OpenAI’s Long-Term AI Risk Team Has Disbanded
May 18th, 2024Via: Wired:
In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s cofounders, was named as the colead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power.
Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other colead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.
Related: ChatGPT Can Talk, but OpenAI Employees Sure Can’t
What Are The Privacy Risks Of ChatGPT-4o? “They Stress that the Training Information Is not Used to Profile People, or to Learn About Them”
May 18th, 2024Via: Forbes:
The privacy implications of ChatGPT are two-pronged, says Oliver Willis, partner at BDB Pitmans. “From a user’s perspective, how does ChatGPT collect and use data about you when you are using it? From everyone else’s perspective, was ChatGPT trained on information about you and what will it tell users about you?”
In its privacy policy, OpenAI acknowledges that the information used to train ChatGPT includes personal data, says Willis. “They stress that the training information is not used to profile people, or to learn about them, but some people will see the use of this data as inherently intrusive.”
OpenAI also acknowledges that using personal data to train ChatGPT means responses sometimes includes information about individuals. “OpenAI offers a mechanism for restricting the use of their data to train ChatGPT, but it is less clear what OpenAI will do for someone who objects to it disclosing their personal data in a chat response,” says Willis.
ChatGPT collects all the data inputted by a user and will retain that information indefinitely to train its models unless you opt out—which isn’t easy to do, says Matthew Holman, partner at Cripps LLP.
“In practice it is really hard for individuals to exercise GDPR rights against large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT,” says Holman. For example, he says, it can “create inaccurate information or hallucinate; it is able to change information without explanation and it can be almost impossible to have your data erased once it is imputed into the LLM.”
UK Says Proposed Pandemic Treaty ‘Not Acceptable’
May 18th, 2024Mmm hmm. The sane move would be to pull out of the WHO and arrest the perpetrators of the Covid scam.
Via: AFP:
A proposed World Health Organization treaty on preparing for future pandemics is currently “not acceptable” to Britain, a UK health minister said on Tuesday.
The WHO’s 194 member states have spent two years trying to reach a landmark global agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response following the devastation caused by Covid-19.
Despite showing a desire for commitments aimed at preventing another Covid-style disaster, big differences have emerged between country blocs on how to achieve them.
Nations decided to keep negotiating for another two weeks after their deadline passed on Friday without agreement.
“The current text is not acceptable to us, therefore unless the current text is changed and refined we will not be signing up,” Conservative minister Andrew Stephenson told the UK parliament.
Remember The One About A Tesla Cybertruck Towing A Porsche 911 Appearing To Beat A Porsche 911 In A Drag Race?
May 18th, 2024Via: Motortrend:
We ran six quarter-mile drag races, and each one had the same outcome: The Porsche 911 Carrera T wins and the Tesla Cybertruck Beast loses. In the world of drag racing, it’s not a particularly close race, either.
DNA Contamination in Pfizer COVID Vaccine Exceeded 500 Times Allowable Levels
May 17th, 2024Via: The Defender:
A new peer-reviewed study raises concerns about the methods used to test for potential DNA impurities in the Comirnaty COVID-19 mRNA vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.
In the study published this month in Methods and Protocols, German researchers Brigitte König and Jürgen O. Kirchner questioned the reliability of the quantitative PCR (qPCR) technique Pfizer-BioNTech used to measure DNA contamination in the vaccine’s active substance.
The researchers experimented with dissolving Comirnaty’s lipid nanoparticles. They found DNA impurity levels ranging from 360 to 534 times higher than the 10 ng (nanogram) per dose limit set by regulators globally.
NATO Considers Sending Trainers to Ukraine
May 17th, 2024Ok, New York Times. We’ll pretend that special forces from NATO countries haven’t been there the entire time…
Via: ZeroHedge:
The continued inevitable and disastrous slide into a WW3 nuclear-armed confrontation between Russian and the West continues as The New York Times reports NATO appears to actually be seriously mulling sending troops to Ukraine to serve in the role as ‘trainers’ at a moment Kiev is desperate to tap and train up new manpower. And this would be closer to front line positions as well.
“NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war,” NY Times wrote Thursday. What has changed? The Zelensky government is now directly requesting it, apparently on a formal level for the first time of the conflict, according to officials.
The Times confirms “Ukrainian officials have asked their American and NATO counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment.”
HHS Suspends Government Funding for EcoHealth Alliance
May 16th, 2024Nothing we haven’t known about for years. Nobody involved is in prison.
Via: The Defender:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today suspended all funding for EcoHealth Alliance and proposed barring the organization from future government contracts or funding.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded nonprofit was performing gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 outbreak and has been at the center of questions about a possible “lab leak” that may have caused the pandemic.
Ongoing funding will end and the organization will be ineligible to receive any further funding from the U.S. government. The funding suspension will remain in effect until the debarment proceedings are complete.
Debarment is the long-term prohibition of receiving federal funds. It is the primary public mechanism that “protects the federal government from fraud, waste and abuse by using a number of tools to avoid doing business with non-responsible actors,” according to the U.S. General Services Administration.
The move to cut EcoHealth’s funding comes two weeks after a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic called for a criminal investigation into Peter Daszak, Ph.D., president of EcoHealth, and issued a report calling for a permanent end to government funding for the organization, which has ties to the Wuhan Institute.
During the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic May 1 hearing, Republican and Democrat representatives explicitly called for defunding EcoHealth Alliance, which Daszak said receives about $16 million in government grants annually.
“This should have happened years ago, and should be the first step in holding scientists accountable for dangerous NIH-funded virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, who has covered this topic extensively, told The Defender.
However, Thacker added, “HHS cannot make Peter Daszak the fall guy, because Anthony Fauci and others enabled his behavior.”
Chicken Owners Must Register in UK
May 16th, 2024Via: Alison Morrow:
Research Credit: cgroove
Lithium from Shale Gas Well Waste Water
May 15th, 2024Via: University of Pittsburgh:
Most batteries used in technology like smart watches and electric cars are made with lithium that travels across the world before even getting to manufacturers. But what if nearly half of the lithium used in the U.S. could come from Pennsylvania wastewater?
A new analysis using compliance data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection suggests that if it could be extracted with complete efficiency, lithium from the wastewater of Marcellus shale gas wells could supply up to 40% of the country’s demand.
Already, researchers in the lab can extract lithium from water with more than 90% efficiency according to Justin Mackey, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory and PhD student in the lab of Daniel Bain, associate professor of geology and environmental sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
The US Geological Survey lists lithium as a critical mineral, (although, as Mackey was quick to point out, lithium is an element, not a mineral). The designation means the U.S. government wants all lithium to be produced domestically by 2030, and so the search for sources has intensified. Currently, much of it is extracted from brine ponds in Chile. Then it’s shipped to China, where it’s processed.
There are lithium mining operations in the U.S., but, Mackey said, “This is different. This is a waste stream and we’re looking at a beneficial use of that waste.”
Attempted Assassination of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico
May 15th, 2024In other news: Slovakia Will Not Support New Pandemic Treaty:
Peter Kotlár, the Slovak Government Plenipotentiary for the COVID-19 pandemic, informed that Slovakia would not support the current version of the new pandemic treaty or the draft amendment to the International Health Regulations. The Health Ministry noted that it would not support any documents weakening Slovakia’s position as a sovereign state.
Via: Reuters:
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico suffered life-threatening injuries on Wednesday when he was shot and wounded in an attempted assassination that stunned his small Central European nation and drew a chorus of international condemnation.
…
Slovak news media reported the shooter was a former security guard at a shopping mall, an author of three collections of poetry and a member of the Slovak Society of Writers. Atkuality.sk cited his son as saying his father was the legal holder of a gun licence.
“I have absolutely no idea what my father intended, what he planned, what happened,” news outlet Aktuality.sk quoted the shooter’s son as saying.
