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Anthropic shares more details about how Claude’s new watermarks will work

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  Anthropic published a blog post Friday seeking to answer some basic questions about how it will watermark the text generated by its chatbot Claude. Such as: How will the watermarking actually work? Can it be hidden with editing? And how does this affect code? Claude users have been debating the move since the company revealed earlier this week that it would be doing this watermarking to comply with the EU AI Act’s Transparency Code, which requires AI companies to use systems that make it possible to identify AI-generated content. On Reddit, for example, one poster characterized this as a conspiracy against innocent Claude users , while another claimed, “The only reason you wouldn’t want this is to lie to people.” And Business Insider reports that “dozens” of users on X have claimed to cancel their Claude subscriptions as a result. Anthropic’s new post starts with a general overview of the watermarking concept, explaining that when making “low-stakes choices” — like choosing be...

Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’

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  Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pushed back against the idea that he’s been painting an overly pessimistic picture of artificial intelligence and how it might shape the future. Amodei’s comments came in response to investor Gavin Baker, who argued — both on the All-In podcast and on X — that Amodei’s warnings about the dangers of AI have helped to fuel a backlash in the United States, particularly against data centers .  Claiming that Amodei has “lost the argument” when it comes to AI regulation (Anthropic has advocated for some regulations, including   a California bill that imposes transparency requirements on large AI companies ), and given that “he is about to be the CEO of one of the most important companies in the world,” Baker wrote, “I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry.” Baker is far from the only one arguing that AI skepticism and even government crackdowns are a natural response to   the...

Woman claims her stepfather used Grok to transform childhood photo into explicit imagery

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  A woman identified as Jane Doe 4 has joined a lawsuit filed by three Tennessee teenagers against Elon Musk’s xAI over the role the company’s chatbot Grok allegedly played in creating child sexual abuse material. According to a report in The Washington Post , the woman alleged that her stepfather used Grok to manipulate a photo taken when she was 11 years old to create more than 7,000 explicit images of her. The woman also said that her stepfather was found dead of suicide two days after the images were uncovered in a law enforcement raid. “Limitless access to these tools is spreading so quickly,” said the woman. “It is taking everyday life and turning it into child sexual abuse.” The teenagers who’d filed the lawsuit accused xAI (now part of SpaceX) of failing to take basic precautions to prevent Grok from being used to create explicit images of real people, including minors. (X was flooded with millions of Grok-generated sexualized images earlier this year.) They are seeking c...

Every fusion startup that has raised over $100M

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  Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes — always a decade away! — to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines. The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. If startups are able to complete commercially viable fusion power plants, then they have the potential to upend trillion-dollar markets. The bullish wave buoying the fusion industry has been driven by  three advances : more powerful computer chips, more sophisticated AI, and powerful high-temperature superconducting magnets. Together, they have helped deliver more sophisticated reactor designs, better simulations, and more complex control schemes. It doesn’t hurt that, at the end of 2022, a U.S. Department of Energy lab announced that it had produced a controlled fusion reaction that pr...