TeeJay Tech Bro

  The White House is drafting an executive order on the disproven link between vaccines and autism, according to independent reports from The Washington Post and Bloomberg , which both cited unnamed sources with knowledge of the efforts. Bloomberg reported that the executive order, which is still taking shape and is subject to change, could be issued as soon as next week. The Post said the order’s drafting so far is aimed at the childhood vaccine schedule, autism research, and parental choice for vaccinations. Dozens of high-quality studies encompassing data from millions of children worldwide have already been carried out on the topic and have consistently found no link between childhood vaccines and autism. The claim of a link stems from an unethical, fraudulent study that was retracted years ago, and its author was stripped of his medical license. Leading medical groups, scientists, and autism patient advocacy groups have strongly rejected any continued pursuit of the disprove...

  This year alone, there have been numerous known instances—often via lawsuits—of AI chatbots (most often, OpenAI’s ChatGPT) that have gone horrifically wrong. A January lawsuit described the story of a man who took his own life after being allegedly “coached” into suicide. A college student in Georgia sued OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT “pushed him into psychosis.” In June, a Canadian family also sued OpenAI and argued that ChatGPT agreed with the young woman’s dismissiveness when it first gave her the option to seek professional mental health advice. ChatGPT allegedly “encouraged” her to end her life, too, and she did so. So what should OpenAI—and other AI companies generally—do differently to reduce harm among people who use their products? Silicon Valley is certainly aware of the legal liability it now faces as these products are being used in ways that they were not intended for, and it seems to be trying to improve. On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it had partnered with ...

  ByteDance is training an AI model that could approach the size of Anthropic’s most cutting-edge Mythos system, as Chinese companies continue to narrow the gap with the top US labs. The Chinese tech giant is at an early stage of training a model with as many as 10 trillion parameters—three times larger than Moonshot’s Kimi K3, the biggest Chinese model released to date, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The ByteDance model is being pre-trained—a stage that typically takes three to six months—before it is fine-tuned and released if all goes well, one of the people said. The exact model size would only be determined at a later stage. Anthropic doesn’t disclose the size of its models, but industry estimates say its most advanced Mythos 5 has about 8 trillion parameters and Fable 5 about 5 trillion. While parameter count sets the fundamental capacity or memory limits for the models to store information, actual capability also depends on other factors, such as dat...

  Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked out in the late 1860s. We know this instability explains why wind causes ripples on the surface of water and clouds shear into a row of curves. For decades scientists argued the same thing must be happening with plasma on the surface of the Sun, and yet nobody had been able to confirm it. Now, a team led by David Kuridze and Friedrich Wöger of the National Solar Observatory reports that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are not just visible on the Sun, but they’re ubiquitous. Their new study proposes that this may change the way we think about how heat, mass, and magnetic energy move through the Sun’s atmosphere. Telescope’s test drive The reason plasma whirlpools on the Sun stayed hidden for so long is rather trivial: They are very small. Their scale sits below wh...