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When Lex Friedman visited our MIT AI Venture Studio class to talk about the future of AI, we got into some pretty interesting ideas about the near future.

At the top of Lex’s comments, he talked about disruption – predicting that two new trillion-dollar companies will emerge out of the AI era, and suggesting that Google, Meta and Microsoft will likely not be able to pivot quickly enough to maintain their dominance.

In terms of where we might see this innovation, one of his focus points was on language. Lex pointed out that in America, we take it for granted that everyone speaks English – but around the world, there is an enormous market for real, precise speech translation. People, he said, speak many languages in an “intimate” way – and that requires precision on the part of the technology.

The fourth group is Curium, an Iranian group that has used LLMs to generate phishing emails and code to evade antivirus detection. Chinese state-affiliated hackers have also used LLMs for research, scripting, translations, and refining their tools.

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Microsoft and OpenAI say they have not detected any significant attacks using LLMs yet, but they have been shutting down all accounts and assets associated with these groups. “At the same time, we feel this is important research to publish to expose early-stage, incremental moves that we observe well-known threat actors attempting, and share information on how we are blocking and countering them with the defender community,” says Microsoft.

An alien invasion capable of triggering catastrophic changes is underway across North America. At least 70 imported earthworm species have colonized the continent, and represent a largely overlooked threat to native ecosystems, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University, Sorbonne University, and other institutions.

The analysis, recently published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, provides the largest-ever database of such earthworms and warns of the need to better understand and manage the invaders in our midst.

“Earthworms tell the story of the Anthropocene, the age we live in,” said study senior author Elizabeth Hadly, the Paul S. and Billie Achilles Professor in Environmental Biology in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. “It is a story of global homogenization of biodiversity by humans, which often leads to the decline of unique local species and the disruption of native ecosystem processes.”