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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 »

The US climate bill has made emission reductions dependent on economic success

The nation is entering markets already crowded with international rivals, many of which have been investing billions for decades. China alone has spent more than $50 billion to establish control of virtually... Read more »

How much would you pay to see a woolly mammoth?

If they can make a dunnart cell with enough thylacine DNA, the next step is to use cloning to try to create an embryo—and, eventually, an animal. Another project involves trying to... Read more »

Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

However, Meta and other companies working on large language models, including Google, have failed to take it seriously. Galactica is a large language model for science, trained on 48 million examples of... Read more »

The Download: Twitter may only last weeks, and Meta’s unforced AI error

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Elon Musk’s demands for loyalty triggered an exodus of Twitter workersHundreds of employees chose to quit instead of... Read more »