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The US and China are pointing fingers at each other over climate change

Why it matters As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago in the newsletter, one of the major discussions at COP27 was about whether richer countries should help poorer, more vulnerable... Read more »

We could run out of data to train AI language programs 

The trouble is, the types of data typically used for training language models may be used up in the near future—as early as 2026, according to a paper by researchers from Epoch,... Read more »

The Download: Meta’s diplomatic AI, and China’s online comment censorship

China recently published a draft law on its forthcoming social credit system, which will eventually guide how the country builds it. The system is intended to promote trustworthiness in business, education, and... Read more »

Meta’s game-playing AI can make and break alliances like a human

Learning to play Diplomacy is a big deal for several reasons. Not only does it involve multiple players, who make moves at the same time, but each turn is preceded by a... Read more »

The Chinese government’s problematic quest to judge online comments

This is just one incident, but as the idea of building social creditworthiness increasingly seeps into other regulations, it reveals the risks of standardizing a practice wherein the government makes moral judgments... Read more »

The Download: China’s social credit law, and robot dog navigation

Galactica was intended to help scientists by summarizing academic papers, and solving math problems, among other tasks. But outsiders swiftly prompted the model to provide “scientific research” on the benefits of homophobia,... Read more »

Trust large language models at your own peril

According to Meta, Galactica can “summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more.” But soon after its launch, it was pretty easy... Read more »

China just announced a new social credit law. Here’s what it means.

To this end, the latest draft law talks about the need to use “diverse methods such as statistical methods, modeling, and field certification” to conduct credit assessments and combine the data from... Read more »

Watch this robot dog scramble over tricky terrain just by using its camera

Unlike existing robots on the market, such as Boston Dynamics’ Spot, which moves around using internal maps, this robot uses cameras alone to guide its movements in the wild, says Ashish Kumar,... Read more »

The Download: resurrecting mammoths, and the climate bill’s big flaw

Sara Ord has one of the most futuristic job titles around—director of species restoration at Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first “de-extinction” company. Her team is figuring out how to turn Asian elephants... Read more »