Staff Picks

"Last week, the Trump Administration released their AI Action Plan. The document contains many promising aspects related to AI research and development, interpretability and control, managing national security risks, and new models for accelerating scientific research. However, there are also concerning provisions, such as those inhibiting state regulations and removing mentions of diversity, equity, and inclusion and climate change from the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. These omissions weaken the United States’ ability to lead on some of the most pressing societal challenges associated with AI technologies." MLH

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Artificial intelligence systems are thirsty, consuming as much as 500 milliliters of water – a single-serving water bottle – for each short conversation a user has with the GPT-3 version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT system. They use roughly the same amount of water to draft a 100-word email message. That figure includes the water used to cool the data center’s servers and the water consumed at the power plants generating the electricity to run them. (gms)

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"The U.S. National Science Foundation announced a partnership with NVIDIA to develop a set of artificial intelligence models that will transform the ability of America's scientists to leverage AI, advancing scientific discovery and ensuring U.S. leadership in AI-powered research and innovation. NSF will contribute $75 million, with NVIDIA providing an additional $77 million, to support the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project, led by the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). The collaboration will create a fully open suite of advanced AI models specifically designed to support the U.S. scientific community." MLH

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Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham has a simple message for aspiring entrepreneurs: You don’t need to focus on artificial intelligence to be successful. the co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator...“I haven’t met all the startups in the current [Y Combinator] batch yet, but the two most impressive companies that I’ve seen so far are not working on AI,” wrote Graham. “The lesson to take from this is not that AI is unimportant (it’s very important), but that the founders matter more than the idea. The founders are the best predictor of how a company will do, not the industry it’s in.” [ARH]

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"An exodus appears to be under way of Ph.D.s and faculty generally, who are leaving academia in the face of political, financial and enrollment crises. It’s a trend federal data and other sources show began even before Trump returned to the White House. " MLH

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"Southeastern Michigan is one of nearly 40 fake university sites that Inside Higher Ed recently uncovered, which appear to have been developed with or supplemented by AI. The sites seem to be part of a network, based on the use of identical language, the repetition of images and other design similarities. And many of these fake colleges also have a presence on social media sites, including LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook." MLH

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" The U.S. Commerce Department said on Monday that one of its agencies will take over operational responsibility to oversee $7.4 billion in semiconductor research funds, saying that the private non-profit established under the Biden administration to handle that function "served as a semiconductor slush fund." The National Institute of Standards and Technology will assume operational responsibility for the National Semiconductor Technology Center, a public-private consortium established under Democratic President Joe Biden, from the National Center for the Advancement of Semiconductor Technology (Natcast)." MLH

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"The late 1970s and early 1980s was a challenging time for the American economy, with inflation hitting 13.5 percent while unemployment reached 11 percent. It was also a turbulent time, as many indicators of the economy’s overall performance, including annual change in GDP and total hours worked, were moving up and down with pretty big swings. Starting around 1983, however, something rather remarkable happened: The economy’s fluctuations became milder. Notably, GDP growth didn’t vary as much year to year, and inflation was more stable. Economists call this “the Great Moderation,” a period lasting from roughly 1983 to 2007, when the economy’s cycles of booms and busts were more mild than they had been." MLH

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The responses to a Nature survey — numbering more than 1,100, mainly from physicists — showed how widely researchers vary in their understanding of the most fundamental features of quantum experiments. (gms)

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"BRUSSELS/WASHINGTON/BERLIN, August 1 (Reuters) - European governments are taking steps to break their dependence on critical scientific data the United States historically made freely available to the world, and are ramping up their own data collection systems to monitor climate change and weather extremes, according to Reuters interviews. The effort - which has not been previously reported - marks the most concrete response from the European Union and other European governments so far to the U.S. government's retreat from scientific research under President Donald Trump's administration." mlh

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"Research shows that among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old." -CAN

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"The first step to building a meaningful product isn't to identify a trendy niche or chase a hot market. It's to pay attention to the moments in your day that feel harder than they should. The tasks you procrastinate. The tools you silently curse. That friction is your opportunity." "Forget disruption. Forget scale. The best early-stage products come from irritation, not inspiration. What's broken in your workflow? What are you duct-taping together every week just to get by? Start there. That's where urgency and empathy already live." "Don't aim for elegance. Aim for utility. If it works, users won't care that it's scrappy." "Test willingness to pay as soon as possible" "Don't rush to scale. If you're still explaining what your product does, you're not ready to grow. Focus instead on helping your early users get results." [ARH]

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"HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers. It’s not clear that any state has a solution and the actual effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta. But more than a dozen states have begun taking steps as data centers drive a rapid build-out of power plants and transmission lines. That has meant pressuring the nation’s biggest power grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centers on electricity bills or pushing data center owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs." MLH

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"Americans’ confidence in higher education has increased, with 42% saying they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in it, up from 36% in each of the past two years. At the same time, the share with little or no confidence has declined from 32% a year ago to 23% today. This represents the first time Gallup has measured an increase in confidence in its decadelong trend. Confidence in higher education remains well below where it was in the initial Gallup measure in 2015, when a majority of 57% were confident."

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"The Arizona college worked closely with its accreditor to design a program that meets the same academic standards as traditional bachelor's degrees while increasing affordability and accessibility. The degree, a 92-credit bachelor of applied science in business (BASB), costs less than $9,500 for in-state students and is available fully online."

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CG

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"A new collaboration between Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and İş Private Equity of Istanbul aims to translate groundbreaking discoveries about a protein that helps regulate metabolism and inflammation into novel therapeutics for obesity, heart disease, and age-related illnesses. Gökhan Hotamışlıgil The agreement is based on the work of faculty member Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, who studies two ancient systems that are fundamental to life: metabolism, which converts nutrients into energy, and the immune response, which defends against pathogens. His research at the intersection of these systems led him to an unusual protein that is produced in fat cells—and, as his team discovered much later, secreted into the blood as an important hormone. For more than 20 years, Hotamışlıgil has studied this protein, growing increasingly excited about its potential as a therapeutic target. Now, İş Private Equity, a subsidiary of Türkiye İşbank Group, aims to make that vision a reality." MLH

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"With the Supreme Court on Monday clearing the way for the Trump administration to shrink the Education Department's workforce, the department on Tuesday announced plans for the Department of Labor (DOL) to co-manage its adult education and career and technical education (CTE) programs. The Education Department (ED) said in a release that DOL will take on a "greater role" in administering the adult education and family literacy programs funded under Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and career and technical education programs funded by the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act (Perkins V). ED noted that it will maintain all statutory responsibilities and positions, policy authority and oversight of these programs." MLH

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"he AFT, alongside the United Federation of Teachers and lead partner Microsoft Corp., founding partner OpenAI, and Anthropic, announced the launch of the National Academy for AI Instruction today. The groundbreaking $23 million education initiative will provide access to free AI training and curriculum for all 1.8 million members of the AFT, starting with K-12 educators. It will be based at a state-of-the-art bricks-and-mortar Manhattan facility designed to transform how artificial intelligence is taught and integrated into classrooms across the United States. " -CAN

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