In the months after Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine, Russia saw a mass exodus of IT workers. According to government figures, about 100,000 IT specialists left Russia in 2022, or some 10% of the tech workforce—a number that is likely an underestimate. It has now been over a year since the invasion began. […]

“Causal reasoning is critical for machine learning,” says Nailong Zhang, a software engineer at Meta. Meta is using causal inference in a machine-learning model that manages how many and what kinds of notifications Instagram should send its users to keep them coming back.  Romila Pradhan, a data scientist at Purdue University in Indiana, is using […]

It has now been over a year since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, with more than 8,300 recorded civilian deaths and counting. The tech workers who left everything behind to flee Russia warn that the country is well on its way to becoming a village: cut off from the global tech industry, research, funding, […]

I agree with critics of the letter who say that worrying about future risks distracts us from the very real harms AI is already causing today. Biased systems are used to make decisions about people’s lives that trap them in poverty or lead to wrongful arrests. Human content moderators have to sift through mountains of traumatizing AI-generated content […]

“I think this is going to be pretty much a disaster from a security and privacy perspective,” says Florian Tramèr, an assistant professor of computer science at ETH Zürich who works on computer security, privacy, and machine learning. Because the AI-enhanced virtual assistants scrape text and images off the web, they are open to a […]

When computer science students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research returned to campus in the summer of 2020, there was a lot to adjust to. The department had moved into a brand-new building, complete with experimental super-sensing devices called Mites. Embedded in more than 300 locations throughout the building, these light-switch-size […]

Finally, there are limitations and risks. GPT-4 sometimes makes up very convincing but incorrect text, and it will misuse source material. One time, Arrodondo says, GPT-4 had him doubting the facts of a case he had worked on himself. “I said to it, You’re wrong. I argued this case. And the AI said, You can […]

The hall’s futuristic features included carbon dioxide sensors that automatically pipe in fresh air, a rain garden, a yard for robots and drones, and experimental super-sensing devices called Mites. Mounted in more than 300 locations throughout the building, these light-switch-size devices can measure 12 types of data—including motion and sound. Mites were embedded on the […]