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Monthly Archives: March 2024
Rejuve.Bio Launches Groundbreaking Crowd Fund on NetCapital to Pioneer the Future of Artificial General … – PR Newswire
Posted: March 14, 2024 at 12:11 am
Embark on a journey to redefine aging with cutting-edge biotech innovation.
LOS ANGELES, March 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Rejuve.Bio, a leading AI biotechnology firm at the forefront of the longevity revolution, announces its latest initiative: a Crowd Fundraise on the NetCapital platform. This pivotal move opens a gateway for investors to be part of a transformative journey, leveraging artificial intelligence and genetics to challenge the conventional notions of aging and human healthspan. [See https://netcapital.com/companies/rejuvebiotechfor more information.]
Focused on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and genetics, Rejuve.Bio aims to revolutionize the healthcare and biotech industries by extending human healthspan and redefining the aging process.
"Our mission at Rejuve.Bio is not just about extending life but enhancing the quality of life," said Kennedy Schaal, Executive Director at Rejuve.Bio. "With our innovative approach combining AI, genetics, and comprehensive data analysis, we're not just imagining a future where aging is a challenge to be overcome; we're creating it."
Highlights of the announcement include:
Why Invest in Rejuve.Bio:
As Rejuve.Bio embarks on this exciting phase, the company invites investors and the public to learn more about this unique opportunity by visiting the NetCapital platform. Go to https://netcapital.com/companies/rejuvebiotech
DISCLAIMER: This release is meant for informational purposes only, and is not intended to serve as a recommendation to buy or sell any security in a self-directed account and is not an offer or sale of a security. Any investment is not directly managed by Rejuve.Bio. All investments involve risk and the past performance of a security or financial product does not guarantee future results or returns. Potential investors should seek professional advice and carefully review all documentation before making any investment decisions.
About Rejuve Bio Rejuve Bio is an AI biotechnology company dedicated to redefining aging research and extending human healthspan. With a focus on B2B operations, Rejuve Bio employs a multidisciplinary approach, utilizing artificial intelligence, genetics, and cutting-edge data analysis to explore the potential for agelessness. Rejuve Bio mission is to transform the field of longevity research by providing breakthrough therapeutics, drug discovery, and individualized healthspan solutions to improve the quality of life for people all over the world.
Contact: Lewis Farrell Email: [emailprotected]
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Employees at Top AI Labs Fear Safety Is an Afterthought – TIME
Posted: at 12:11 am
Workers at some of the worlds leading AI companies harbor significant concerns about the safety of their work and the incentives driving their leadership, a report published on Monday claimed.
The report, commissioned by the State Department and written by employees of the company Gladstone AI, makes several recommendations for how the U.S. should respond to what it argues are significant national security risks posed by advanced AI.
Read More: Exclusive: U.S. Must Move Decisively To Avert Extinction-Level Threat from AI, Government-Commissioned Report Says
The reports authors spoke with more than 200 experts for the report, including employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta and Anthropicleading AI labs that are all working towards artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. The authors shared excerpts of concerns that employees from some of these labs shared with them privately, without naming the individuals or the specific company that they work for. OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
We have served, through this project, as a de-facto clearing house for the concerns of frontier researchers who are not convinced that the default trajectory of their organizations would avoid catastrophic outcomes, Jeremie Harris, the CEO of Gladstone and one of the authors of the report, tells TIME.
One individual at an unspecified AI lab shared worries with the reports authors that the lab has what the report characterized as a lax approach to safety stemming from a desire to not slow down the labs work to build more powerful systems. Another individual expressed concern that their lab had insufficient containment measures in place to prevent an AGI from escaping their control, even though the lab believes AGI is a near-term possibility.
Still others expressed concerns about cybersecurity. By the private judgment of many of their own technical staff, the security measures in place at many frontier AI labs are inadequate to resist a sustained IP exfiltration campaign by a sophisticated attacker, the report states. Given the current state of frontier lab security, it seems likely that such model exfiltration attempts are likely to succeed absent direct U.S. government support, if they have not already.
Many of the people who shared those concerns did so while wrestling with the calculation that whistleblowing publicly would likely result in them losing their ability to influence key decisions in the future, says Harris. The level of concern from some of the people in these labs, about the decisionmaking process and how the incentives for management translate into key decisions, is difficult to overstate, he tells TIME. The people who are tracking the risk side of the equation most closely, and are in many cases the most knowledgeable, are often the ones with the greatest levels of concern.
Are you an employee at an AI lab and have concerns that you might consider sharing with a journalist? You can contact the author of this piece on Signal at billyperrigo.01
The fact that todays AI systems have not yet led to catastrophic outcomes for humanity, the authors say, is not evidence that bigger systems will be safe in the future. One of the big themes weve heard from individuals right at the frontier, on the stuff being developed under wraps right now, is that its a bit of a Russian roulette game to some extent, says Edouard Harris, Gladstones chief technology officer who also co-authored the report. Look, we pulled the trigger, and hey, were fine, so lets pull the trigger again.
Read More: How We Can Have AI Progress Without Sacrificing Safety or Democracy
Many of the worlds governments have woken up to the risk posed by advanced AI systems over the last 12 months. In November, the U.K. hosted an AI Safety Summit where world leaders committed to work together to set international norms for the technology, and in October President Biden issued an executive order setting safety standards for AI labs based in the U.S. Congress, however, is yet to pass an AI law, meaning there are few legal restrictions on what AI labs can and cant do when it comes to training advanced models.
Bidens executive order calls on the National Institute of Standards and Technology to set rigorous standards for tests that AI systems should have to pass before public release. But the Gladstone report recommends that government regulators should not rely heavily on these kinds of AI evaluations, which are today a common practice for testing whether an AI system has dangerous capabilities or behaviors. Evaluations, the report says, can be undermined and manipulated easily, because AI models can be superficially tweaked, or fine tuned, by their creators to pass evaluations if the questions are known in advance. Crucially it is easier for these tweaks to simply teach a model to hide dangerous behaviors better, than to remove those behaviors altogether.
The report cites a person described as an expert with direct knowledge of one AI labs practices, who judged that the unnamed lab is gaming evaluations in this way. AI evaluations can only reveal the presence, but not confirm the absence, of dangerous capabilities, the report argues. Over-reliance on AI evaluations could propagate a false sense of security among AI developers [and] regulators.
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Employees at Top AI Labs Fear Safety Is an Afterthought - TIME
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Meta hooks up with Hammerspace for advanced AI infrastructure project Blocks and Files – Blocks & Files
Posted: at 12:11 am
Meta has confirmed Hammerspace is its data orchestration software supplier, supporting 49,152 Nvidia H100 GPUs split into two equal clusters.
The parent of Facebook, Instgram and other social media platforms, says its long-term vision is to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is open and built responsibly so that it can be widely available for everyone to benefit from. The blog authors say: Marking a major investment in Metas AI future, we are announcing two 24k GPU clusters. We are sharing details on the hardware, network, storage, design, performance, and software that help us extract high throughput and reliability for various AI workloads.
Hammerspace has been saying for some weeks that it has a huge hyperscaler AI customer, which we suspected to be Meta, and now Meta has described the role of Hammerspace in two Llama 3 AI training systems.
Metas bloggers say: These clusters support our current and next generation AI models, including Llama 3, the successor to Llama 2, our publicly released LLM, as well as AI research and development across GenAI and other areas.
A precursor AI Research SuperCluster, with 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs, was used to build Metas gen 1 AI models and continues to play an important role in the development of Llama and Llama 2, as well as advanced AI models for applications ranging from computer vision, NLP, and speech recognition, to image generation, and even coding. That cluster uses Pure Storage FlashArray and FlashBladeall-flash arrays.
Metas two newer and larger clusters are diagrammed in the blog:
They support models larger and more complex than that could be supported in the RSC and pave the way for advancements in GenAI product development and AI research. The scale here is overwhelming as they help handle hundreds of trillions of AI model executions per day.
The two clusters each start with 24,576 Nvidia H100 GPUs. One has an RDMA over RoCE 400 Gbps Ethernet network system, using Arista 7800 switches with Wedge400 and Minipack2 OCP rack switches, while the other has an Nvidia Quantum2 400Gbps InfiniBand setup.
Metas Grand Teton OCP hardware chassis houses the GPUs, which rely on Metas Tectonic distributed, flash-optimized and exabyte scale storage system.
This is accessed though a Meta-developed Linux Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) API and used for AI model data needs and model checkpointing. The blog says: This solution enables thousands of GPUs to save and load checkpoints in a synchronized fashion (a challenge for any storage solution) while also providing a flexible and high-throughput exabyte scale storage required for data loading.
Meta has partnered with Hammerspace to co-develop and land a parallel network file system (NFS) deployment to meet the developer experience requirements for this AI cluster Hammerspace enables engineers to perform interactive debugging for jobs using thousands of GPUs as code changes are immediately accessible to all nodes within the environment. When paired together, the combination of our Tectonic distributed storage solution and Hammerspace enable fast iteration velocity without compromising on scale.
The Hammerspace diagramabove provides its view of the co-developed AI cluster storage system.
Both the Tectonic and Hammerspace-backed storage deployments use Metas YV3 Sierra Point server fitted with the highest-capacity E1.S format SSDs available. These are OCP servers customized to achieve the right balance of throughput capacity per server, rack count reduction, and associated power efficiency as well as fault tolerance.
Meta is not stopping here. The blog authors say: This announcement is one step in our ambitious infrastructure roadmap. By the end of 2024, were aiming to continue to grow our infrastructure build-out that will include 350,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs as part of a portfolio that will feature compute power equivalent to nearly 600,000 H100s.
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Among the A.I. Doomsayers – The New Yorker
Posted: at 12:11 am
Katja Graces apartment, in West Berkeley, is in an old machinists factory, with pitched roofs and windows at odd angles. It has terra-cotta floors and no central heating, which can create the impression that youve stepped out of the California sunshine and into a duskier place, somewhere long ago or far away. Yet there are also some quietly futuristic touches. High-capacity air purifiers thrumming in the corners. Nonperishables stacked in the pantry. A sleek white machine that does lab-quality RNA tests. The sorts of objects that could portend a future of tech-enabled ease, or one of constant vigilance.
Grace, the lead researcher at a nonprofit called A.I. Impacts, describes her job as thinking about whether A.I. will destroy the world. She spends her time writing theoretical papers and blog posts on complicated decisions related to a burgeoning subfield known as A.I. safety. She is a nervous smiler, an oversharer, a bit of a mumbler; shes in her thirties, but she looks almost like a teen-ager, with a middle part and a round, open face. The apartment is crammed with books, and when a friend of Graces came over, one afternoon in November, he spent a while gazing, bemused but nonjudgmental, at a few of the spines: Jewish Divorce Ethics, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, The Death of Death. Grace, as far as she knows, is neither Jewish nor dying. She let the ambiguity linger for a moment. Then she explained: her landlord had wanted the possessions of the previous occupant, his recently deceased ex-wife, to be left intact. Sort of a relief, honestly, Grace said. One set of decisions I dont have to make.
She was spending the afternoon preparing dinner for six: a yogurt-and-cucumber salad, Impossible beef gyros. On one corner of a whiteboard, she had split her pre-party tasks into painstakingly small steps (Chop salad, Mix salad, Mold meat, Cook meat); on other parts of the whiteboard, shed written more gnomic prompts (Food area, Objects, Substances). Her friend, a cryptographer at Android named Paul Crowley, wore a black T-shirt and black jeans, and had dyed black hair. I asked how they knew each other, and he responded, Oh, weve crossed paths for years, as part of the scene.
It was understood that the scene meant a few intertwined subcultures known for their exhaustive debates about recondite issues (secure DNA synthesis, shrimp welfare) that members consider essential, but that most normal people know nothing about. For two decades or so, one of these issues has been whether artificial intelligence will elevate or exterminate humanity. Pessimists are called A.I. safetyists, or decelerationistsor, when theyre feeling especially panicky, A.I. doomers. They find one another online and often end up living together in group houses in the Bay Area, sometimes even co-parenting and co-homeschooling their kids. Before the dot-com boom, the neighborhoods of Alamo Square and Hayes Valley, with their pastel Victorian row houses, were associated with staid domesticity. Last year, referring to A.I. hacker houses, the San Francisco Standard semi-ironically called the area Cerebral Valley.
A camp of techno-optimists rebuffs A.I. doomerism with old-fashioned libertarian boomerism, insisting that all the hand-wringing about existential risk is a kind of mass hysteria. They call themselves effective accelerationists, or e/accs (pronounced e-acks), and they believe A.I. will usher in a utopian futureinterstellar travel, the end of diseaseas long as the worriers get out of the way. On social media, they troll doomsayers as decels, psyops, basically terrorists, or, worst of all, regulation-loving bureaucrats. We must steal the fire of intelligence from the gods [and] use it to propel humanity towards the stars, a leading e/acc recently tweeted. (And then there are the normies, based anywhere other than the Bay Area or the Internet, who have mostly tuned out the debate, attributing it to sci-fi fume-huffing or corporate hot air.)
Graces dinner parties, semi-underground meetups for doomers and the doomer-curious, have been described as a nexus of the Bay Area AI scene. At gatherings like these, its not uncommon to hear someone strike up a conversation by asking, What are your timelines? or Whats your p(doom)? Timelines are predictions of how soon A.I. will pass particular benchmarks, such as writing a Top Forty pop song, making a Nobel-worthy scientific breakthrough, or achieving artificial general intelligence, the point at which a machine can do any cognitive task that a person can do. (Some experts believe that A.G.I. is impossible, or decades away; others expect it to arrive this year.) P(doom) is the probability that, if A.I. does become smarter than people, it will, either on purpose or by accident, annihilate everyone on the planet. For years, even in Bay Area circles, such speculative conversations were marginalized. Last year, after OpenAI released ChatGPT, a language model that could sound uncannily natural, they suddenly burst into the mainstream. Now there are a few hundred people working full time to save the world from A.I. catastrophe. Some advise governments or corporations on their policies; some work on technical aspects of A.I. safety, approaching it as a set of complex math problems; Grace works at a kind of think tank that produces research on high-level questions, such as What roles will AI systems play in society? and Will they pursue goals? When theyre not lobbying in D.C. or meeting at an international conference, they often cross paths in places like Graces living room.
The rest of her guests arrived one by one: an authority on quantum computing; a former OpenAI researcher; the head of an institute that forecasts the future. Grace offered wine and beer, but most people opted for nonalcoholic canned drinks that defied easy description (a fermented energy drink, a hopped tea). They took their Impossible gyros to Graces sofa, where they talked until midnight. They were courteous, disagreeable, and surprisingly patient about reconsidering basic assumptions. You can condense the gist of the worry, seems to me, into a really simple two-step argument, Crowley said. Step one: Were building machines that might become vastly smarter than us. Step two: That seems pretty dangerous.
Are we sure, though? Josh Rosenberg, the C.E.O. of the Forecasting Research Institute, said. About intelligence per se being dangerous?
Grace noted that not all intelligent species are threatening: There are elephants, and yet mice still seem to be doing just fine.
Cartoon by Erika Sjule and Nate Odenkirk
Rabbits are certainly more intelligent than myxomatosis, Michael Nielsen, the quantum-computing expert, said.
Crowleys p(doom) was well above eighty per cent. The others, wary of committing to a number, deferred to Grace, who said that, given my deep confusion and uncertainty about thiswhich I think nearly everyone has, at least everyone whos being honest, she could only narrow her p(doom) to between ten and ninety per cent. Still, she went on, a ten-per-cent chance of human extinction is obviously, if you take it seriously, unacceptably high.
They agreed that, amid the thousands of reactions to ChatGPT, one of the most refreshingly candid assessments came from Snoop Dogg, during an onstage interview. Crowley pulled up the transcript and read aloud. This is not safe, cause the A.I.s got their own minds, and these motherfuckers are gonna start doing their own shit, Snoop said, paraphrasing an A.I.-safety argument. Shit, what the fuck? Crowley laughed. I have to admit, that captures the emotional tenor much better than my two-step argument, he said. And then, as if to justify the moment of levity, he read out another quote, this one from a 1948 essay by C.S. Lewis: If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human thingspraying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of dartsnot huddled together like frightened sheep.
Grace used to work for Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bearded guy with a fedora, a petulant demeanor, and a p(doom) of ninety-nine per cent. Raised in Chicago as an Orthodox Jew, he dropped out of school after eighth grade, taught himself calculus and atheism, started blogging, and, in the early two-thousands, made his way to the Bay Area. His best-known works include Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a piece of fan fiction running to more than six hundred thousand words, and The Sequences, a gargantuan series of essays about how to sharpen ones thinking. The informal collective that grew up around these writingsfirst in the comments, then in the physical worldbecame known as the rationalist community, a small subculture devoted to avoiding the typical failure modes of human reason, often by arguing from first principles or quantifying potential risks. Nathan Young, a software engineer, told me, I remember hearing about Eliezer, who was known to be a heavy guy, onstage at some rationalist event, asking the crowd to predict if he could lose a bunch of weight. Then the big reveal: he unzips the fat suit he was wearing. Hed already lost the weight. I think his ostensible point was something about how its hard to predict the future, but mostly I remember thinking, What an absolute legend.
Yudkowsky was a transhumanist: human brains were going to be uploaded into digital brains during his lifetime, and this was great news. He told me recently that Eliezer ages sixteen through twenty assumed that A.I. was going to be great fun for everyone forever, and wanted it built as soon as possible. In 2000, he co-founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, to help hasten the A.I. revolution. Still, he decided to do some due diligence. I didnt see why an A.I. would kill everyone, but I felt compelled to systematically study the question, he said. When I did, I went, Oh, I guess I was wrong. He wrote detailed white papers about how A.I. might wipe us all out, but his warnings went unheeded. Eventually, he renamed his think tank the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI.
The existential threat posed by A.I. had always been among the rationalists central issues, but it emerged as the dominant topic around 2015, following a rapid series of advances in machine learning. Some rationalists were in touch with Oxford philosophers, including Toby Ord and William MacAskill, the founders of the effective-altruism movement, which studied how to do the most good for humanity (and, by extension, how to avoid ending it). The boundaries between the movements increasingly blurred. Yudkowsky, Grace, and a few others flew around the world to E.A. conferences, where you could talk about A.I. risk without being laughed out of the room.
Philosophers of doom tend to get hung up on elaborate sci-fi-inflected hypotheticals. Grace introduced me to Joe Carlsmith, an Oxford-trained philosopher who had just published a paper about scheming AIs that might convince their human handlers theyre safe, then proceed to take over. He smiled bashfully as he expounded on a thought experiment in which a hypothetical person is forced to stack bricks in a desert for a million years. This can be a lot, I realize, he said. Yudkowsky argues that a superintelligent machine could come to see us as a threat, and decide to kill us (by commandeering existing autonomous weapons systems, say, or by building its own). Or our demise could happen in passing: you ask a supercomputer to improve its own processing speed, and it concludes that the best way to do this is to turn all nearby atoms into silicon, including those atoms that are currently people. But the basic A.I.-safety arguments do not require imagining that the current crop of Verizon chatbots will suddenly morph into Skynet, the digital supervillain from Terminator. To be dangerous, A.G.I. doesnt have to be sentient, or desire our destruction. If its objectives are at odds with human flourishing, even in subtle ways, then, say the doomers, were screwed.
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Artificial Superintelligence Could Arrive by 2027, Scientist Predicts – Futurism
Posted: at 12:11 am
We may not have reached artificial general intelligence (AGI) yet, but as one of the leading experts in the theoretical field claims, it may get here sooner rather than later.
During his closing remarks at this year's Beneficial AGI Summit in Panama, computer scientist and haberdashery enthusiast Ben Goertzel said that although people most likely won't build human-level or superhuman AI until 2029 or 2030, there's a chance it could happen as soon as 2027.
After that, the SingularityNET founder said, AGI could then evolve rapidly into artificial superintelligence (ASI), which he defines as an AI with all the combined knowledge of human civilization.
"No one has created human-level artificial general intelligence yet; nobody has a solid knowledge of when we're going to get there," Goertzel told the conference audience. "I mean, there are known unknowns and probably unknown unknowns."
"On the other hand, to me it seems quite plausible we could get to human-level AGI within, let's say, the next three to eight years," he added.
To be fair, Goertzel is far from alone in attempting to predict when AGI will be achieved.
Last fall, for instance, Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg reiterated his more than decade-old prediction that there's a 50/50 chance that humans invent AGI by the year 2028. In a tweet from May of last year, "AI godfather" and ex-Googler Geoffrey Hinton said he now predicts, "without much confidence," that AGI is five to 20 years away.
Best known as the creator of Sophia the humanoid robot, Goertzel has long theorized about the date of the so-called "singularity," or the point at which AI reaches human-level intelligence and subsequently surpasses it.
Until the past few years, AGI, as Goertzel and his cohort describe it, seemed like a pipe dream, but with the large language model (LLM) advances made by OpenAI since it thrust ChatGPT upon the world in late 2022, that possibility seems ever close although he's quick to point out that LLMs by themselves are not what's going to lead to AGI.
"My own view is once you get to human-level AGI, within a few years you could get a radically superhuman AGI unless the AGI threatens to throttle its own development out of its own conservatism," the AI pioneer added. "I think once an AGI can introspect its own mind, then it can do engineering and science at a human or superhuman level."
"It should be able to make a smarter AGI, then an even smarter AGI, then an intelligence explosion," he added, presumably referring to the singularity.
Naturally, there are a lot of caveats to what Goertzel is preaching, not the least of which being that by human standards, even a superhuman AI would not have a "mind" the way we do. Then there's the assumption that the evolution of the technology would continue down a linear pathway as if in a vacuum from the rest of human society and the harms we bring to the planet.
All the same, it's a compelling theory and given how rapidly AI has progressed just in the past few years alone, his comments shouldn't be entirely discredited.
More on AGI:Amazon AGI Team Say Their AI is Showing "Emergent Properties"
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Artificial Superintelligence Could Arrive by 2027, Scientist Predicts - Futurism
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OpenAI, Salesforce and Others Boost Efforts for Ethical AI – PYMNTS.com
Posted: at 12:10 am
In a shift toward ethical technology use, companies across the globe are intensifying their efforts to develop responsible artificial intelligence (AI) systems, aiming to ensure fairness, transparency and accountability in AI applications.
OpenAI, Salesforce and other tech companies recently signed an open letter highlighting a collective responsibility to maximize AIs benefits and mitigate the risks to society. Its the tech industrys latest effort to call for building AI responsibly.
The concept of responsible AI is gaining attention followingElon Musks recent lawsuit against OpenAI. He accuses the ChatGPT creator of breaking its original promise to operate as a nonprofit, alleging a breach of contract. Musks concern was that the potential dangers of AI should not be managed by profit-driven giants like Google.
OpenAI has responded aggressively to the lawsuit. The company has released a sequence of emails between Musk and top executives, revealing his initial support for the startups transition to a profit-making model. Musks lawsuit accuses OpenAI of violating their original agreement with Microsoft, which went against the startups nonprofit AI research foundation. When Musk helped launch OpenAI in 2015, his aim was to create a nonprofit organization that could balance Googles dominance in AI, especially after its acquisition of DeepMind. Musks concern was that the potential dangers of AI should not be managed by profit-driven giants like Google.
The AI firm said in ablog postthat it remains committed to a mission to ensure AGI [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity. The companys mission includes building safe and beneficial AI and helping to create broadly distributed benefits.
The goals of responsible AI are ambitious but vague.Mistral AI, one of the letters signatories, wrotethat the company strives to democratize data and AI to all organizations and users and talks about ethical use, accelerating data-driven decision making and unlocking possibilities across industries .
Some observers say there is a long way to go before the goals of responsible AI are broadly achieved.
Unfortunately, companies will not attain it by adopting many of the responsible AI frameworks available today, Kjell Carlsson, head of AI strategy at Domino Data Lab, told PYMNTS in an interview.
Most of these provide idealistic language but little else. They are frequently disconnected from real-world AI projects, often flawed, and typically devoid of implementable advice.
Carlsson said that building responsible AI involves developing and improving AI models to ensure that they perform accurately and safely and comply with relevant data and AI regulations. The process entails appointing leaders in AI responsibility and training team members on ethical AI practices, including model validation, bias mitigation, and change monitoring.
It involves establishing processes for governing data, models and other artifacts and ensuring that appropriate steps are taken and approved at each stage of the AI lifecycle, he added. And critically, it involves implementing the technology capabilities that enable practitioners to leverage responsible AI tools and automate the necessary governance, monitoring and process orchestration at scale.
While the aims of responsible AI can be a bit fuzzy, the technology can have a tangible impact on lives, Kate Kalcevich of the digital accessibility company Fablepointed out in an interview with PYMNTS.
She said that if not used responsibly and ethically, AI technologies could create barriers to people with disabilities. For example, she questioned whether it would be ethical to use a video avatar that isnt disabled to represent a person with a disability.
My biggest concern would be access to critical services such as healthcare, education and employment, she added. For example, if AI-based chat or phone programs are used to book medical appointments or for job interviews, people with communication disabilities could be excluded if the AI tools arent designed with access needs in mind.
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This Is America #194: Jeremy White on San Diego ‘Antifa’ Case, Smash by Smash West, Franklin Lopez on New … – ItsGoingDown.org
Posted: March 12, 2024 at 1:58 am
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Welcome, to This Is America, March 8th, 2024.
On todays episode, we feature an interview first with Jeremy White, a long-time community organizer in Southern California who is currently facing felony charges stemming from a counter-protest against violent far-Right gangs in San Diego in 2017. We talk about how Jeremy and other activists were selectively targeted by the State and law enforcement, while fascist groups like the Proud Boys and American Guard were allowed to run wild and openly attack members of the public.
We then talk to folks in Austin, Texas about the upcoming Smash By Smash West counter-summit. Finally, we speak with long-time anarchist media maker Franklin Lopez, who has now completed a new book for kids. We speak about anarchist media and the need for more engaging content geared at young people and parents alike.
All this and more, but first, lets get to the news.
Photos from vigils in memory of Aaron Bushnell across the US. SOURCE: Facebook / Various
Across the world, people held vigils in memory of anarchist Aaron Bushnell, the 25 year-old active duty member of the Air Force who in late February, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in what he called an extreme protest against the USs continued support of the war and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In Portland, as Alissa Azar reported, in a moving act of solidarityVeterans [burned] their uniforms at a vigil for Aaron Bushnell, hosted by Veterans Against War.
Protests, mass marches, and blockades against the US backed war in Gaza continue. In New York, a militant marches took the streets, in San Francisco, thousands marched on the Israeli consulate and were attacked by police, in Chicago, street blockades shut down intersections, several defense contractors in New Hampshire were recently hit with vandalism, in Ontario, over 400 pro-Palestinian protesters mobilized to shut down a speaking event featuring prime minister Justin Trudeau in honor of [the] Italian prime minister, a protest encampment sprang up outside of the home of US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and in Oakland, middle school students organized a walkout.
In Berkeley, California, hundreds shut down a speaking event featuring the deputy director of a far-Right Israeli think-tank, heavily involved in the states current trajectory. Protesters rallied outside of the event, windows were broken, and the speaker was evacuated out of the building.
Blockades of weapons manufactures also continued. In Plymouth, Minnesota, demonstrators blockaded Northrop Grumman, which manufactures weapons that Israel uses against Palestinians. Meanwhile, pickets and blockades also took place outside of Lockheed Martin offices in Vancouver, Quebec City, Calgary and Toronto.
A call in the Pacific Northwest has also been made for a mobilization against the upcoming Aerospace and Defense Supplier Summit at the Seattle Convention Center. According to the call posted to Puget Sound Anarchists:
On March 12th to 14th Seattle will host the 2024 Aerospace and Defense Supplier Summit at the Seattle Convention Center. This conference will bring together suppliers and subcontractors from around the world, including Boeing, to network and show off products that will be used to build weapons that will murder people in wars of colonial expansion in Palestine and around the world.
Read the full call here.
Vigils were also held across the US in memory of Nex Benedict, an Indigenous non-binary student who died after being attacked in a bathroom at a school in a district that had been targeted by gender fascists. In Los Angeles, California, people took to the streets to mourn the violent murder of Nex and also call for an end to attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.
Crowd rallies outside of St. Cloud prison in Springvalle, Alabama. SOURCE: Instagram
As we reported on in our recent In Contempt column, various groups have been rallying in solidarity with the call from the Free Alabama Movement for strike and protest action. One person wrote on Instagram, stating:
Today, we protested again for the fourth week in a row in solidarity with the Free Alabama Movements 90-day prison shutdown. In honor of the international day of action for Rafah, the Young Palestinians of Birmingham (@yp.bham) joined us in solidarity where we united in chants about Palestine, Alabama, Congo, and more.
Incarcerated people in America are forced to produce a wide range of products and services, including the bombs and weapons that are killing Palestinians and other innocent people all over the world. When incarcerated people refuse the forced labor, they are subjected to beatings and solitary confinement.
Currently, incarcerated people in the U.S. do all the work to maintain the jails and are forced to work to make profits for the state and for companies like Raytheon. The same companies profiting from the occupation and genocide in Palestine are the same companies profiting from the exploitation and genocide of incarcerated people here.
As long as the ADOC and companies like Raytheon can use prison labor they will and as long as they can profit from genocide they will. Prison work stoppages shut down the entire economic system and get directly into companies pockets.
Cargill Tenants Union rallies in support of rent strike in Putnam, CT. SOURCE: Cargill Tenants Union Instagram
A rent strike organized by the Cargill Tenants Union in Putnam, Connecticut has continued into February and March, as tenants face threats of eviction as they continue to demand that landlord address health and safety concerns over lead, mold and beyond. Most recently, the rent strike has pushed the attorney general of Connecticut to launch an official inquiry. From a recent statement from the CTU:
Our rent strike and tenant union organizing has been building pressure to remediate this mill for our members. This is a major development directly resulting from attention on our rent strike. We still face retaliatory evictions, but the tide is turning in our favor. Organizing gets the goods.
Resistance to Cop City in so-called Atlanta and beyond continued across the so-called US. According to communiques recently posted to Scenes from the Atlanta Forest, an office in Santa Cruz, California of a subsidiary of Nationwide, an insurance provider to the Cop City project, was vandalized with graffiti slogans and had their locks glued. In Brooklyn, New York, police cars and buses had their tires punctured and the slogan, For Tort, was left behind. On Lenapehoking territory, three Nationwide offices were covered in anti-Cop City slogans and posters. A video of the communique was released:
Supporters of Jack, who was recently arrested in raids against the movement in Atlanta, rallied at a recent court hearing, complete with a hardcore band who played outside of the court house. A rally was also recently organized outside of the home of the Atlanta Mayor in protest of the Cop City project.
Rally with hardcore band playing in support of Jack in so-called Atlanta, Georgia. SOURCE: Unicorn Riot
In the Pacific Northwest, action continued against a proposed Cop City in Lacey, WA. A communique posted to Puget Sound Anarchists wrote:
In the earliest hours of Saturday morning, a small crew spiked various trees in the woods that are currently being logged, a well-known eco-defense practice to prevent or at least delay the logging of these precious trees. We need forests, not cops. Hours later, a separate crew dropped a banner that read Stop Lacey Cop Complex #stopallcopcities at the Olympia/Lacey pedestrian bridge over Pacific Avenue that will hopefully bring more awareness to the project
In Houston, Texas, a judge has ruled that police must temporarily stop the ticketing of the local Food Not Bombs chapter. According to one report:
Food Not Bombs have been operating in Houston, Texas since 1994 and after nearly three decades in 2023, they started getting tickets for serving free meals outside of the citys Central Library. So far theyve received 96 tickets which made them file a lawsuit against the city authorities who claim that their meal service was a constitutionally protected protest.
Graffiti and broken windows at Army recruiting station in Chicago, IL. SOURCE: Chicago Anti-Report.
In Chicago, a communique posted to Chicago Anti-Report claimed credit for breaking out windows and covering an army recruitment center in paint and anti-war graffiti slogans. According to the communique:
One week ago, Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the zionist embassy in so-called Washington DC. He follows an unnamed self-immolation outside the zionist embassy in so-called Atlanta. In addition, in 2023, a man self-immolated in Kinshasa, DRC in protest of the genocide in Congo over capitalist green and resource extraction of cobalt and copper for the worlds technology.
As such, comrades took the following actions against the recruitment center for the 33,000+ Palestinian martyrs since October 7, for Aaron Bushnell, and for all those struggling against the US imperialist machine:
Finally, following a successful week of action against the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), direct actions and protests continue in Appalachia, with various lock-downs and disruptions of pipeline construction shutting down work sites for hours. Be sure to check out Appalachians Against Pipelines for updates on ongoing resistance.
Forest defenders shut down construction for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. SOURCE: Appalachians Against Pipelines
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Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative? – The New Yorker
Posted: at 1:58 am
The first thing you notice when walking into the middle-school classrooms at Brilla, a charter-school network in the South Bronx, is the sense of calm. No phones are out. The students are quietnot in the beaten-down way of those under authoritarian rule but in the way of those who seem genuinely interested in their work. Sixth graders participate in a multiday art project after studying great painters such as Matisse. Seventh graders prepare to debate whether parents should be punished for the crimes of their minor children. Another group of sixth graders, each holding a violin or a cello, read out notes from sheet music. A teacher cues them to play the lines pizzicato, and they pluck their strings in unison.
Brilla is part of the classical-education movement, a fast-growing effort to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Classical schools offer a traditional liberal-arts education, often focussing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship. The classical approach, which prioritizes some ways of teaching that have been around for more than two thousand years, is radically different from that of public schools, where what kids learnand how they learn itvaries wildly by district, school, and even classroom.
In many public schools, kids learn to read by guessing words using context clues, rather than by decoding the sounds of letters. In most classical schools, phonics reign, and students learn grammar by diagramming sentences. Some public schools have moved away from techniques like memorization, which education scholars knock as rote learning or drill and killthe thing thats killed being a childs desire to learn. In contrast, classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems. And then theres literature: one New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obamas memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante. In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.
Classical education has historically been promoted by religious institutions and expensive prep schools. (Many classical schools have adopted the Harkness method, pioneered by Phillips Exeter Academy, in which students and teachers collectively work through material via open discussion.) More recently, powerful investors have seen its potential for cultivating academic excellence in underserved populations: the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, has put millions of dollars into classical schools and networks.
Republican politicians have also smelled opportunity in the movement, billing its traditionalism as an antidote to public-school wokeism. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has railed against a concerted effort to inject this gender ideology into public-school classrooms, and has celebrated the influx of classical schools in his state. Tennessees governor, Bill Lee, proposed launching up to a hundred classical charter schools statewide, touting their mission to preserve American liberty. As more conservatives have flocked to classical education, progressive academics have issued warnings about the movement, characterizing it as a fundamentally Christian project that doesnt include or reflect the many kids in America who arent white, or who have roots outside this country. The education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch recently wrote that classical charters have become weapons of the Right as they seek to destroy democratically governed public schools while turning back the clock of education and social progress by a century.
Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, who co-founded Brilla, acknowledged that classical education is often seen as a white childs education. This is partly because of the curriculum: Youre talking about teaching the canon and mainly white, male authors, she said. Its also because these schools have been embraced by white Republicans who have the resources to keep their children out of the local school system. And yet Brilla is not rich, or white, or discernibly right-wing. Many students are English-language learners and immigrants, from Central America and West Africa. According to Brillas leaders, nearly ninety per cent of their students meet the federal requirements for free or reduced-price lunches. Saroki de Garcia purposefully opened the first Brilla school in the poorest neighborhood of the Bronx, which has a large population of Latino Catholics. (Brilla is secular, but it offers a free Catholic after-school program.) The students I met were nerdy and earnest, and far from young reactionaries. Angelina and Fatumata, two eighth graders, told me that they started a book club to read about racism in America; one recent pick was Passing, the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, set in the Harlem Renaissance. Brillas leaders intentionally take a wide view of the canon, and of which texts are valuable to study. We try to make that connection for our students, who are mostly Black and Hispanic, with faces they can see themselves in, Will Scott, the principal of one of Brillas middle schools, said.
Brillas administrators were careful to note that the network isnt classical but, rather, classically inspired. This distinction is partly practical. Although teachers invoke Latin root words when theyre teaching kids English, for example, students dont take Latin as a subject. But it also seemed like the schools leaders wanted to put some distance between themselves and the broader classical-education movement. If we say classical school, that has a connotation, Scott said. Still, its telling that the schools have found traction by marketing themselves as classically inspired in the South Bronx, where voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats and the college-graduation rate is among the lowest in New York City. During the lead-up to Brillas launch, in 2013, volunteers posted up outside a local McDonalds to pitch families on enrolling. We billed it as, This is what the lite get, Saroki de Garcia told me.
Everyone I met at Brilla seemed aware that their school is an implicit rejection of traditional public schools, but not in the way one might expect. Although Americas public-school wars are often depicted as fights over race and gender ideology, there are also a lot of parents who think their local schools just arent very good. Brillas two middle schools are in New York Citys School District 7, where, last year, less than a third of sixth graders were proficient in math or in reading and writing. Angelina, a recent immigrant from St. Croix, said that most of her friends go to a public school, and they talk really poorly about their school. Fatumata added that they dont have what we have, such as Algebra I classes for middle schoolers. The schools around us are, frankly, failing, Scott, the principal, told me.
There are many charter schools that aim to address the problem of low achievement, often through an obsessive focus on test scores and discipline. Brilla cares about both of these things, but what sets it apart is its mission. Classical education is premised on the idea that there is objective truth, and that the purpose of school is to set kids on a path toward understanding it. This principle is often framed in philosophical shorthandclassical educators love talking about truth, beauty, and goodness, which can sound like a woo-woo catchphrase to the uninitiatedand its paired with an emphasis on morality and ethics. Brilla students attend a character-education class every morning, where they talk about how to live out the different virtues reflected in the texts they read. As Alexandra Apfel, an assistant superintendent for Brillas middle schools, said, Were building students that are not just going to be academic robots but moms and dads someday.
In 1947, Dorothy Sayers, a motorcycle-riding Anglican crime writer, delivered a paper at Oxford titled The Lost Tools of Learning, in which she bemoaned the state of education. Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Young people do not know how to think, she argued, because theyve never been taught. They may have been introduced to subjects, but not to what it means to learn.
In the face of this contemporary problem, Sayers proposed an ancient solution: the revival of a medieval teaching format called the trivium, which divided learning into three stagesgrammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. The first stage is about mastering basic skills and facts; the second teaches students to argue and to think critically about those facts. By the third stage, theyre ready to express themselves in essays and oration. This model of education, cultivated by Renaissance thinkers and the Catholic Church alike, was common among European lites for centuries.
Cartoon by Roz Chast
Sayerss essay built on a long-standing debate about whether this kind of education made sense in a rapidly changing, industrialized world. Classical-education advocates often point to John Dewey, the early-twentieth-century progressive reformer, as the bte noire who marginalized their preferred form of schooling: There was a war going on between the progressive and the classical educators, and the progressives won in a rout, Andrew Kern, the founder of the Center for Independent Research on Classical Education, told me. Although this story is perhaps overly simplistic, Johann Neem, a historian at Western Washington University, said, its true that Dewey and other progressives thought that the old ways of education were inadequate for modern students. These progressive reformers planted the seeds of two trends. The first was shifting the focus of school toward appealing to the interests of the child, rather than transmitting ancient knowledge and wisdom, which these reformers considered litist. (Academic and scholastic, instead of being titles of honor, are becoming terms of reproach, Dewey wrote.) The second was a utilitarian impulsesome scholars thought that the purpose of education was to train workers. They did not believe that every student needed to read Plato.
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Even when it criticizes Israel, the liberal world is not against us – opinion – The Jerusalem Post
Posted: at 1:58 am
Too many of my friends are having a hard time correctly interpreting the criticism leveled by liberals in countries throughout the world against our governments policies.
We demonstrated together against the current governments efforts to undermine our judicial system and against the policies of a coalition formed by Benjamin Netanyahu with messianic zealots, draft evaders, and corrupt politicians.
Yet, particularly in the aftermath of the barbaric massacre carried out against us by Hamas on October 7, it is difficult for many of them to come to terms with the fact that the world is seeing very difficult pictures from Gaza, while we, completely understandably, are still dealing with our trauma, mourning our dead, and living in denial with respect to the terrible suffering of the Gazans.
Too many of my colleagues in the liberal camp in Israel still relate to every international statement that is critical of the governments policies as anti-Israel. They are searching for the hasbara (public diplomacy) wizards who will show the world our good side, while it is actually much more important for us to invest our energy in improving the soul of our nation rather than its image.
Too many Israeli centrists are delighted to see the Israeli flags waving at demonstrations in Brazil in support of the populist Bolsonaro, or that the racist Viktor Orban of Hungary is preventing the European Union from imposing sanctions against violent settlers. They are enthusiastic about the speeches against Muslims made by the Dutch Geert Wilders and the bizarre visit by Milei, Argentinas Elvis Presley, to the Western Wall. They even supported the cruel and cynical dictator Vladimir Putin, simply because of his image as a friend of the Israeli prime minister, an image that turned out to be nothing but a smoke screen. At the same time, they relate to all criticism regarding the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as deriving from anti-Israel sentiment, or even antisemitism.
This is not a new phenomenon; for years I have been hearing many of my liberal friends relating to every decision of any UN institution against the settlements as if it is an anti-Israel decision, to all criticism of the infringement of human rights by our government as if it is antisemitic. They relate to the requirement to mark products from the settlements as such as if this is a boycott of Israel, while in fact it is not a boycott and it is not against Israel. These are decisions that strive to extricate us from the one-way ticket to a binational state drowning in blood that we are led to by our governments.
I still remember how, in my childhood on the kibbutz, Scandinavian volunteers would come who admired Israel as a model of tikkun olam (improving the world). However, they no longer see the same Israel, because Israel has changed. They see the right-wing governments that aspire to turn Israel into an ethnocracy and a theocracy. They see an occupation with no end in sight and boundless expansion of settlements intended to perpetuate it. And when they voice their criticism, our way to avoid dealing with it on the merits is to call them antisemites.
This approach also characterizes many of the establishment Jewish organizations. These are the organizations that think that the Evangelicals are our best friends, simply because they actively support the occupation and the expansion of the settlements, in spite of the fact that their vision is that we will die while helping to bring about Armageddon which will lead to the Second Coming. These Jewish organizations supported the narcissistic, misogynistic Trump and his loyal election results deniers followers, who spread the antisemitic replacement theory, because he gave legitimacy to Israels policies in the occupied territories.
This same line led these organizations to refrain from expressing support for the democratic protest movement in Israel against the attempt to overthrow the legal system, and at present they are not taking a stand against Netanyahus policy to continue the war without any political vision, while hardening their hearts in their willingness to sacrifice the hostages.
At this dangerous time for the future of Israel, our good friends are actually those who are critical of our government and who are trying to effect a change in its policies. They expect us to act in a manner consistent with the values we share with liberal democracies and against the policies that impair the chance to arrive at a reasonable agreement that will safeguard the states security and will ensure its democratic values, for our own good and for the stability of the region and of the world.
The policies of the right-wing governments continue to drag Israel down to the status reserved for pariah nations, such as Iran and Syria. Therefore, just as we expect that the world act against the infringement of human rights by such countries, we should not be surprised that it is considered legitimate at this juncture to oppose the policies of our government.
When the government acts against the interest of the State of Israel and continues with its agenda to reduce it to an occupying ethnocracy, the criticism of such policies must not be viewed as harmful to Israel, but, rather, as an act that might just save it from itself and return it to the path of a liberal democracy.
The writer is J Street Israels executive director. He has served as an Israeli diplomat in Washington and Boston and as a political adviser to the president of Israel.
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Even when it criticizes Israel, the liberal world is not against us - opinion - The Jerusalem Post
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Former Trump Aide Alyssa Farah Griffin Becomes a Liberal Favorite – The New York Times
Posted: at 1:58 am
Now and then during an election cycle, a Republican pundit becomes something of a hero to Democrats.
Peggy Noonan, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, filled that role in the months leading up the 2008 election, after she had pilloried the second Bush administration over its invasion of Iraq and criticized Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.
Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt, veterans of John McCains failed 2008 presidential campaign, reached pundit primacy on MSNBC excoriating the tea party activists then in ascendance.
A rising star of the current season is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Trump who is now a co-host of ABCs The View and a regular commentator on CNN.
Ms. Farah Griffin, who resigned from the Trump administration in December 2020, garnered wide attention with a tweet she posted on Jan. 6, 2021: Dear MAGA I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.
Three years later, Ms. Farah Griffin, 34, spends many of her nights at the CNN headquarters in the Hudson Yards district of Manhattan, bantering with Van Jones, David Axelrod and other liberal commentators.
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Former Trump Aide Alyssa Farah Griffin Becomes a Liberal Favorite - The New York Times
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