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I tried out organisational software to help streamline my work and build a ‘second brain’. I never knew there were so many different ways to take notes…Steven Johnson has a reputation as a research software nerd. The author of 13 nonfiction books, he’s constantly looking for digital tools to streamline his creative process. So when large language models – which power text-generating AI tools such as ChatGPT – started getting attention, he was most interested in what they could mean for organising information.In 2022, an article Johnson wrote about LLMs for the New York Times caught the eye of researchers at Google Labs, the tech company’s experimental AI arm, who came to him with a proposition: would he help them develop the kind of digital research assistant he’d been dreaming of? The result is NotebookLM, a note-taking tool that uses AI to help organise, summarise and answer questions about any information you give it. “The way we think about it is it’s a tool for understanding things,” Johnson says. Continue reading...

Yiming Chen ’24, Wilhem Hector, Anushka Nair, and David Oluigbo will start postgraduate studies at Oxford next fall.

Quantum-science advances using AI can measure very small surfaces and distances -- opening a world of medical, manufacturing and other applications.

Parallels between our brains and vector databases go deeper than retrieval. Both excel at compression, organizing and identifying patterns.

Plus: An “AI granny” is wasting scammers’ time, a lawsuit goes after spyware-maker NSO Group’s executives, and North Korea–linked hackers take a crack at macOS malware.

Exclusive: Rights group expresses concerns as it emerges US spy tech company has been lobbying UK ministersThe US spy tech company Palantir has been in talks with the Ministry of Justice about using its technology to calculate prisoners’ “reoffending risks”, it has emerged.The proposals emerged in correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act which showed how the company has also been lobbying new UK government ministers, including the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Continue reading...

2025 needs to be the year identity providers go all in on improving every aspect of software quality and security, including red teaming.

A potential repeal of President Biden's AI rules could mean enterprises will have trouble navigating state-specific laws.

Google's Gemini-Exp-1114 AI model tops key benchmarks, but experts warn traditional testing methods may no longer accurately measure true AI capabilities or safety, raising concerns about the industry's current evaluation standards.

Billionaire alleges Microsoft and OpenAI illegally sought to monopolize AI market and sideline competitorsElon Musk has expanded his lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, adding federal antitrust and other claims and adding OpenAI’s largest financial backer, Microsoft, as a defendant.Musk’s amended lawsuit, filed on Thursday night in federal court in Oakland, California, said Microsoft and OpenAI illegally sought to monopolize the market for generative artificial intelligence and sideline competitors. Continue reading...

Even if you haven’t knowingly opted in, companies are still scraping your personal information to train their systemsWelcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. If you’d like to skip to a section about a particular site or social network, click the “Jump to” menu at the top of this article.The competition to make the latest, greatest, most advanced artificial intelligence thing has turned an already data-hungry tech industry ravenous. Companies looking to build out their AI-powered search engines, smart email composers or chatbots are scraping your posts and personal data and using them to train those systems, which need ever-increasing amounts of text and images. Continue reading...

Progress on the energy transition depends on collective action benefiting all stakeholders, agreed participants in MITEI’s annual research conference.