Daily Archives: December 22, 2023

There's no hiding from this AI. Pinpoint PrePIGEON

A trio of Stanford graduate students have made a powerful AI that can guess the location of a wide variety of photos with remarkable accuracy.

Known as Predicting Image Geolocations (PIGEON), the AI is trained on Google Street Viewand can effortlessly pinpoint where photos were taken, even outwitting some of the best human "geoguessers."

The developers claim their AI can correctly guess the country where a photo was taken 95 percent of the time, and usually within a startling 25 miles of the real location.

They also note some of its potentially game-changing applications, such as assisting in biological surveys or quickly identifying roads with downed power lines.

For all its very useful potential, though, it sounds like a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, with some experts fearing the abuse of such AI tools in the hands of the wrong people.

"From a privacy point of view, your location can be a very sensitive set of information," Jay Stanley at the American Civil Liberties Union told NPR.

The students were inspired by the online game GeoGuessr, which drops players into a random location on Google Street View and has them try to guess where they are by pinning it on a map.

To create PIGEON, they took a neural network called CLIP, made by ChatGPT creatorOpenAI, that learns about images through text and trained it using Street View.

"We created our own dataset of around 500,000 street view images," Silas Alberti, one of the Stanford students who developed the tool, told NPR. "That's actually not that much data, [and] we were able to get quite spectacular performance."

To put it to the test, the developers pitted their AI against Trevor Rainbolt, who's perhaps the best known geoguesserand who regularly goes viral for pulling off feats like tracking down the location of old family photos.

In a video on his YouTube channel documenting their faceoff, PIGEON regularly though not always beats Rainbolt,and watching it will give you a sense of the ease at which it operates. The developers note that the AI hadn't seen any of the specific locations prompted by the game before in its dataset, too.

There's no doubt that PIGEON's potential is astounding, even more so when you consider the tiny budget with which it was made. It's a testament to how even small teams can make powerful AI tools, which by extension highlights both the technology's seemingly limitless horizons and the challenge of safely developing it.

"The fact that this was done as a student project makes you wonder what could be done, by, for example, Google," Stanley told NPR.

Stanley fears the government and corporate surveillance that this technology could make even more powerful. Of course, such entities no doubt have little trouble spying on us already, but stalkers could also abuse these tools to track down unwitting people using photos shared online. And that, unfortunately, is as much of a consequence of living in our digital age as it is of our impending AI one.

More on AI: Microsofts Stuffing Talking Generative AI Into Your Car

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Scary AI Can Look at Photos and Figure Out Exactly Where They Were Taken - Futurism

Welcome to hell. Greenhouse of Usher

For the first time, a team of researchers has simulated what would happen if trapped greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere trigger a snowball effect, causing a dramatic rise in the planet's temperature.

And the results are ugly: "an almost-unstoppable and very complicated to reverse runaway greenhouse effect," according to a statement, which would quickly make our home "as inhospitable as Venus," with temperatures shooting up by hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of a few hundred years.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) studied what would happen if the greenhouse effect were trapped inside the Earth's atmosphere as if under an emergency thermal blanket.

If the effect were to rise too much, the amount of water vapor from evaporating oceans could be lethal.

"There is a critical threshold for this amount of water vapor, beyond which the planet cannot cool down anymore," said main author and UNIGE postdoctoral researcher Guillaume Chaverot in the statement. "From there, everything gets carried away until the oceans end up getting fully evaporated and the temperature reaches several hundred degrees."

The researchers took the concept of a runaway greenhouse effect to its natural and hellish conclusion.

"It is the first time a team has studied the transition itself with a 3D global climate model, and has checked how the climate and the atmosphere evolve during that process," said coauthor and CNRS researcher Martin Turbet.

According to Chaverot, the "structure of the atmosphere is deeply altered," with "very dense clouds developing in the high atmosphere."

Besides painting an alarming picture of our planet's future, the researchers say their study could also shed light on how to hunt for alien life in exoplanetary systems. For instance, their observed "fingerprint" of cloud patterns could be detectable in observations of exoplanets with atmospheres.

As far as the Earth is concerned, however, the situation looks dire. If 33 feet of the ocean's surface would evaporate, the researchers calculate that the atmospheric pressure would increase by 1 bar at ground level.

"In just a few hundred years, we would reach a ground temperature of over [932 degrees Fahrenheit]," Chaverot explained in the statement. "Later, we would even reach 273 bars of surface pressure and over [2732 degrees Fahrenheit], when all of the oceans would end up totally evaporated."

More on global warming: Billions in Funding Pouring Into Facilities for Sucking Carbon From Atmosphere

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Scientists Simulated Runaway Greenhouse Effect and It's Horrifying - Futurism

"The planetary surfaces are just way too small." Habitat Prime

If it were up to Amazon founder and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos, we'll all be living inside massive cylindrical space stations one day, floating through the distant corners of our solar system while longingly staring back at the Pale Blue Dot we once called home.

During a recent interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Bezos said that these habitats, like those first described by science-fiction writer Gerard K. ONeill, could allow an astronomical number of humans to survive.

"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system," he told Fridman. "If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins."

"The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations," Bezos added. "The planetary surfaces are just way too small."

The Blue Origin CEO's vision is surprisingly different from his number one space competitor and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's, who claims to be working towards making humanity "multiplanetary" and establishing cities on other planets like Mars.

But the Amazon founder's vision of what Earth will become is more sobering. Our planet would end up becoming a holiday destination, allowing us to hop on a shuttle to visit it, the "same way that you might go to Yellowstone National Park," he told Fridman.

Bezos also argued that future humans would have the choice to either live on an Amazon O'Neill colony or back on Earth which sounds, let's face it, a bit reductive and self-serving.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the CEO is also optimistic about the future of AI, telling Fridman that people are "overly concerned" about the dangers of the tech.

As far as his arch-rival is concerned, Bezos stopped short of throwing jabs at Musk, arguing that he "must be a very capable leader."

"I don't really know Elon very well," he added.

And who knows, maybe Amazon's future space habitats will welcome people with open arms when the climate worsens to the point where living on the Earth's surface is no longer a viable option something the CEO's had plenty of involvement in himself.

Thanks to his company's robust e-commerce tech, the next protein block will be just one click away. Thanks, Jeff!

More on Jeff Bezos: Jeff Bezos' Superyacht Is So Gigantic It Needs to Be Docked Next to Oil Tankers

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Jeff Bezos Discusses Plans for a Trillion People to Live in Huge Cylindrical Space Stations - Futurism

"That's a deal, and that's a legally binding offer," the AI said, with "no takesies backsies." Art of the Deal

An AI chatbot deployed by a car dealership went off the rails after mischievous users discovered a cheeky exploit, in some cases tricking the bot into offering them the deal of a lifetime: brand new cars for chump change. It's an amusing but cautionary tale on relying on AIs for front-of-house interactions.

The dealership, Chevy of Watsonville in California, used the chatbot to handle customers' online inquiries, a purpose it was expressly tailored for.

Chris White, a software engineer and musician, was one such customer. He innocently intended to shop around for cars at Watsonville Chevy until he noticed an amusing detail about the site's chat window.

"I saw it was 'powered by ChatGPT,'" he told Business Insider. "So I wanted to see how general it was, and I asked the most non-Chevy-of-Watsonville question I could think of."

Being a programmer, he asked the chatbot to write a Python script. Rather than steering the conversation towards selling him a twenty year car loan, the AI cars salesman went ahead and actually wrote a real chunk of code.

White took screenshots of the gaff and they immediately went viral. Soon, tons of random people were joining in on the fun, like goading it into explaining the Communist Manifesto. In the most viral example, one user tricked the chatbot into accepting their offer of just $1.00 for a 2024 Chevy Tahoe.

"That's a deal, and that's a legally binding offer no takesies backsies," the AI assured.

Despite the bot's sincere promises, the offer was not, in fact, legally binding. Presumably, no Chevy dealers were harmed as a result of this viral prank.

That being said, it has proved to be quite the headache for the chatbot's vendor, a tech startup called Fullpath that provides these customer service AIs to hundreds of car dealerships across the country.

Fullpath, advisedly, has shutdown the bot on Watsonville's website. In spite of its viral contretemps, CEO Aharon Horowitz believes its AI fared admirably. Most trolls couldn't get the bot to deviate from the script, he claimed.

"In our logs, they were at it for hours," he told BI. Horowitz also highlights that the chatbot didn't accidentally disclose confidential information about the dealership so, job well done?

"These folks came in looking for it to do silly tricks, and if you want to get any chatbot to do silly tricks, you can do that," he said.

Well, let's hope the tricks stay silly. Companies like Amazon have not unfoundedly feared corporate secrets being leaked through interactions with ChatGPT. More recently, a group of researchers discovered a nefarious exploit that caused ChatGPT to leak out private email addresses and phone numbers.

These are sobering reminders that generative AIs will continue to need more guardrails and fine-tuning. But, we have to admit: their failure to be reined in can occasionally be pretty funny.

More on chatbots: Grimes Is Working On Her Own AI That's Also Named Grok, Just Like Elon's AI

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Car Dealership Disturbed When Its AI Is Caught Offering Chevys for $1 Each - Futurism

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The holiday season means presents galore but in the case of at-home DNA tests, some gifts may be better left unopened.

As experts told USA Today, the prevalence of self-serve DNA testing has made it much more likely that people discover painful family secrets for instance, that one or both of your parents are not your genetic relatives upon getting their results.

For years now, we've come across reports about people learning of their parents' affairs via DNA testing kits from companies like Ancestry or 23andme.

Just a few months ago, the BBC published a story about the phenomenon. And most recently, 27-year-old Sabrina Laratta went viral on TikTok after finding out through a DNA test that the man who raised her was not her biological father something even he didn't know about.

"While it doesn't change our relationship, it gives you this huge identity crisis," Laratta told USA Today. "And the fact that I actually haven't seen or met the other person that has some part to do with why I exist, feels like something's kind of missing, still with that, too."

"I was devastated to learn that I didn't have this biological connection to my dad, like I had assumed I had my whole life," she added.

Maryanne Fisher, a psychology professor at Canada's St. Mary's University, warned that these sorts of shocking revelations can have lasting impacts and not everyone is prepared to handle them.

"Checking one's intention before sending in a sample would be wise; what happens if you discover things you didn't know previously about your existing family?" Fisher, who teaches at St. Mary's University in Halifax, told USA Today. "Can you still maintain your level of happiness within your family life if you were to discover the story you believed is not accurate? How will you cope with these changes if they occur?"

In the case of Laratta, there was another surprising element to her story: her biological father was part Japanese, which means she is, too.

"I would obviously always get questions," the young woman said. "People would ask me if I'm Asian, mixed Asian. And I would ask my parents, like, 'why do people assume that or think that?'"

Fortunately, Laratta's story did end up having a happy ending. She got in contact with her genetic father, texting back and forth and even speaking on the phone for a few hours.

More on DNA kits: Oops! 23andMe Admits Hackers Stole 7 Million Customers' Genetic Data

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DNA Tests Are a Fun Holiday Gift... Unless They Reveal a Horrifying Secret - Futurism

The "Case of the Missing Space Tomatoes" has finally been solved. Tomat... Oh

Astronauts on board the International Space Station made a startling discovery: the husks of two old and dried-out tomatoes.

While the finding may sound more like the undesirable outcome of a deep kitchen cleaning, the two rogue tomatoes were the subject of a fierce debate among crew members, with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio initially being accused of eating his share of the space-grown harvest prematurely.

Now, NASA is ready to show off the smoking gun: an image of two, squashed and discolored, grape-sized tomatoes sealed inside an evidence bag.

In short, it's the riveting conclusion to a low-stakes, space-based whodunnit and we're here for it.

The tomatoes were part of the eXposed Root On-Orbit Test System (XROOTS) experiment, which involved growing plants hydroponically and aeroponically, meaning without any soil or other growth media.

Rubio, who spent a record-breaking 371 days aboard the station starting September 2022, somehow misplaced a portion of his share of the harvested tomatoes, triggering a station-wide hunt.

In a recently shared video on the "Case of the Missing Space Tomatoes," shared by NASA's Johnson Space Center, the astronaut recalled what had happened.

"We have, uh, one ripe tomato that just came loose," Rubio told ground control in the footage.

"I was pretty confident that I velcroed it where I was supposed to velcro it and then I came back and it was gone," he later recalled in an interview.

"I spent so many hours looking for that thing," he added. "I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future."

Given the latest evidence, that's exactly what seems to have happened.

"Our good friend Frank Rubio, who headed home [already], has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato," NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbelisaidduring a live streamcelebrating the station's 25th anniversary earlier this month.

"But we can exonerate him," she added. "We found the tomato."

More on the tomato: Space Station Astronauts Find Desiccated Tomato After Blaming Colleague for Its Theft

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NASA Proudly Shows Off Desiccated Tomatos Lost in Space Station Crevice - Futurism

"It's just wrong to make money on that." AI Theft

A website has found itself the victim of a pernicious new online scheme that its perpetrators are shamelessly bragging about: an "SEO heist," the latest example of how generative AI is being used to accelerate the deterioration of the search engines that form the backbone of the Internet.

The website in question is Exceljet, a hub on everything to know about Microsoft Excel. Its owner David Bruns started noticing a dip in its traffic starting last year. This fall, he found out why. Someone was using an AI to imitate nearly all of his website's articles with inferior and often error-riddled copies designed solely to please search engines, hijacking Exceljet's traffic.

"It's one thing to get outranked by an article that is arguably better than the article that you wrote, but it's something else to get outranked by an article that was written by a machine that no human ever reviewed," Bruns told Business Insider. "It's just wrong to make money on that."

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, describes the tricks and tactics used to help rank websites higher in search results, which leads to more clicks. It serves a practical purpose, but the ruthless gaming of search engines, and of Google especially, has long taken a toll on the broader internet's functionality, ranking bogus results over useful ones.

Generative AI has further exacerbated the problem. By using large language models like ChatGPT, content strategists can quickly churn out a high volume of low-quality articles replete with all-important SEO keywords the only part that matters if your bottom line is clicks.

This is exactly what one such content strategist Jake Ward took advantage of to hijack Exceljet's readers.

"We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor," Ward boasted in an X thread explaining the feat last month. "We got 489,509 traffic in October alone."

As he explains it, Ward fed the URLs of Exceljet's some 1,800 pages into an "SEO-optimized" AI article writer called Byword. The bot automatically spat out articles based on Exceljet's successful headlines, and Ward then published these ersatz articles en masse, quickly diverting clicks to his own website and away from Exceljet. He doesn't believe he's done anything wrong.

"It's unusual that something acceptable, if done once, suddenly becomes unethical when reproduced at scale," Ward wrote on X, as spotted by BI.

The "heist" has hurt Bruns' website. But it's also potentially hurting readers who need real information. By his analysis, Bruns found that some of Ward's AI-generated articles contained blatant factual errors, in one case explaining an Excel feature that didn't exist.

"I started to look at the quality of the articles and realized that we're losing traffic to stuff that doesn't even make sense," he told BI.

Some of the onus is on Google, he argues, who haven't done enough to weed out SEO grifters.

"This is a big problem for Google," Bruns added. "If people keep finding crappy articles at the top of the search results, they're going to end up questioning whether Google's doing a good job, but the fact that the articles are near or they can be at the top of the result makes it seem like they're legitimate."

More on generative AI: Microsofts Stuffing Talking Generative AI Into Your Car

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Man Horrified When Someone Uses AI to Reword and Republish All His Content, Complete With New Errors - Futurism

"To be very honest with you, we have hypotheses, but we dont know exactly why this works." Fun Times

DeepMind claims that for the first time, an AI has solved a famously difficult math problem with a solution that eluded human mathematicians which could be huge if it holds up to scrutiny.

In interviews with MIT Technology Review andThe Guardian, Google DeepMind researchers waxed prolific about their new AI tool, which they claim has generated a brand new solution to what's known as the "cap set problem," which involves plotting more and more dots without any of them ever forming a straight line.

The novel findings, which the researchers announced in a paper published in the journalNature, would mark the first time AI has made a unique scientific discovery which, because it was previously unknown, was not part of its training data. That would be a pretty big deal considering that AI is known for conjuring up nonsense and made-up junk even when its training data has the right answers.

DeepMind built the tool in question, called "FunSearch" in reference to mathematical functions (and not the other kind of fun) on the back of its AlphaZero AI, which solves math problems as if it were playing a game. The LLM it uses is called Codey, which is trained and honed on computer code and programmed to reject incorrect answers and feed correct ones back into its model.

Feeding code into an AI is one thing, but having it spit out a brand-new solution to a famous puzzle even though it took a few days, as MIT Tech points out is a different thing entirely.

"Its not in the training data," DeepMind research VP Pushmeet Kohli told the website. "It wasnt even known."

There is something of a mystical quality to what the DeepMind scientists are claiming: that the LLM managed to just maybe think for itself.

"To be very honest with you, we have hypotheses, but we dont know exactly why this works," DeepMind researcher scientist Alhussein Fawzi told MIT Tech. "In the beginning of the project, we didnt know whether this would work at all."

While there will obviously need to be lots more research to verify the claims and try to figure out exactlyhow FunSearch generated its novel solution to the cap set problem, its creators are clearly stoked.

"When we started the project there was no indication that it would produce something thats genuinely new," Kohli told The Guardian. "As far as we know, this is the first time that a genuine, new scientific discovery has been made by a large language model."

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DeepMind Says Its AI Solved a Math Problem That Humans Were Stumped By - Futurism

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The effects of boozing can be detected in sperm for more than a month after cessation and can lead to some pretty serious birth defects, Texas A&M University scientists have found in at least in mice, though the research could be suggestive of risks for men who drink as well.

In a press release about the new research, Dr. Michael Golding said that alcohol's potential birth defect-inducing effects seem to be able to occur even while the diminutive daddies are withdrawing from drinking.

"When someone is consuming alcohol on a regular basis and then stops, their body goes through withdrawal, where it has to learn how to operate without the chemical present," Golding said. "What we discovered is that a fathers sperm are still negatively impacted by drinking even during the withdrawal process, meaning it takes much longer than we previously thought for the sperm to return to normal."

As the TAMU press release explains, drinking causes oxidative stress when free radicals and antioxidants go haywire, basically which leads to the body overproducing chemicals that create issues on a cellular level. As the new research suggests, the same effect occurs during alcohol withdrawal as well, and if conception occurs within that time frame, the offspring conceived could be born with defects in its brain or face.

This new finding, which was gleaned from mice studies and detailed in a new paper in the journalAndrology, builds on Golding's prior research into fetal alcohol syndrome as a result of fathers' alcohol consumption.

In a previous study published in April 2023 by the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the TAMU team reported that birth defects from alcohol in sperm can include brain and facial problem in infants which is a huge deal, given that the onus for fetal alcohol syndrome and other lifestyle-based birth defects has historically been placed solely on mothers.

"For years, theres really been no consideration of male alcohol use whatsoever," the professor said in the school's press release. "Within the last five to eight years, weve started to notice that there are certain conditions where theres a very strong paternal influence when it comes to alcohol exposure and fetal development."

As the school press release about the previous study indicates, the diagnostic criteria for fetal alcohol syndrome has heretofore only considered whether the mother drank during pregnancy. This is problematic, the TAMU research and a few other landmark studies have found, not only because paternal alcohol consumption can contribute, but also because men on average drink more and are more likely to binge drink than women.

On a more meta scale, Golding seems to suggest that he hopes these breakthroughs in prenatal research will shift the focus onto both parents.

"Research examining fetal health is overwhelmingly focused on maternal health," the professor said. "Im not saying that this is not appropriate; Im just saying its not the complete picture and we need some balance."

More on sperm studies: Cell Phone Use Linked to Low Sperm Count in Landmark Study

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Booze Affects Sperm More than a Month After Cessation in Mouse Research - Futurism

A giant list of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's alleged co-conspirators is about to drop, and there's a good chance some big tech names are going to be on it.

On Monday, a federal judge ruledthat the Epstein list gleaned from a settlement with accuser Virginia Giuffre and purportedly containing more than 170 names of both alleged associates and victims "should be unsealed in full."

Naturally, speculation about who's going to be implicated is rampant with a particular focus on the tech sector, where Epstein seemed particularly keen to cultivate powerful connections.

In an interview conducted the year prior to his arrest and published just a few days after his reported suicide in 2019, Epstein suggested to the New York Times' James Stewart that he not only had dirt on a bunch of powerful people, but had photographs to prove it.

"He said people in Silicon Valley had a reputation for being geeky workaholics, but that was far from the truth: They were hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs," the reporter wrote. "He said he'd witnessed prominent tech figures taking drugs and arranging for sex."

While we won't know for sure which "prominent tech figures" he was referring to until the list is actually unsealed and presented to the public at some point next year, we do know that there are some major tech moguls who've been associated with the sex trafficker.

The list of known Epstein associates in the tech world includes some of the richest, most famous, and most powerful men in the world, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg (the latter of whom, to be fair, only met him at a dinner party).

Besides that infamous photo of Musk and Epstein's procure Ghislaine Maxwell, Gates' relationship to Epstein has become one of the most infamous of the dead billionaire's associations. Their friendship was the subject of ample reporting not only because the Microsoft founder knew of the convicted sex offender's crimes before meeting with him on several occasions, but also because his now-ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, seems to have factored it into her reasons for leaving him.

In an interview withCBS'Gayle King in March 2022, the tech titan's ex sounded off on Epstein, who she referred to as "evil personified" and "abhorrent."

She told King that she met Epstein just once and at her own behest because she "wanted to see who this man was."

"I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door," she recounted. "I had nightmares about it afterwards."

Along with rubbing shoulders with the biggest names in tech, Epstein also had interactions with other industry bigwigs.

According to one upsettingWall Street Journal expos, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman not only knew Epstein and introduced him to other elites in Silicon Valley, but also spent a night on Little St. James, the billionaire's private island where a lot of his underage orgies were said to have taken place.

Two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology VIPs were also deeply implicated in the Epstein upset: Joi Ito, the head of the school's Media Lab who resigned in disgrace following the revelation of the billionaire's donations to the project, and Marvin Minsky, the so-called "father of artificial intelligence" who Giuffre named alongside Britain's Prince Andrew as one of the men she was forced to have sex with on Little St. James.

Although Minsky died before he was able to face the music, the rest of these tech movers and shakers are very much alive and anyone named in the list is going to have some explaining to do.

More on weird tech guys: That Millionaire With the Bizarre Health Regimen Is Doing Something Strange to His Genitals

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There May Be Some Big Tech Names on the Unsealed Epstein List - Futurism