Tag: technology

EU Targets X (Again) in Grok AI Probe

European regulators have launched a new investigation into Elon Musk’s X, focusing on alleged failures to control sexually explicit imagery generated by the company’s AI chatbot, Grok.

The case is being pursued under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a law that grants the European Commission expansive powers to police digital platforms for potential “harms.”

In a statement, the Commission said, “The new investigation will assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with the deployment of Grok’s functionalities into X in the EU.”

The agency added that the review includes “risks related to the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, such as manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material.” Officials stated that these threats “seem to have materialized, exposing citizens in the EU to serious harm.”

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Britain To Roll Out Facial Recognition in Police Overhaul

Britain’s policing system, we are told, is broken. And on Monday, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced that the fix would arrive in the form of algorithms, facial recognition vans, and a large check made out to the future.

The government plans to spend £140m ($191M) on artificial intelligence and related technology, with the promise that it will free up six million police hours a year, the equivalent of 3,000 officers.

It is being billed as the biggest overhaul of policing in England and Wales in 200 years, aimed at dragging a creaking system into the modern world.

The ambition is serious. The implications are too.

The plan is for AI software that will analyze CCTV, doorbell, and mobile phone footage, detect deepfakes, carry out digital forensics, and handle administrative tasks such as form filling, redaction, and transcription. Mahmood’s argument is that criminals are getting smarter, while parts of the police service are stuck with tools that belong to another era.

She put it plainly: “Criminals are operating in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, some police forces are still fighting crime with analogue methods.”

And she promised results: “We will roll out state-of-the-art tech to get more officers on the streets and put rapists and murderers behind bars.”

There is logic here. Few people would argue that trained officers should be buried in paperwork. Technology can help with that. The concern is what else comes with it.

Live facial recognition is being expanded aggressively. The number of police vans equipped with the technology will increase fivefold, from ten to fifty, operating across the country. These systems scan faces in public spaces and compare them to watch lists of wanted individuals.

This is a form of mass surveillance and when automated systems get things wrong, the consequences fall on real people.

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Somali Member of Minnesota House of Representatives Uses Doctored Image of Alex Pretti in Memorial Tribute

Minnesota State Representative Mohamud Noor has come under fire for using what appears to be an AI-enhanced or filtered image of Alex Pretti, the armed man shot by a federal agent in Minneapolis over the weekend, in a social media memorial post.

The bizarrely altered photo appears to have been manipulated to make Pretti look more attractive.

Pretti, 37, was fatally shot after he engaged in a scuffle with federal agents who were in the middle of an immigration enforcement operation.

Noor, a Democrat who represents District 60B in the Minnesota House, posted a tribute to Pretti on X, writing:

“Words can’t describe our pain. Our hearts are broken, but our spirit is strong. Alex Pretti was killed standing for his neighbors. This has to stop. Our community deserves safety, transparency, and accountability. RIP Alex.”

However, the image he used bears absolutely no resemblance to the original. It appeared he used AI tools or heavy filters to “enhance” Pretti’s appearance, making him look more conventionally attractive by smoothing his skin, thickening his hair, and altering facial features.

Naturally, Noor was absolutely blasted in the replies and quote posts.

“Why are you guys trying to make him better looking through AI and filters? That’s actually twisted,” one user wrote.

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The Tech Community’s Efforts to Dethrone OpenAI

OpenAI has made tech waves in the recent years given the prominences of the ChatGPT family of models, and the remanent of LLMs as search engine reindexing algorithms. They were a private research entity that became a titan now competing with the likes of Google. However, their story is less than glamorous.

They started out as a non-profit funded by Musk only to be insanely profit-driven. In fact, they are a cash-burn enterprise, and on top of that there are concerns based off of the localization of AI search results, privacy concerns over social prompt injecting, the suspicious death of whistleblower Suchir Balaji, and questions on whether these LLMs, particularly OpenAI are becoming digitized religions. This all put ChatGPT in the spotlight in a negative sense, and on top of the already burning fire were the Ann Altman allegations. The biggest issue, however, is that OpenAI is extremely centralized and has a business model that is based off of incentivizing data harvesting.

On the other hand, there are researchers like me and the growing cyberpunk community who have been working on AI research for many years. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the localization and privacy concerns that OpenAI has raised. This led me to build AI systems based off of open peering that aims to democratize LLMs and AI applications.

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Bay Area scientist launches new company with sights on gene-edited babies

Last month, as he announced the launch, he said that Preventive has raised almost $30 million from private funding.

The funding is reportedly coming from some heavy hitters in the tech world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his husband Oliver Mulherin.

Harrington also said his team included leading experts in the fields of reproductive technology, reproductive medicine and genome-editing.

“Our goal is straightforward,” he wrote, “to determine through rigorous preclinical work whether preventive gene editing can be developed safely to spare families from severe disease.”

Harrington acknowledged the major ethical concerns around the science and the gray areas in the regulatory process, which he said, have opened the field to potentially detrimental outcomes. 

“The combination of limited expert involvement and lack of a clear regulatory pathway has created conditions for fringe groups to take dangerous shortcuts that could harm patients and stifle responsible investigation,” the researchers said, adding, “Given that this technology has the potential to save millions of lives, we do not want this to happen.”

Gene editing can only be used in in vitro fertilization to allow for the first step of genetic testing on an embryo.

“It requires IVF because you have to have the embryo in a dish,” explained Stanford law professor Henry (Hank) Greely, a leading expert on ethical, legal, and social implications in bioscience technologies.

Once a test determines an embryo has the DNA makeup of a genetic disease, for example, like Huntington’s or cystic fibrosis, scientists would then use the DNA editing technique known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, to make alterations to the DNA.

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New insight into light-matter thermalization could advance neutral-atom quantum computing

Light and matter can remain at separate temperatures even while interacting with each other for long periods, according to new research that could help scale up an emerging quantum computing approach in which photons and atoms play a central role.

In a theoretical study published in Physical Review Letters, a University at Buffalo-led team reports that interacting photons and atoms don’t always rapidly reach thermal equilibrium as expected.

Thermal equilibrium is the process by which interacting particles exchange energy before settling at the same temperature, and it typically happens quickly when trapped light repeatedly interacts with matter. Under the right circumstances, however, physicists found that photons and atoms can instead settle at different—and in some cases opposite—temperatures for extended periods.

Implications for quantum computing

These so-called prethermal states are fleeting on human timescales, but they can last long enough to matter for neutral-atom quantum computers, which rely on interactions between photons and atoms to store and process information.

“Thermal equilibrium alters quantum properties, effectively erasing the very information those properties represent in a quantum computer,” says the study’s lead author, Jamir Marino, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “So delaying thermal equilibrium between photons and atoms—even for a matter of milliseconds—offers a temporal window to preserve and process useful quantum behavior.”

All quantum computers store and process information using qubits—the most basic units of quantum information and analogous to the binary bits used in classical computers. While classical bits can exist either as a 1 or a 0, qubits have the ability to exist in a superposition of two states at once, allowing for infinitely more complex calculations.

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‘Nobody Else Has It’: Trump Confirms Mysterious US ‘Sonic Weapon’ Used During Capture of Venezuela’s Maduro

A ‘secret’ weapon was used in Caracas Op, Trump confirms.

On January 3, US special operators realized a jaw-dropping operation that neutralized air defense over the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and invaded the heavily guarded presidential palace of Miraflores, extracting dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife, taking them back to New York to stand trial.

In the raid, dozens of Cuban and Venezuelan guards were killed, while the US suffered no fatalities.

One of the most mysterious aspects of the operation, which US President Donald J. Trump has now confirmed, is that US special forces are said to have used a ‘secret sonic weapon’ during the daring capture of Maduro.

Daily Mail reported:

“The President on Tuesday night bragged that ‘nobody else’ has the weapon, while glorifying the capabilities of the US military.

[…] [NewsNation anchor Katie Pavlich] asked Trump whether Americans should be ‘afraid’ of these sonic devices.

‘Well yeah,’ Trump responded. He then added that only the US military has access to the sonic weapons by noting, ‘It’s something I don’t want to… nobody else has it’.”

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Superconductivity Breakthrough Brings Practical Use Closer than Ever, as Team Unveils “Hidden Magnetic Order in the Pseudogap”

In the quest for room-temperature superconductivity, an international team of physicists has uncovered a link between magnetism and the mysterious phase of matter known as the pseudogap, which may finally yield clues to achieving superconductivity above frigid, artificial temperatures.

Given the artificially cold temperatures on which current superconducting technologies rely, making their use impractical for many applications, the search for new room-temperature superconducting materials is a major goal of applied physics research.

Now, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and the Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City are potentially helping to advance scientists closer than ever to superconducting at practical temperatures, as reported in a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Superconductors

Superconductors are materials that allow electrical current to flow without resistance. However, even in superconducting materials, the property only becomes active below a threshold temperature. This limits technological applications, as the materials require bulky cooling apparatus to maintain the desired temperatures, which are well below typical room temperatures.

Despite the volume of research involving superconductivity, in many ways it remains poorly understood, awaiting insights that will enable the next generation of quantum computing and other applications.

Some superconductors operate at what are considered “high temperatures,” although, in practical terms, these are still well below typical room temperatures and usually only slightly above absolute zero. What is interesting about those materials, however, is that they tend to exhibit a “pseudogap state” in which electrons begin to behave strangely as they transition to a superconducting state.

Understanding how this state leads to superconductivity could be essential to revealing the mechanisms at play and then applying them to produce room-temperature superconductors.

Testing the Pseudogap

Advancing toward resolving this long-standing issue, researchers used a quantum simulator set slightly above absolute zero to monitor electron spins. They identified that the up or down spins of electrons were influenced by their neighbors in a universal pattern.

At the center of the team’s work was the Fermi-Hubbard model, which describes electron interactions in a solid. The research team’s simulations successfully recreated this model, rather than a real-world material, using lithium atoms in an optical lattice of laser light at temperatures on the order of billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Simulations allowed the researchers a level of precision control impossible in real-world experiments.

When materials host an unaltered amount of electrons, they spin in an alternating pattern called antiferromagnetism. Through a process called “doping,” electrons can be removed, disrupting the magnetic order in a way that physicists had long assumed was permanent. Yet in the new observations, the team discovered a hidden layer of organization present beneath the seeming chaos at very low temperatures.

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This 1996 Law Protects Free Speech Online. Does It Apply to AI Too?

We can thank Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for much of our freedom to communicate online. It enabled the rise of search engines, social media, and countless platforms that make our modern internet a thriving marketplace of all sorts of speech.

Its first 26 words have been vital, if controversial, for protecting online platforms from liability for users’ posts: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” If I defame someone on Facebook, I’m responsible—not Meta. If a neo-Nazi group posts threats on its website, it’s the Nazis, not the domain registrar or hosting service, who could wind up in court.

How Section 230 should apply to generative AI, however, remains a hotly debated issue.

With AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, the “information content provider” is the chatbot. It’s the speaker. So the AI—and the company behind it—would not be protected by Section 230, right?

Section 230 co-author former Rep. Chris Cox (R–Calif.) agrees. “To be entitled to immunity, a provider of an interactive computer service must not have contributed to the creation or development of the content at issue,” Cox told The Washington Post in 2023. “So when ChatGPT creates content that is later challenged as illegal, Section 230 will not be a defense.”

But even if AI apps create their own content, does that make their developers responsible for that content? Alphabet trained its AI assistant Gemini and put certain boundaries in place, but it can’t predict Gemini’s every response to individual user prompts. Could a chatbot itself count as a separate “information content provider”—its own speaker under the law?

That could leave a liability void. Granting Section 230 immunity to AI for libelous output would “completely cut off any recourse for the libeled person, against anyone,” noted law professor Eugene Volokh in the paper “Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output,” published in 2023 in the Journal of Free Speech Law.

Treating chatbots as independent “thinkers” is wrong too, argues University of Akron law professor Jess Miers. Chatbots “aren’t autonomous actors—they’re tightly controlled, expressive systems reflecting the intentions of their developers,” she says. “These systems don’t merely ‘remix’ third-party content; they generate speech that expresses the developers’ own editorial framing. In that sense, providers are at least partial ‘creators’ of the resulting content—placing them outside 230’s protection.”

The picture gets more complicated when you consider the user’s role. What happens when a generative AI user—through simple prompting or more complicated manipulation techniques—induces an AI app to produce illegal or otherwise legally actionable speech?

Under certain circumstances, it might make sense to absolve AI developers of responsibility. “It’s hard to justify holding companies liable when they’ve implemented reasonable safeguards and the user deliberately circumvents them,” Miers says.

Liability would likely turn on multiple factors, including the rules programmed into the AI and the specific requests a user employed.

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Physicists Have Achieved Quantum “Alchemy” by Exciting Electrons to High-Energy States

A promising—and powerful—new engineering breakthrough could soon enable researchers to alter the properties of materials by exciting electrons to higher-than-normal energy levels.

In physics, Floquet engineering involves changes in the properties of a quantum material induced by a driving force, such as high-powered light. The resulting effect causes the material’s behavior to change, introducing novel quantum states with properties that do not occur under normal conditions.

Given its promising applications, Floquet engineering has remained of interest to researchers for many years. Now, a team of scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and Stanford University says they have developed a new method for achieving Floquet physics that is more efficient than past methods that rely on light.

21st Century Alchemy?

Professor Keshav Dani, a researcher with OIST’s Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit, said in a statement announcing the breakthrough that the team’s new approach leverages what are known as excitons, which have proven far more powerful in coupling with quantum materials than existing methods “due to the strong Coulomb interaction, particularly in 2D materials.”

Because of this, Dani says, excitons “can thus achieve strong Floquet effects while avoiding the challenges posed by light.” The team says this offers a novel means of exploring various applications, which include “exotic future quantum devices and materials that Floquet engineering promises.”

Such unique phenomena could enable material science applications that are almost akin to alchemy, in that the concept of creating new materials simply by shining light on them sounds more like science fiction than even the most advanced 21st-century engineering.

Floquet Engineering

In the past, Floquet effects have remained elusive in the lab, although investigations over the years have demonstrated their promise, provided they can be achieved under practical conditions. However, a major limiting factor has been reliance on intense light as the primary driving force, which can also lead to damage or even vaporization of the materials, thereby limiting useful results.

Normally, Floquet engineering focuses on achieving such effects under quantum conditions that challenge our usual expectations of time and space. When researchers employ semiconductors or similar crystalline materials as a medium, electrons behave in accordance with what one of these dimensions—space—will allow. This is because of the distribution of atoms, which confines electron movement and thereby limits their energy levels.

Such conditions represent just one “periodic” condition that electrons are subjected to. However, if a powerful light is shone on the crystal at a certain frequency, it represents an additional periodic drive, albeit now in the dimension of time. The resulting rhythmic interaction between light (i.e., photons) and electrons leads to additional changes in their energy.

By controlling the frequency and intensity of the light used as this secondary periodic force, electrons can be made to exhibit unique behaviors, which also cause changes in the material they inhabit for the time during which they remain excited.

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