Lifeboat Foundation

Benchmarks from German AI startup Aleph Alpha show that the startup’s latest AI models can keep up with OpenAI’s GPT-3. A success that should not lull Europe into a false sense of security.

ChatGPT has catapulted artificial intelligence into the public discussion like no other product before it. Behind the chatbot is the U.S. company OpenAI, which made headlines with the large-scale language model GPT-3 and later with the text-to-picture model DALL-E 2. The impact of systems like ChatGPT or Midjourney on education and work, which can be felt today, was foreseeable even then.

The underlying language models are often referred to in research as foundation models: a large AI model that, due to its generalist training with large datasets, can later take on many tasks for which it was not explicitly trained.

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The coming of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the ability of an artificial intelligence to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can — is inevitable. Despite the predictions of many experts that AGI might never be achieved or will take hundreds of years to emerge, I believe it will be here within the next decade.

How can I be so certain? We already have the know-how to produce massive programs with the capacity for processing and analyzing reams of data faster and more accurately than a human ever could. And in truth, massive programs may not be necessary anyway. Given the structure of the neocortex (the part of the human brain we use to think) and the amount of DNA needed to define it, we may be able to create a complete AGI in a program as small as 7.5 megabytes.

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2022 has been a dynamic year for quantum computing. With commercial breakthroughs such as the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) investing in its first quantum computer, the launch of the world’s first quantum computer capable of advantage over the cloud and the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for ground-breaking experiments with entangled photons, the industry is making progress.

At the same time, 2022 saw the tremendous accomplishment of the exaflop barrier broken with the Frontier supercomputer. At a cost of roughly $600 million and requiring more than 20 megawatts of power, we are approaching the limits of what classical computing approaches can do on their own. Often for practical business reasons, many companies are not able to fully exploit the increasing amount of data available to them. This hampers digital transformation across areas most reliant on high-performance computing (HPC): healthcare, defense, energy and finance.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already made its way into our personal and professional lives. Although the term is frequently used to describe a wide range of advanced computer processes, AI is best understood as a computer system or technological process that is capable of simulating human intelligence or learning to perform tasks and calculations and engage in decision-making.

Until recently, the traditional understanding of AI described machine learning (ML) technologies that recognized patterns and/or predicted behavior or preferences (also known as analytical AI).

A DIY hacker equipped with a Flipper Zero and old security camera managed to build a Mobile Infrared Trasmitter to bypass red lights.

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In a new approach to security that unites technology and art, EPFL researchers have combined silver nanostructures with polarized light to yield a range of brilliant colors, which can be used to encode messages.

Cryptography is something of a new field for Olivier Martin, who has been studying the optics of nanostructures for many years as head of the Nanophotonics and Metrology Lab EPFL’s School of Engineering. But after developing some new silver nanostructures in collaboration with the Center of MicroNanoTechnology, Martin and Ph.D. student Hsiang-Chu Wang noticed that these nanostructures reacted to polarized light in an unexpected way, which just happened to be perfect for encoding information.

They found that when polarized light was shone through the nanostructures from certain directions, a range of vivid and easily-identifiable colors was reflected back. These different colors could be assigned numbers, which could then be used to represent letters using the electronic communication standard code ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). To encode a secret message, the researchers applied a quaternary code using the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3 (as opposed to the more commonly used binary code 0 and 1). The result was a series of four-digit strings composed of different color combinations that could be used to spell out a message, and the method of chromo-encryption was born.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022.

The extraordinary group of participants consisted of 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany, as well as Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future. Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affecting children and young people.

AirTag competitor Tile today announced a new Anti-Theft Mode for Tile tracking devices, which is designed to make Tile accessories undetectable by the anti-stalking Scan and Secure feature.

Scan and Secure is a security measure that Tile implemented in order to allow iPhone and Android users to scan for and detect nearby Tile devices to keep them from being used for stalking purposes. Unfortunately, Scan and Secure undermines the anti-theft capabilities of the Tile because a stolen device’s Tile can be located and removed, something also possible with similar security features added for AirTags.