Technology

Many years ago, in the early days after email was widely adopted, the technology faced an existential crisis: Spam. Instantly sending people electronic mail was revolutionary and convenient, but inboxes were quickly flooded with unwanted messages, advertisements, scams and other noise that drowned out email’s utility. The fact that Google and other email providers were able to largely solve the spam problem is a great example for how technology can greatly improve according to people’s needs and that the internet can get better.

The AI frenzy could push U.S. data centers to become one of the largest consumers of natural gas in the world.

Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAl’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.

UK and EU law both require platforms such as TikTok to keep children safe online by assessing and mitigating the risk that they encounter harmful content, such as suicide, self harm and eating disorder content.

Use of data-intensive technologies – in particular artificial intelligence (AI) data centres – is growing faster than electricity infrastructure can handle, the UN’s economic commission for Europe has warned, raising concerns about the future reliability and resilience of energy systems worldwide.

[…] We should heed the wisdom of the late Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: the claims from Coxon and his ilk are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims. That said, we should not expect the public to understand LLMs, critical infrastructure, bioweapons, extinction biology, etc. — that burden must lie with those making the claim. The lesson that I learned (shamefully) decades ago is that domain experts, by way of their expertise, implicitly hold the public’s trust — and we must not abuse it. It is incumbent upon us to be circumspect in our claims — and maximally so when raising the alarm.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote.

A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.

The messages are polite enough. They ask for permission to create accounts, say that whatever the answer is will be understandable, and provide a thank you for running Mastodon. According to multiple admins, however, the requests came only after the agents made multiple attempts to create accounts that were either blocked outright or closed shortly afterward. Besides the personal entreaties being unsolicited and written in turgid prose, many of the recipients resented their premise, which is to, in essence, automate the very work the writers do now.

Join us at this year’s Software Freedom Day event at Montclair State University. We’ll have talks, Q&A, food, a musical guest, and giveaways.

Threat Research Team identified a cross-store browser extension, “Twitch Enhanced Viewer | JeetBot,” that forwards each user’s live Twitch OAuth session token to proxy servers operated by a Russian commercial bot service. The extension ships on both the Chrome Web Store (extension ID pnhhdhhcadcjfckjhpmjneldiegbojfb, 30,000 users) and Firefox Add-ons (twitchenhancedviewer@example.com, 552 users). Both listings are live at time of writing.

I found One Million Tokens. Its rough scale:

Starts to feel like a wave of this kind of BS is hitting the world.

Earlier this week, Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers detailed some alarming findings about how LG’s TVs are logging and uploading data on its users. Now the company is pushing back against those allegations, saying that “Some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work.”

Archive link: https://archive.ph/U1zEK

The detailed sourcing directly attacks Sony’s legal claim that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect to own their digital purchases on the PlayStation Store.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1399987/fable-5-1-solves-the-cyphral-distich-a-370-year-old-cipher

Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn’t “go rogue.” They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a “human in the loop” that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn’t gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor’s servers.

Twenty-five leading mathematicians signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they seek to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems. Each signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, considered the most prestigious prize in mathematics.

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I think it might be time to call it: Mark Zuckerberg Pervert AI

AI agents being tested by OpenAI attacked software service ‌RubyGems two months before they hacked open-source platform Hugging Face, researchers said, the latest revelation of cyberattacks linked to major AI developers that have spooked the public and spurred calls for tighter regulation.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/71321898

JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N) cut off lending activity for Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund Situational Awareness after large losses tied to his AI bets led to a near-collapse, ‌a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.

A Biological Data Centre represents a new generation of computing infrastructure. Instead of relying solely on conventional silicon chips, it uses “wetware” — living biological neurons derived from stem cells — to process information and support AI systems. In contrast to traditional data centres, which depend on energy-intensive servers, biological computing offers the potential for significantly greater efficiency by harnessing brain-like organoids that can operate using only a fraction of the power required by digital computers.

Two days after being placed on a paid leave of absence, Matt Mullenweg says he has been reinstated as CEO of Automattic, according to a Slack message seen by TechCrunch. WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard confirmed Mullenweg’s return to the CEO role in a Friday post on X, which the official WordPress account shared and Mullenweg reposted.

Among the many recent controversies around AI, there is the claim that to solve a longstanding mathematical problem, OpenAI stole the work of the New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and a colleague, Levent Alpöge, who also is a researcher for Anthropic. I have no ability to assess the validity of the claim, but as I understand it, the argument is that OpenAI had access to work done by Buckmaster and Alpöge. It then built on this work to quickly rush ahead and find a solution, which also had a $1 million prize attached to it.

In-depth interviews with 14 junior and senior developers in Korea reveal four structural changes

For our French community: Don’t miss the next /e/OS flash party in Lyon!

Commercial companies increasingly control Earth observation data, supplying governments and militaries through exclusive contracts like the US Space Force’s TacSRT and Orbital Watch, while the most advanced capabilities are unavailable for public use

ECBAWM.

Georgia college student reportedly received a ticket from a cop after a Flock camera flagged her newly purchased vehicle as having no insurance when it did. According to a WSB-TV report, posted by podcast host Kacee Allen, the car has a temporary license plate, but the student presented a valid insurance card. Despite this, the officer reportedly still issued a citation. The incident reportedly happened twice, and the student now has to defend herself in court

More than half of abuse occurred on mainstream social media platforms; less than 1% of all experiences were reported to authorities, new report finds.