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31271 Posts
Don’t Let Mistrust of Tech Companies Blind You to the Power of AI

Don’t Let Mistrust of Tech Companies Blind You to the Power of AI

Meanwhile, in less visible ways, AI is already changing education, commerce, and the workplace. One friend recently told me about a big IT firm he works with. The company had a lengthy and long-established protocol for launching major initiatives that involved designing solutions, coding up the product, and engineering the rollout. Moving from concept to execution took months. But he recently saw a demo that applied state-of-the-art AI to a typical software project. “All of those things that took months happened in the space of a few hours,” he says. “That made me agree with your column. Tons of the…
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I just finished my freshman year at Yale. I’m worried I didn’t make deep, long-lasting friendships.

I just finished my freshman year at Yale. I’m worried I didn’t make deep, long-lasting friendships.

When I started college at Yale a year ago, I had one worry: I might not meet my best friends for life the second I got to campus. It's an unrealistic expectation, but it sticks with you when you grow up hearing stories about how your parents or older siblings met their best friends during freshman orientation.Thankfully, I found Yale students who laughed at this idea. While some people tried to find their lifelong friends immediately, most of the people I met at college joked about how ridiculous that expectation was.Whether it's true or not, however, that pressure weighed heavily…
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Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames “AI Wave”

Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames “AI Wave”

The regrettable casualties of desperately chasing the industry's hot new thing.Unwavering DedicationOff the back of a strong third quarter, Microsoft is reportedly laying off somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 workers across its Azure cloud and mixed reality departments. And in a leaked memo as tone-deaf as it is bland, an executive at the company proclaimed that their peons' sacrifices are not in vain, for they are being done on the altar of the almighty "AI wave.""Our clear focus as a company is to define the AI wave and empower all our customers to succeed in the adoption of this transformative…
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Mutual Information Guided Backdoor Mitigation for Pre-trained Encoders

Mutual Information Guided Backdoor Mitigation for Pre-trained Encoders

arXiv:2406.03508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) is increasingly attractive for pre-training encoders without requiring labeled data. Downstream tasks built on top of those pre-trained encoders can achieve nearly state-of-the-art performance. The pre-trained encoders by SSL, however, are vulnerable to backdoor attacks as demonstrated by existing studies. Numerous backdoor mitigation techniques are designed for downstream task models. However, their effectiveness is impaired and limited when adapted to pre-trained encoders, due to the lack of label information when pre-training. To address backdoor attacks against pre-trained encoders, in this paper, we innovatively propose a mutual information guided backdoor mitigation technique, named…
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Whistleblower claims Amazon violated UK sanctions by selling facial recognition tech to Russia

Whistleblower claims Amazon violated UK sanctions by selling facial recognition tech to Russia

An ex-employee has accused Amazon of breaching UK sanctions by selling facial recognition technology to Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine, The Financial Times reported.Charles Forrest alleged that he was unfairly dismissed in 2023 after accusing Amazon of wrongdoing on a number of issues between November 2022 and May 2023, according to the article. The allegations were presented to a London employment tribunal as part of a hearing this week.Forrest said that Amazon closed a deal with Russian firm VisionLabs to provide access to its Rekognition facial recognition technology. It did that "through what appears to be a shell company…
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AI search answers are the fast food of your information diet – convenient and tasty, but no substitute for good nutrition

AI search answers are the fast food of your information diet – convenient and tasty, but no substitute for good nutrition

If you have used Google lately and been lucky – or unlucky – enough to encounter an answer to your query rather than a bunch of links, you have been subjected to something called AI Overviews. This is a new core feature that Google has been rolling out, a move widely anticipated since the company’s experiments with its LaMDA large language model in 2021, and since OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot rocketed to prominence in 2023. Google’s knowledge panels summarize information from search results, in contrast to AI Overview, which generates answers based on its training data. Screen capture by…
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Understanding the Limitations of Diffusion Concept Algebra Through Food

Understanding the Limitations of Diffusion Concept Algebra Through Food

arXiv:2406.03582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image generation techniques, particularly latent diffusion models, have exploded in popularity in recent years. Many techniques have been developed to manipulate and clarify the semantic concepts these large-scale models learn, offering crucial insights into biases and concept relationships. However, these techniques are often only validated in conventional realms of human or animal faces and artistic style transitions. The food domain offers unique challenges through complex compositions and regional biases, which can shed light on the limitations and opportunities within existing methods. Through the lens of food imagery, we analyze both qualitative and quantitative patterns within…
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I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL·E 2 for $45: here’s what I learned | Deephaven

I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL·E 2 for $45: here’s what I learned | Deephaven

Blog posts with images get 2.3x more engagement. Here’s the problem - we make a query engine for streaming tables. How the heck are you supposed to pick images for technical topics like comparing the similarities between Deephaven and Materalize, viewing pandas DataFrames, gRPC tooling for getting data streams to the browser, using Kafka with Parquet for storage, or using Redpanda for streaming analytics?As a small team of mostly engineers, we don’t have the time or budget to commission custom artwork for every one of our blog posts.Our approach so far has been to spend 10 minutes scrolling through tangentially…
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Revolutionizing problem-solving with AI and gaming integration

Revolutionizing problem-solving with AI and gaming integration

In today’s day and time, which is defined by rapid technological advancements, the fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and gaming presents a globally innovative opportunity to tackle some of the world's most pressing issues. Traditionally viewed as two separate, distinct domains, AI and gaming together have the potential to revolutionize the way we approach work, life, and complex global challenges. This combination builds a superpower technology that can connect AI's analytical prowess and gaming's engaging, educational frameworks to create innovative solutions for real-world problems such as forest fires, poverty, and homelessness.The merging of AI and gaming offers an innovative and…
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