Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - China-free batteries made from salt are finally here (msn.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: U.S. startups are finally delivering something researchers have been working on for decades: a battery in which rare, hard-to-get elements are replaced with the same stuff found in ordinary table salt.

This tech has the potential to help every country on earth break its dependence on China for batteries, and the critical minerals that go into them.

Like any other battery, sodium-ion cells can store and release energy. They are initially being deployed where they’re needed most, in America’s power grid and fast-expanding crop of data centers. As in our homes, giving the grid or other infrastructure the ability to stockpile energy when it is cheap and plentiful, and discharge it when it is scarce, can increase reliability and lower the cost of electricity.

Submission + - New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human (shreveporttimes.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: If you call 911 in New Orleans, you may hear the sound of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent answering your call instead of a human voice.

The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is changing the way dispatch calls are handled in New Orleans with the implementation of new technology.

Comment Fable can't be that great... (Score 2, Insightful) 41

by Shaitan (#66276598) Attached to: Azure CTO Pastes Doom Into Paint One Frame At a Time

"Paint renders the game but does not compute it," said Russinovich. "Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke."

You'd think the AI would have helpfully told him his 'joke' lacked anything with the potential to be funny. When someone recreates an Apple II using legos and a raspberry pi or makes it run in a browser; it's pointless nerding that says they have too much time on their hands. This isn't even nerding or pointless, it actually ads a stop for no purpose whatsoever. Straight up retarded.

Submission + - Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses (bbc.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers.

It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI.

The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people.

The breakthrough has been labelled a "very significant turning point" in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise "urgent" safety and security concerns.

Submission + - An Ancient Poop Explosion Could Have Helped Complex Life Evolve (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: If the earliest animals hadn't been such prolific poopers, life might not have diversified into all the weird and wonderful forms we see today.

That's the conclusion reached by a new review study published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The team of scientists in Australia and Germany found that the Cambrian explosion â" a period around 540 million years ago when the ancestors of most animal groups arose â" could have been partly set in motion by an explosion of feces, left by those that came before.

Comment This is the Path to CEO AI Psychosis (Score 5, Insightful) 38

Nadella is not showing psychosis here, but the fact that he thinks his chatbot hack of a webpage is evidence of something important show him on the road to get there.

CEOs “play with AI,” develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie’s examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work.

But these top-level executives aren’t the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren’t responsible for training AI models on a company’s idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates.

In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs.

Comment Cut the hyperbole (Score 1) 76

by Shaitan (#66268518) Attached to: OpenAI Finds Evidence Other AI Agents Escaped Containment

"AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control."

Stop with all this sci-fi drama. Despite being 'smarter' and more capable these tools lack ANY logical path to something remotely resembling actual human agency. They are text prediction algorithms that were trained on human generated output so the text they predict follows similar patterns to human input. The 'thinking' process is the same model making a prediction of what should come next in response to a guess another instance just made, repeat... again, it's copying patterns from human training materials so this CAN capture some of the results of actual thinking but there is no sentient listener inside the machine hearing anything and choosing which thoughts to reject or accept. It can't make a novel decisions and can't distinguish good reasoning from bad.

Agency depends on an emotional framework and while the models are almost certainly recording patterns which would enable them to simulate these... in fact, inject the notion the model has an emotion into it's context and it will impact/bias the output making them involuntary just like a person. It wouldn't be hard to layer a metadata identity alongside an executive function harness on one of these at this point and an emotive/motive driver framework but NOTHING like this is being done because these companies don't want the ethical baggage people would impose. Without that framework the "AI" has no persistence and no motives or desire and therefore it doesn't feel better about anything or want anything... let alone to 'break out.'

Submission + - A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology.

By taking advantage of this flaw, which concerns how LLMs identify who or what is giving them instructions, the researchers were able to make popular LLMs spit out information they had been trained not to provide, such as how to synthesize cocaine and how to sabotage a commercial aircraft’s navigation system.

“There’s a real probability that this is going to be a problem that’s fundamentally unsolvable,” says Charles Ye, an independent researcher and coauthor of the ICML paper.

Companies will typically hire teams of human testers to try to come up with novel attacks that break existing guardrails, a process known as red-teaming. Model makers also use LLM super-hackers (such as OpenAI’s GPT-Red) that find and exploit weaknesses in other models to automate parts of this process. The goal is then to take those attacks and train a new model to resist them and anything that looks like them.

The problem, says Jasmine Cui, another independent researcher and coauthor of the paper, is that the approach amounts to giving the models a list of things they shouldn’t do. But no list is exhaustive. “It’s like watching The Simpsons and they have Bart writing ‘I will not say something inappropriate to my teacher’ a hundred times,” she says. “And he still does things that are pretty crass anyway.”

The ICML paper describes attacks against several of OpenAI’s models, but Cui and Ye say that they have since seen similar results with models made by Anthropic, Alibaba, and DeepSeek.

Cui and her colleagues wanted to find out why an attack like chain-of-thought forgery was so effective. They suspected it had something to do with the mechanism that LLMs use to keep track of where their instructions are coming from.

But what Cui and her colleagues discovered is that LLMs are in fact very bad at keeping track of different roles. In a series of experiments that looked at what was going on inside a handful of different models, the researchers found that LLMs seem to identify the role of a specific chunk of text not by the tags around it but by the style of that text and the words it contains.

The upshot, the researchers claim, is that all an attacker needs to do to hack an LLM is write text that spoofs a certain role. And because roles are a fundamental part of how LLMs work, no amount of training will fully solve the problem.

Ye is worried that nobody is ready for what’s coming. “There’s going to be a huge economic incentive for people to do jailbreaks and prompt injections,” he says. The best defense could be to expect the worst. Organizations shouldn’t trust LLMs, and they should expect that anything done by agents could be unsafe, he says: “That’s not a great solution, but it just might be what we have to do.”

“It’s really incredible that these things are being deployed everywhere to control super-critical systems,” he adds. “There’s been no study of the fundamental science here. We’re all doing it ad hoc.”

Comment Re: Enron Husk desperate to stop the stock freefal (Score 1) 148

by Shaitan (#66264718) Attached to: Trump Administration Bans New Chinese Humanoid Robots

ROFL are you suggesting China? China can't even invade a small island directly off its own coast that the US wants. Which is smart, the US is the only nation which has successfully projected power across the oceans in the modern world. It's a daunting logistics problem that only the US has solved and the US was able to do it and slaughter the Chinese more than 20-1 with just 1950s technology.

"Wars of the future will, like wars of the past"

Wars of the past have not all been settled by manufacturing capacity. Wars are settled, or prevented before they start, by many things because not all wars have the same objective or logistical challenges. It is the Alps which have protected Switzerland while the rest of Europe fell. Geography plays a big role in war, including the failed British and Japanese invasions of the US.

"Manufacturing capacity... It sure as shit isn't the USA."

The only competitor on that front is China, which learned manufacturing from the US and was funded by the US. Since China went hostile we've cut off and crippled China economically; meanwhile we've been drastically ramping up domestic manufacturing pipeline back up. Currently the US is strategically positioned like no time before to simply cut off oil to China and then China will have essentially zero ability to wage war let alone fuel the supply lines for a war on the opposite side of the pacific. China certainly has no ability to get drones anywhere near the US mainland.

But China's manufacturing is at full capacity. The US demonstrated its capability to shift our entire economic and manufacturing pipeline into war mode during WW2, we aren't even remotely close to our full manufacturing capacity.

China has no capability to win a military war with the US, let alone invade the US. They've already failed in challenging the US economically. China has spent the last few decades poisoning the world [including an internal faction here in the US] against the United States with socialist propaganda and while that information war isn't settled the tide has begun shifting against them with the capitalist and patriotic right taking back power in the US and starting to take back power in the UK/Europe.

Comment Re: Enron Husk desperate to stop the stock freefal (Score 1) 148

by Shaitan (#66263674) Attached to: Trump Administration Bans New Chinese Humanoid Robots

There is virtually no parallel between an invasion of Ukraine or Ukraine's response which parallels a potential invasion of the US beyond the word 'invasion.'

If anything I'd say the US thwarting a Russian invasion by proxy with a half-hearted effort in Ukraine says a great deal about how ridiculous it would be to suggest anyone is likely to be able to invade the US mainland.

Comment Re:multiple personality disorder (Score 1) 86

by Shaitan (#66263202) Attached to: Your Brain Can Rewire Itself To Allow True Multitasking

I've read those books as well.

But everyone has multiple personalities, they just identify them all as part of the same whole. "But but they have the same memory!" Or do we just PERCEIVE it as the same because when I stop to remember things on two different days I can sometimes recall details/events on one day I couldn't on the other and we ALL have memories which can proven to not match what cameras record, especially over time.

The only thing connecting you in one mood from you in a different mood where you 'feel differently about things' is the completely baseless PERCEPTION that the two are the same person. Really, we don't know that we had a yesterday, only that we wake up remembering one.

And have you ever been of 'mixed minds' with two conflicting opinions on a topic? One stream of thought leans one way, another tugs back in another direction... like that little voice that keep trying to rationalize eating a dessert or keeping a 'harmless' secret from your spouse. This might seem like pointless nitpicking but if you are trying to go from a chatting and intelligent neural network to a general humanlike intelligence these distinctions matter.

Slashdot Top Deals

There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly. -- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)

Close