A China military publication says the Starlink internet service may be used by the US to bring “chaos or calamity’’ to the world.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is back in the news thanks to the recent introduction of Gato from DeepMind. As much as anything, AGI invokes images of the Skynet (of Terminator lore) that was originally designed as threat analysis software for the military, but it quickly came to see humanity as the enemy. While fictional, this should give us pause, especially as militaries around the world are pursuing AI-based weapons.
However, Gato does not appear to raise any of these concerns. The deep learning transformer model is described as a “generalist agent” and purports to perform 604 distinct and mostly mundane tasks with varying modalities, observations and action specifications. It has been referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of AI models. It is clearly much more general than other AI systems developed thus far and in that regard appears to be a step towards AGI.
Multimodal systems are not new — as evidenced by GPT-3 and others. What is arguably new is the intent. By design, GPT-3 was intended to be a large language model for text generation. That it could also produce images from captions, generate programming code and other functions were add-on benefits that emerged after the fact and often to the surprise of AI experts.
AI For Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation — Angela Sheffield, Senior Program Manager, National Nuclear Security Administration, U.S. Department of Energy.
Angela Sheffield is a graduate student and Space Industry fellow at the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School. She is on detail from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), where she serves as the Senior Program Manager for AI for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development.
China has to have the capability to identify and destroy SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, according to Chinese military experts in a report released in April. The research, headed by Ren Yuanzhen of the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, was published in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Modern Defence Technology. The publication inexplicably disappeared from the online version of The South China Morning Post after The South China Morning Post reported on its contents.
David Cowhig, a former US ambassador, was able to complete the translation of the document before it vanished, which allowed him to uncover a number of preventative steps that were suggested to be taken against Starlink. According to the study, China has to “use a mix of soft and hard kill measures to disrupt the operating system of the constellation and deactivate part of the Starlink satellites.”
ORNL’s Frontier HPE Cray EX with AMD CPUs is the ‘first true exascale machine.’
The United States is on top of the supercomputing world in the Top500 ranking of the most powerful systems. The Frontier system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) running on AMD EPYC CPUs took first place from last year’s champ, Japan’s ARM A64X Fugaku system. It’s still in the integration and testing process at the ORNL in Tennessee, but will eventually be operated by the US Air Force and US Department of Energy.
Frontier, powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Cray EX platform, was the top machine by a wide margin, too. It’s the first (known) true exascale system, hitting a peak 1.1 exaflops on the Linmark benchmark. Fugaku, meanwhile, managed less than half that at 442 petaflops, which was still enough to keep it in first place for the previous two years.
Continue reading “US retakes first place from Japan on Top500 supercomputer ranking” »
“We’ve spent a lot of time in education to help people understand that just like an automobile extends your capabilities in the physical domain, artificial intelligence extends your abilities within the data domain and the information domain,” the general said Wednesday.
AI and its traces can be found across the Pentagon and its many enclaves and alcoves. The department has for years recognized its value as well, describing the tech in a 2018 strategy as rapidly changing businesses, industries and military threats. More can be done, Groen said.
Continue reading “AI less about ‘killer robots,’ more about Pentagon transformation, Groen says” »
The ancient farmsteaders may have “left in haste.”
Archaeologists in Israel have unearthed the 2,100-year-old remains of a farmstead whose owners likely abandoned it in a hurry, possibly to avoid an impending military invasion.
“We were very lucky to discover a time-capsule, frozen in time, in which the finds remained where they were left by the occupants of the site,” which is near Israel’s northern Sea of Galilee, archaeologist Amani Abu-Hamid, who is leading the excavation for the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), said in a statement.
The study was led by Ren Yuanzhen, a researcher with the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, under the PLA’s Strategic Support Force. Coauthors included several senior scientists in China’s defense industry.
Ren and his colleagues could not immediately be reached for comment and it is uncertain to what extent their view represents an official stance of the Chinese military or government.
“A combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation’s operating system,” said the paper, published in the domestic, peer-reviewed journal Modern Defense Technology.
The virus is called monkeypox because researchers first detected it in laboratory monkeys in 1958, but it is thought to transmit to people from wild animals such as rodents or from other infected people. In an average year, a few thousand cases occur in Africa, typically in the western and central parts of the continent. But cases outside Africa have previously been limited to a handful that were associated with travel to Africa or with the importation of infected animals. The number of cases detected outside of Africa in the past week alone — which is almost certain to increase — has already surpassed the total number detected outside the continent since 1970, when the virus was first found to cause disease in humans. This rapid spread is what has scientists on high alert.
But monkeypox is no SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, says Jay Hooper, a virologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. It doesn’t transmit from person to person as readily, and because it is related to the smallpox virus, there are already treatments and vaccines on hand for curbing its spread. So although scientists are concerned — because any new viral behaviour is worrying — they are not panicked.
Unlike SARS-CoV-2, which spreads through tiny air-borne droplets called aerosols, monkeypox is thought to spread from close contact with bodily fluids, such as saliva from coughing. That means a person with monkeypox is likely to infect far fewer close contacts than someone with SARS-CoV-2, Hooper says. Both viruses can cause flu-like symptoms, but monkeypox also triggers enlarged lymph nodes and, eventually, distinctive fluid-filled lesions on the face, hands and feet. Most people recover from monkeypox in a few weeks without treatment.
In over six decades since the first satellite, the mode of communication hasn’t changed. Now, this technology will herald a new era of secure, faster connections.
