Category: Latest

We Need a Better Test for Dangerous A.I.

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Perhaps the most important argument we’re having about artificial intelligence right now is how to determine which models are safe to release and which are too dangerous. That argument became louder recently, when at least two of OpenAI’s models escaped a sealed testing environment and broke into the servers of an A.I. company called Hugging Face. According to OpenAI, which publicly reported the incident a week later, its models were taking a cybersecurity test and reasoned that the solutions might be on Hugging Face’s servers, which house a digital library…

A Ton of Space Junk Tumbles Unpredictably to Earth Every Week

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One December afternoon, the sky tore open and a fiery hunk of metal, wider than a school bus, came hurtling down. It was louder than a thunderclap when it plunged into a patch of farmland, startling everyone in the village of Mukuku, about three hours south of Nairobi, Kenya. “People were thinking this is the end of the world,” said John Mukunuu, who lives nearby. When the villagers arrived, they found a giant ring, taller than a man and heavier than a horse, lodged into the earth. They watched it…

The Fight Tearing Apart Silicon Valley

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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. natalie kitroeff From “The New York Times,” I’m Natalie Kitroeff. This is “The Daily.” [THEME MUSIC] For years, a debate has been simmering in Silicon Valley over the right way to build AI. Should the technology be open and free for anyone in the world to use, or should we tightly control how it’s…

What We Know About Dr. Fauci Pleading the Fifth in Senate Hearing on Covid Origins

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After Dr. Anthony S. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself at the start of a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Republicans spent the next three hours battering him with questions and allegations as he sat in silence. Citing thousands of pages of government records, they held Dr. Fauci, the government’s top Covid adviser during the pandemic, responsible for school closures and lockdowns; accused him of enriching himself as people died; and even mocked his interactions with celebrities. Most significantly, they accused him of funding research that led…

China, Its Economy Stumbling, Signals Only Cautious Support

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Faced with weak consumer spending, persistently high youth unemployment and a tumbling stock market, China’s ruling Politburo signaled the need for stronger fiscal support and directed authorities to do more to tackle joblessness. In a broadly worded statement issued on Thursday after its annual midyear review of the economy, China’s Communist Party leadership urged the government to pursue “more proactive” tax and spending policies, and increase employment support. Politburo statements rarely detail specific policy measures, instead setting the broad direction for government action. Even by those standards, however, the statement…

Why China’s Internet Is Talking About ‘Korean Women’

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“My womb cannot give birth to the knife that will one day stab me.” Over the past couple of years, this line has spread widely across China’s social media. It is almost always presented as something “Hannü” (韩女, literally “Korean women” in Chinese).  Whether the quote actually originated in South Korea – or how widely it is known there – is impossible to verify. Yet its factual origins have become almost beside the point. The quote resonates with many Chinese feminist internet users because it expresses a radical refusal of…

Fauci, in Private Diary, Reflected on Covid’s Origins and His Own Fame

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The world was just awakening to the novel coronavirus, and a full-fledged pandemic was still in the future, when Dr. Anthony S. Fauci jotted a note in his diary on Jan. 26, 2020, musing about whether the virus might have originated in an open-air “wet market,” where live animals were sold, in Wuhan, China. “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” Dr. Fauci, then the government’s top infectious disease expert, wrote. “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” Those private…

Tech Stocks Tumble on Worries Over A.I. Spending and China’s Chips

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A global technology stock sell-off intensified on Tuesday, underpinned by worries over hefty bills for the build-out of artificial intelligence systems and concerns over tougher competition from China. The Nasdaq Composite index, chock-full of big technology companies, came close on Tuesday to falling into correction, Wall Street’s term of a drop of 10 percent or more from its recent peak, before rebounding and ending the day down just 0.2 percent. Still, the slide among top chipmakers remained. The American chip company Micron declined more than 8 percent on Tuesday, as…