AI Insights Hub

A WIRED investigation into internet censorship in US schools found widespread use of filters to censor health, identity, and other crucial information. Students say it makes the web entirely unusable.

Hailed as a world first, European Union artificial intelligence rules are facing a make-or-break moment as negotiators try to hammer out the final details this week.

Machine learning used to analyse compounds in a bottle of wine and trace them back to estateFraudsters who pass off ropey plonk as a high-end tipple may soon have artificial intelligence on their case; scientists have trained an algorithm to trace wines to their origins based on routine chemical analyses.Researchers used machine learning to distinguish wines based on subtle differences in the concentrations of scores of compounds, allowing them to track the wines back not only to a particular vine-growing region, but to the estate where the wine was made. Continue reading...

Breakthrough AI and LLMs like ChatGPT have unleashed waves of optimism, apprehension and speculation. What will 2024 bring?

An emerging consensus among school technologists is that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is irrepressible, so the process of embracing it has to start somewhere. One approach that has made progress at La Cañada Unified School District (LCUSD) in California: forming a task force of stakeholders to deal with emerging technology.

Documents show that OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on brain-inspired chips developed by startup Rain. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously made a personal investment in Rain.

Smart AI regulation can strike a balance between innovation and governance and protect businesses from unnecessary risk.

Controversial EagleAI program connected to Trump supporter uses public records to flag people who shouldn’t be on the rollsA Georgia county on Friday agreed to use a controversial program to identify ineligible people on its voter rolls that is connected to one of the most prominent election deniers and a key figure in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Columbia county, which is just outside Augusta, is believed to be the first place in the US to use the program, which is called EagleAI, the New York Times reported. The software matches voting data with publicly available information like post office and death records to flag people who should no longer be on the rolls. Continue reading...

OpenAI's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was unleashed onto an unsuspecting public exactly one year ago.

The EU’s artificial intelligence safety bill enters its final stages this week, but seems already to have been nobbled by the big names in the USWednesday will be a fateful day in Brussels, a faraway city of which post-Brexit Britain knows little and cares less. It’s the day on which the EU’s AI proposals enter the final stages of a tortuous lawmaking process. The bill is a landmark (first in the world) attempt to seriously regulate artificial intelligence (AI) based on its capacity to cause harm and will soon be in the final phase of the legislative process – so-called “trilogues” – where the EU parliament, commission and council decide what should be in the bill, and therefore become part of EU law. Big day, high stakes, in other words.However, the bill is now hanging in the balance because of internal disagreement about some key aspects of the proposed legislation, especially those concerned with regulation of “foundation” AI models that are trained on massive datasets. In EU-speak these are “general-purpose AI” (GPAI) systems – ones capable of a range of general tasks (text synthesis, image manipulation, audio generation and so on) – such as GPT-4, Claude, Llama etc. These systems are astonishingly expensive to train and build: salaries for the geeks who work on them start at Premier League striker level and go stratospheric (with added stock options); a single 80GB Nvidia Hopper H100 board – a key component of machine-learning hardware – costs £26,000, and you need thousands of them to build a respectable system. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are only about 20 firms globally that can afford to play this game. And they have money to burn. Continue reading...

New invention, which can be set up at home, promises to transform the way we monitor our health, say scientistsScientists have developed a laser camera that can read a person’s heartbeat at a distance and pinpoint signs that they might be suffering from cardiovascular illnesses.The system – which exploits AI and quantum technologies – could transform the way we monitor our health, say researchers at Glasgow University. Continue reading...

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence—and recent turmoil at industry powerhouse OpenAI—have brought fresh attention to a key hub of ethics research related to the technology in Montreal, led by Canadian "godfather of AI" Yoshua Bengio.