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☆ House Republicans want to give themselves $8,000+ pay rises, while furiously opposing other government spending
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-14 | by ( Sophia Ankel | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

House Republicans want to give themselves pay rises of at least $8,000, Roll Call reported. The push came after they negotiated cuts to three federal programs for low-income people. Spending plans approved by the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee last month include lawmakers getting a 4.6% pay increase in 2024, Roll Call reported, citing the Congressional Research Service. The report comes after GOP leaders negotiated a debt-ceiling agreement with President Joe Biden that curtails federal programs for people on low incomes, imposing new work requirements to get help. "House Republicans are moving to give themselves a raise while taking an ax to education, health, and other essential programs that help grow the economy by growing the middle class."

Persons: Mark Amodei, Amodei, Joe Biden, Angie Craig of, Colin Seeberger, Seeberger Organizations: Service, Republicans, Republican, Congressional Research Service, Senate, GOP, Assistance, Center for American Locations: Wall, Silicon, Nevada, Angie Craig of Minnesota

☆ Inside the White-Hot Center of A.I. Doomerism
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( Kevin Roose | More About Kevin Roose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

labs and safety research organizations contain some trace of effective altruism’s influence, and many count believers among their staff members. Some Anthropic staff members use E.A.-inflected jargon — talking about concepts like “x-risk” and memes like the A.I. (Just one example: Ms. Amodei is married to Holden Karnofsky, the co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy, an E.A. Open Philanthropy, in turn, gets most of its funding from Mr. Moskovitz, who also invested personally in Anthropic.) safety was genuine, in part because its leaders had sounded the alarm about the technology for so long.

Persons: E.A.s, Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan, Anthropic, Sam Bankman, Fried, Bankman, Amodei, Shoggoth, Holden Karnofsky, Luke Muehlhauser, Moskovitz Organizations: Facebook, Skype, Open Locations: E.A, Jaan Tallinn, Anthropic

☆ Anthropic — the $4.1 billion OpenAI rival — debuts new A.I. chatbot and opens it to public
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( Hayden Field | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

As Microsoft -backed OpenAI and Google race to develop the most advanced chatbots, powered by generative artificial intelligence, Anthropic is investing heavily to keep up. Just a few months after raising $750 million over two financing rounds, the startup is debuting a new AI chatbot: Claude 2. "We have been focused on businesses, on making Claude as robustly safe as possible," said Daniela Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic with her brother, Dario. Claude 2 will initially only be available to users in the U.S. and U.K., and Anthropic plans to expand availability in the coming months. Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the public late last year, the tech world has invested heavily in the potential of generative AI chatbots, which respond to text prompts with sophisticated and conversational replies.

Persons: Dario Amodei, Kamala Harris, There's, Claude 2, Claude, Anthropic, Daniela Amodei, Dario, we've, OpenAI, ChatGPT, it's Organizations: White, Microsoft, Google Locations: Washington, U.S, paywalls

☆ Tim Cook uses ChatGPT and says Apple is looking at it closely
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-06 | by ( Hayden Field | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Apple CEO Tim Cook arrives for the season three premiere of "Ted Lasso" at the Regency Village Theater in Los Angeles, California, on March 7, 2023. Apple CEO Tim Cook said recently that he uses ChatGPT, the AI chatbot, and is excited about the tool's "unique applications." Cook added that large language models — the AI tools that power chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard — show "great promise" but also the potential for "things like bias, things like misinformation [and] maybe worse in some cases." The Apple CEO also offered his thoughts on regulation and guardrails, saying they're needed but that AI is powerful and the tech's development is moving quickly. "If you look down the road, then it's so powerful that companies have to employ their own ethical decisions," Cook said.

Persons: Tim Cook, Ted Lasso, ABC's, Cook, Bard, they're, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei Organizations: Apple, Village, GMA Locations: Los Angeles , California

One is about the possibility that we’re going to have this super intelligent AI that’s capable of great destruction. casey newtonI think that’s right. But it’s just like — I don’t think — I don’t think about to do these things in the moment like Dan. I don’t think that there’s an ethical issue with doing what he wants to do. And yeah, I just think it’s going into an area that’s going to be uncomfortable for the friend.

Persons: kevin roose, casey newton, we’re, ” casey newton I’ve, kevin roose It’s, Kevin Roose, ” casey newton, Casey Newton, clowned, New York Times ’, Kate Conger, Casey, Ajeya Cotra, kevin roose Totally, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, They’re, Kevin, Dan Hendricks who’s, “, “ I’m, don’t, you’re, I’m, — casey newton, it’s, ChatGPT, casey newton I’m, I’ve, Martinez, Varghese, kevin roose Tyler, —, Steven A, Schwartz, ”, they’re, it’ll, there’s, Mr, Bean, We’ve, James Vincent, It’s, Jensen Huang, Harry Potter, Harry Potter of, kevin roose —, casey newton Parallelelizable, Parallelizable, — casey newton Let’s, that’s, who’s, NVIDIA —, casey newton Well, doesn’t, katie cogner, Kate Conger who’s, katie cogner Hi, katie cogner I’m, Dan, what’s, Getty, casey newton Kate, let’s, John, Here’s John, john, kevin roose That’s, Kate, he’s, He’s, he’ll, casey newton That’s, There’s, we’ve, “ I’ve, ” Kate, cogner, Prince Harry, katie cogner Doesn’t, Harry, casey newton We’re, We’re, kevin roose Kate, they’ve, Joni Mitchell, Chris Vecchio, Chris, kevin roose I’m, You’d, casey newton “, you’ll, casey newton Oh, ” kevin roose Organizations: The New York Times, NVIDIA, New York Times, Safety, Google, AI, ChatGPT, Avianca Airlines, Delta Airlines, China Southern Airlines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Royal Dutch Airlines, “, Bar Association, Texas, M University Commerce, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Harry Potter of Kentucky Christian, Facebook, eBay, “ New York Times, Boston, Garden, MetLife, TED, AIs Locations: British, Avianca, Durden, ChatGPT, Taiwan, Kentucky, Hogwarts, Harry Potter of Kentucky, California, Madison, —

☆ AI poses 'extinction' risk comparable to nuclear war, CEOs of OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic say
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

The Center for AI Safety's statement compares the risks posed by AI with nuclear war and pandemics. AI experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio have also supported the statement. The CEOs of three leading AI companies have signed a statement issued by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) warning of the "extinction" risk posed by artificial intelligence. Per CAIS, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have all signed the public statement, which compared the risks posed by AI with nuclear war and pandemics. AI experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are among the statement's signatories, along with executives at Microsoft and Google.

☆ A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Kevin Roose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A group of industry leaders is planning to warn on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they are building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and nuclear wars. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I. companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic. movement, signed the statement, as did other prominent researchers in the field (The third Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, who leads Meta’s A.I.

Leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA Corp (NVDA.O), OpenAI, and Stability AI, will participate in a public evaluation of their AI systems. Shortly after Biden announced his reelection bid, the Republican National Committee produced a video featuring a dystopian future during a second Biden term, which was built entirely with AI imagery. Such political ads are expected to become more common as AI technology proliferates. In February, Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to eliminate bias in their AI use. The Biden administration has also released an AI Bill of Rights and a risk management framework.

☆ Alphabet-backed Anthropic outlines the moral values behind its AI bot
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Stephen Nellis | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

The moral values guidelines, which Anthropic calls Claude's constitution, draw from several sources, including the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and even Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) data privacy rules. Anthropic was founded by former executives from Microsoft Corp-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI to focus on creating safe AI systems that will not, for example, tell users how to build a weapon or use racially biased language. Co-founder Dario Amodei was one of several AI executives who met with Biden last week to discuss potential dangers of AI. Anthropic takes a different approach, giving its Open AI competitor Claude a set of written moral values to read and learn from as it makes decisions on how to respond to questions. "In a few months, I predict that politicians will be quite focused on what the values are of different AI systems, and approaches like constitutional AI will help with that discussion because we can just write down the values," Clark said.

☆ White House to meet Microsoft, Google CEOs on AI dangers
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Nandita Bose | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/IllustrationWASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) - The White House will host CEOs of top artificial intelligence companies, including Alphabet Inc's Google (GOOGL.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O), on Thursday to discuss risks and safeguards as the technology catches the attention of governments and lawmakers globally. Leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability AI, will participate in a public evaluation of their AI systems at the AI Village at DEFCON 31 - one of the largest hacker conventions in the world - and run on a platform created by Scale AI and Microsoft. Such political ads are expected to become more common as AI technology proliferates. In February, Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to eliminate bias in their use of AI. The Biden administration has also released an AI Bill of Rights and a risk management framework.

☆ How Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei plans to turn trust and safety into a feature, not a bug
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Amodei chatted with Insider about her approach to trust and safety and what the future holds for AI. However, the majority of Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei's career has been spent trying to prove the opposite: that trust and safety is a feature, not a bug. "It's an organizational structure question, but it's also a mindset question," she told Insider. In 2020, Amodei and six other OpenAI employees, including her brother Dario Amodei, left the company to start rival AI lab Anthropic. Throughout Anthropic's growth, the company has kept an interdisciplinary culture, with employees whose experiences range from physics to computational biology to policywriting, Amodei told Insider.

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan bill to authorize the U.S. Mint to alter the metal content of coins in order to save taxpayers money will be reintroduced on Thursday, the two senators sponsoring the bill told CNBC exclusively. Officially titled the Coin Metal Modification Authorization and Cost Savings Act, the legislation was originally introduced in both the House and Senate in 2020. The bill passed the House that year with overwhelming bipartisan support. "I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support our bipartisan bill." "This commonsense, bipartisan effort will modify the composition of certain coins to reduce costs while allowing for a seamless transition into circulation," Ernst said.

☆ Microsoft's $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-08 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +10 min

Microsoft's cumulative investment in OpenAI has reportedly swelled to $13 billion and the startup's valuation has hit roughly $29 billion. What does that mean for Microsoft's investment and broader arrangement? The structure changed in 2019, when two top executives published a blog post announcing the formation of a "capped-profit" entity called OpenAI LP. Microsoft has an exclusive license on GPT-4 and all other OpenAI models, the OpenAI spokesperson said. When considering potential exits for OpenAI, Microsoft — which does not hold an OpenAI board seat — would be the natural acquirer given its close entanglement.

☆ The CEO of AI startup Anthropic explains how his experience at OpenAI helped him develop a new chatbot that he says is 'more conversational' and creative than ChatGPT
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

The AI company Anthropic announced Tuesday that its Claude chatbot would be available to developers. While working at OpenAI, Dario Amodei spent nearly five years helping to develop the language model powering ChatGPT. Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, says early testers have found Claude "more conversational" and creative than ChatGPT. Anthropic is launching two versions of its chatbot, dubbed Claude and Claude Instant. With constitutional AI, Claude would create and critique its outputs after reading the customer's constitution to create more predictable outcomes.

☆ Alphabet-backed Anthropic releases OpenAI competitor named Claude
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Stephen Nellis | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

March 14 (Reuters) - Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company backed by Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), on Tuesday released a large language model that competes directly with offerings from Microsoft Corp-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Large language models are algorithms that are taught to generate text by feeding them human-written training text. Anthropic has taken a different approach, giving Claude a set of principles at the time the model is "trained" with vast amounts of text data. Rather than trying to avoid potentially dangerous topics, Claude is designed to explain its objections, based on its principles. That's one of the reasons we liked Anthropic," Richard Robinson, chief executive of Robin AI, a London-based startup that uses AI to analyze legal contracts that Anthropic granted early access to Claude, told Reuters in an interview.

☆ Google asked employees to train Bard to produce high-quality answers. AI researchers explain how Google can do that.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-24 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

AI experts told Insider how Googlers might write the high-quality responses for Bard to improve its model. Then they were asked to evaluate Bard's answers to ensure they were what one would expect and of a reasonable length and structure. If an answer was too humanlike, factually wrong, or otherwise didn't make sense, employees could rewrite the answer and submit it to help train Bard's model. To refine Bard, Google could implement a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning, Vered Shwartz, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, said. That model would look at answers Bard produced, rejecting the bad ones and validating the good ones until the chatbot understood how it should behave.

☆ Inside the self-proclaimed first generative AI conference, executives explain why the hot new technology behind ChatGPT is 'not just hype, but something real'
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-18 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

AI startup Jasper hosted what it claims was the first conference dedicated to generative AI. The mood was reminiscent of the hype around crypto, but attendees say generative AI is here to stay. Thomas Maxwell/InsiderInsiders say generative AI is not just a fadGenerative AI has already run into some road bumps. Anthropic's Amodei said that consumers, businesses, and developers alike are moving at "record speeds" to adopt generative AI. Thomas Maxwell/InsiderWhat's different with generative AI is that large language models have been quietly in development for some time, , executives said.

☆ Investors and techies gather in San Francisco to bathe in generative A.I. hype sparked by ChatGPT
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-17 | by ( Jonathan Vanian | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +8 min

They were there to discuss the latest craze capturing the attention of the tech world: generative artificial intelligence. The underlying AI software powering ChatGPT, a kind of machine-learning technology known as a "large language model," isn't new. As Bessemer Venture Partners' Sameer Dholakia told audience members, generative AI could change "the lives of billions of people." Blackwell credits OpenAI and ChatGPT with showing people what's possible with generative AI, shining a spotlight on the industry at large. But for one day in San Francisco, generative AI was more than just a tool.

“It’s critically important that the Rules Committee reflect the body and reflect the will of the people. “What we’re seeing is the incredibly shrinking speakership,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in an interview Friday. “The reason these people want to be on the Rules Committee is they want to screw things up for McCarthy. The message the leader received from his deal-making centrists: We can live with giving Freedom Caucus members committee slots but committee gavels are a “nonstarter.”“Nobody should get a chairmanship without earning it,” Bacon said. That pisses us off.”Díaz-Balart said he had received assurances that “there are no deals cut about chairmanships” to committees as part of swaying votes to make McCarthy speaker.

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