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Category: government – Page 8

In today’s AI news, this year coding might go from one of the most sought-after skills on the job market to one that can be fully automated. Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta and some of the biggest companies in the tech industry are already working toward this on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on Friday.

In other advancements, NovaSky, a team of researchers based out of UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, released Sky-T1-32B-Preview, a reasoning model that’s competitive with an earlier version of OpenAI’s o1. “Remarkably, Sky-T1-32B-Preview was trained for less than $450,” the team wrote in a blog post, “demonstrating that it is possible to replicate high-level reasoning capabilities affordably and efficiently.”

And, no company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. The world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer has green-lit a plan to use the immigration system to recruit a new wave of AI experts and loosen up data mining regulations to help Britain lead the world in the new technology. The recruitment of thousands of new AI experts by the government and private sector is part of a 50-point plan to transform Britain with the new technology.

In videos, newly deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, El Capitan — the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) first exascale supercomputer, is setting new benchmarks in computing power. At 2.79 exaFLOPs of peak performance El Capitan’s unprecedented capabilities are already impacting scientific computing and making the previously unimaginable a reality.

Then, François Chollet discusses the outcomes of the ARC-AGI (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) Prize competition in 2024, where accuracy rose from 33% to 55.5% on a private evaluation set. They explore two core solution paradigms—program synthesis (induction) and direct prediction (“transduction”)—and how successful solutions combine both.

And, in this entertaining and important talk, AI ethicist Nadia Lee shares the perils, pitfalls and opportunities that swirl around our emerging AI reality. Nadia Lee is an ethical AI advocate and the founder of ThatsMyFace, an AI company which detects key assets and people in malicious content for businesses.

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg Says AI Could Soon Do The Work Of Meta’s Midlevel Engineers” | >

Exploring the most important questions we face as we age.

Dr. Debra Whitman, Ph.D. is Executive Vice President and Chief Public Policy Officer, at AARP (https://www.aarp.org/) where she leads policy development, analysis and research, as well as global thought leadership supporting and advancing the interests of individuals age 50-plus and their families. She oversees AARP’s Public Policy Institute, AARP Research, Office of Policy Development and Integration, Thought Leadership, and AARP International.

Dr. Whitman is an authority on aging issues with extensive experience in national policy making, domestic and international research, and the political process. An economist, she is a strategic thinker whose career has been dedicated to solving problems affecting economic and health security, and other issues related to population aging.

As staff director for the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, Dr. Whitman worked across the aisle to increase retirement security, lower the cost of health care, protect vulnerable seniors, safeguard consumers, make the pharmaceutical industry more transparent, and improve our nation’s long term care system.

Before that, Dr. Whitman worked for the Congressional Research Service as a specialist in the economics of aging. She provided members of Congress and their staff with research and advice, and authored analytical reports on the economic impacts of current policies affecting older Americans, as well as the distributional and intergenerational effects of legislative proposals.

Continue reading “Dr. Debra Whitman, Ph.D. — Chief Public Policy Officer, AARP — Author, The Second Fifty” | >

At CES 2025, Elon Musk joined Mark Penn the Stagwell CEO, and 25 CMOs to discuss AI, robotics, Neuralink, space exploration, and Mars colonization. Musk shared bold predictions on AI’s role in cognitive tasks, humanoid robots, autonomous cars, and X’s future as a platform for collective human consciousness. They also explored government’s role in tech, internet connectivity, and combating global pessimism.

00:00 Introduction and Welcome.
01:52 Elon Musk on AI and Future Technology.
05:12 Advancements in Self-Driving Cars.
07:23 Humanoid Robots and Their Impact.
09:26 Mars Colonization Plans.
11:24 Neuralink and Brain-Computer Interfaces.
14:03 Government Efficiency and Budget Cuts.
17:49 Freedom of Speech and Social Media.
23:50 Optimism for the Future.

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Continue reading “Elon Musk JUST Dropped Massive Bombshell on Tesla Bots, Neuralink and Major Tesla Updates | CES 2025” | >

Shaping The Culture & Conduct Of Science — Dr. Marcia McNutt Ph.D. — President, National Academy Of Sciences

Dr. Marcia McNutt, Ph.D. is President of the National Academy of Sciences (https://www.nasonline.org/directory-e…), where she also chairs the National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and serves a key role in advising our nation on various important issues pertaining to science, technology, and health.

From 2013 to 2016, Dr. McNutt served as editor-in-chief of the Science journals.

Dr. McNutt is a geophysicist who prior to joining Science, was director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and science adviser to the United States Secretary of the Interior from from 2009 to 2013. During her tenure, the USGS responded to a number of major disasters, including earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and Japan, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Dr. McNutt led a team of government scientists and engineers at BP headquarters in Houston who helped contain the oil and cap the well. She directed the flow rate technical group that estimated the rate of oil discharge during the spill’s active phase. For her contributions, she was awarded the U.S. Coast Guard’s Meritorious Service Medal.

Continue reading “Dr. Marcia McNutt — President, National Academy of Sciences — Shaping Culture & Conduct Of Science” | >

“The ultimate goal is to extend healthspan—meaning the number of years aging adults live healthy lives and enjoy overall well-being by compressing the frailty and disability that comes with aging into a shorter duration of time near the end of life,” says Andrew Brack, PhD, the PROSPR Program Manager.

The new venture will be building on some of the work that the National Institute of Aging (NIH) has been working on and will be working in collaboration with various organizations in the biotechnology industry as well as some unspecified regulators to accelerate the development, testing, and availability of new therapeutic that targets human healthspan.

It is hoped that the new initiative, along with positively impacting the healthspan of Americans, will also help to enhance the economy across the nation.

Read more | >

You can trigger a dizzy spell by standing up too fast, skipping lunch, spinning in a circle, or drinking too much alcohol. Dizziness can be linked to one’s ears, brain, heart, or metabolic system. The treatments, likewise, are heterogeneous. In benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, crystals in the inner ear canals become loose; physical repositioning, known as maneuvers, can usually treat it. For conditions of chronic dizziness called persistent postural perceptual dizziness (P.P.P.D.), vestibular rehabilitation and S.S.R.I.s, which normally treat depression and anxiety, seem to work better. Vestibular migraine is treated through the use of migraine-specific supplements or medications—which wouldn’t be advised for someone with the buildup of inner-ear fluid known as Ménière’s disease.

The sensation we call dizziness is a sort of general alarm system for the body—but just as a fire alarm can’t tell you where a fire is burning (or whether someone walked through the emergency exit by mistake), it doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s wrong. Dasgupta argued that diagnosing the causes of dizziness requires a lost clinical art known as anamnesis, or a holistic interview about the patient’s symptoms and their surrounding context. “This is like detective work,” he said. Diego Kaski, who treats vestibular patients as a consulting neurologist at the U.K.’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, tries to understand his patient’s symptoms by imagining that they are happening to him. He often relies on gestures: if people have vertigo, which includes the illusion of movement, “they might spin their finger or their hand around,” Kaski told me. Others will hold onto their heads or rock their upper bodies from side to side. Patient accounts tend to be psychological as well as physical. “You lose control of what your body is doing, and that can be quite a fearful experience,” Kaski said. Many dizzy people wonder whether they are dying.

While visiting doctor after doctor, I learned from a Google search about what sounded like a dizziness utopia: the German Center for Vertigo and Balance Disorders, or D.S.G.Z., in Munich. It was originally funded by the German federal government and, since 2019, has operated as an interdisciplinary center of the University Hospital of Munich.

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Generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents myriad opportunities for integrity actors—anti-corruption agencies, supreme audit institutions, internal audit bodies and others—to enhance the impact of their work, particularly through the use of large language models (LLMS). As this type of AI becomes increasingly mainstream, it is critical for integrity actors to understand both where generative AI and LLMs can add the most value and the risks they pose. To advance this understanding, this paper draws on input from the OECD integrity and anti-corruption communities and provides a snapshot of the ways these bodies are using generative AI and LLMs, the challenges they face, and the insights these experiences offer to similar bodies in other countries. The paper also explores key considerations for integrity actors to ensure trustworthy AI systems and responsible use of AI as their capacities in this area develop.

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But when, where and how that could come to pass is hard to predict — in part, some researchers say, because of guardrails the federal government has placed around gain-of-function research.

The term describes experiments that seek to understand a virus’ potential to adapt to new hosts, spread more easily, survive longer in the environment and cause those infected to become sicker. Though many scientists view the approach as a critical tool for conducting biological research, other experts have long complained that it’s unacceptably risky — a reputation exacerbated by persistent speculation that the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic was created in gain-of-function experiments in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

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Southeast Asia’s emerging economies are vying to become a top AI hub — a race that has them both coming together and, quietly, battling among themselves.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), made up of 10 countries with a combined population of 672 million people, already has some advantages when compared to Europe or the U.S.

With over 200 million people aged 15 to 34, the region’s youthful and largely tech savvy populations make the region adaptable to future technological advances. That, combined with government support for accelerating AI in the region, could deliver substantial rewards for local workers.

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