Several significant developments across science, technology, and international relations emerged this week, ranging from power struggles within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the ethical concerns surrounding AI-generated deepfakes. A strategic alliance concerning critical minerals is also under discussion among several nations.
At the NIH, a power struggle over institute directorships deepened as a new presidential administration prepared to fill approximately 4,000 jobs across the federal government, according to Ars Technica. These political appointees are intended to help implement the president's agenda and ensure government agencies are responsive to elected officials.
Meanwhile, research highlighted by Ars Technica revealed compelling, previously overlooked scientific stories. These included evidence suggesting humans, not glaciers, transported the stones to build Stonehenge from Wales and northern Scotland. Other stories involved a lip-syncing robot, the use of brewer's yeast as scaffolding for lab-grown meat, and the search for Leonardo da Vinci's DNA in his art.
In the realm of artificial intelligence, concerns arose regarding the creation and distribution of deepfakes. An analysis by researchers at Stanford and Indiana University found that a civilian online marketplace, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, facilitated the purchase of custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes, according to MIT Technology Review. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, indicated that a significant portion of requests on the site were for deepfakes of real people, with 90% of these targeting women. Some files were specifically designed to create pornographic images, despite the site's ban on such content.
VentureBeat reported on the limitations of current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, particularly in handling sophisticated documents. According to VentureBeat, standard RAG pipelines treat documents as flat strings of text, using fixed-size chunking that can destroy the logic of technical manuals by slicing tables, severing captions from images, and ignoring visual hierarchy. "The failure isn't in the LLM. The failure is in the preprocessing," VentureBeat noted.
On the international stage, the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Australia, and other nations are scheduled to meet to discuss a strategic alliance concerning critical minerals, Hacker News reported. Ministers from the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand will convene in Washington to discuss rare earths, including calls for the US to guarantee a minimum price. This summit is viewed as an effort to repair transatlantic ties and create alliances to help countries reduce their dependence on China.
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