. Using years - and sometimes decades - worth of crime reports, the algorithm analyses the data to identify areas with high probabilities for certain types of crime, placing little red boxes on maps of the city that are streamed into patrol cars."

"This time the model could look at both the surrounding words and the content of the image to fill in the blank. Through millions of repetitions, it could then discover not just the patterns among the words but also the relationships between the words and the elements in each image."

"Can AI and analytics be used in a way that improves operational efficiency without jeopardizing our ethical principles? The answer is "yes" - if moral objectives and constraints, now often treated as an afterthought, are considered from the outset when designing models. We will discuss a recent attempt to combine ethics, analytics, and operational efficiency in the world of organ allocation and examine the lessons it holds for other areas of health care and beyond."

"The researchers found that the cost of the computational power required to train the models is doubling every nine months. This is a prodigious rate of growth-at this rate, the cost of the hardware and electricity needed to build cutting-edge AI systems alone would be in the billions by later this decade, without accounting for other costs such as employee compensation."

"It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people….This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. "

"What Hamilton and his colleagues found surprising was that this approach could also be applied to helping find problems with existing deep networks, related to the surge of "deepfakes" that have recently cropped up. They applied this data structure to find areas where probabilistic models, such as the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are often used to create deepfakes, break down. They coined these problematic areas "blind spots," and note that they give us insight into how GANs can be biased. Such blind spots further show that GANs struggle to represent particular areas of a dataset, even if most of their fakes can fool a human. "

""ChatGPT may have better syntax than humans, but it's shallow on research and critical thinking," said Lauren Goodlad, a professor of English and comparative literature at Rutgers University and the chair of its Critical Artificial Intelligence initiative. She said she understands where concern about the tool is coming from but that - at least at the college level - the type and caliber of written tasks that ChatGPT can offer does not replace critical thinking and human creativity. "These are statistical models," she said. "And so they favor probability, as in they are trained on data, and the only reason they work as well as they do is that they are looking for probable responses to a prompt.""

"Green Light uses machine learning systems to comb through Maps data to calculate the amount of traffic congestion present at a given light, as well as the average wait times of vehicles stopped there. That information is then used to train AI models that can autonomously optimize the traffic timing at that intersection, reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there. It's all part of Google's goal to help its partners collectively reduce their carbon emissions by a gigaton by 2030."

"The music industry is urging streaming platforms not to let artificial intelligence use copyrighted songs for training, in the latest of a run of arguments over intellectual property that threaten to derail the generative AI sector's explosive growth. In a letter to streamers including Spotify and Apple Music, the record label Universal Music Group expressed fears that AI labs would scrape millions of tracks to use as training data for their models and copycat versions of pop stars."

"Ultimately, he suggests, each user would have their own "large language model" (LLM), the underlying technology of services such as ChatGPT, which would be trained on their own speech and behaviour patterns, to let them generate extremely personalised responses to queries and requests. Such systems could be a natural progression from AI tools that already exist today. Services such as Gmail can summarise and suggest replies to emails based on previous messages, while Microsoft Teams will transcribe and summarise video conferences, automatically generating a to-do list from the contents."

"According to a new report from 404Media, as originally reported in Alexios Mantzarlis' Faked Up newsletter, the Crush AI modifier app receives the vast majority of its traffic from Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. According to Similarweb's data, last month Crush AI received more than a quarter of a million visits to its service - and roughly 90 percent of that traffic was from Meta's platforms. Crush AI makes it quite clear what the purpose of its service is in its advertisements. The company's ads include photos of real-life individuals like Instagram influencer and model Mikayla Demaiter and OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain. The ads boast that users can "upload a photo" and "erase anyone's clothes.""

"Umi is a digital wellness platform and personalized family wellness coach that integrates AI and a community of experts. By consolidating wellness data into personalized, actionable pathways for every family, Umi helps people build healthy habits and connect through wellness routines that work for everyone. And by leveraging the power of Anthropic's Claude AI model, Umi benefits from the advanced reasoning capabilities to navigate the unique challenges faced by individuals and families."

"These experiments in computational creativity are enabled by the dramatic advances in deep learning over the past decade. Deep learning has several key advantages for creative pursuits. For starters, it's extremely flexible, and it's relatively easy to train deep-learning systems (which we call models) to take on a wide variety of tasks."

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."