   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S11What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru - WIRED (No paywall)   The paper in question was, in Gebru’s mind, pretty unobjectionable. It surveyed the known pitfalls of so-called large language models, a type of AI software—most famously exemplified by a system called GPT-3—that was stoking excitement in the tech industry. Google’s own version of the technology was now helping to power the company’s search engine. Jeff Dean, Google’s revered head of research, had encouraged Gebru to think about the approach’s possible downsides. The paper had sailed through the company’s internal review process and had been submitted to a prominent conference. But Kacholia now said that a group of product leaders and others inside the company had deemed the work unacceptable, Gebru recalls. Kacholia was vague about their objections but gave Gebru a week to act. Her firm deadline was the day after Thanksgiving.Gebru’s distress turned to anger as that date drew closer and the situation turned weirder. Kacholia gave Gebru’s manager, Samy Bengio, a document listing the paper’s supposed flaws, but told him not to send it to Gebru, only to read it to her. On Thanksgiving Day, Gebru skipped some festivities with her family to hear Bengio’s recital. According to Gebru’s recollection and contemporaneous notes, the document didn’t offer specific edits but complained that the paper handled topics “casually” and painted too bleak a picture of the new technology. It also claimed that all of Google’s uses of large language models were “engineered to avoid” the pitfalls that the paper described.
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S10'Exploding head syndrome'? Inside a mysterious, disturbing sleep condition - National Geographic (No paywall)  What Lovos experienced is known by the unscientific but evocative moniker "exploding head syndrome" (EHS), a mysterious example of a parasomnia, or sleep disorder. Parasomnias include sleepwalking, sleep talking, sleep paralysis, and pesky muscle spasms known as "myoclonic jerks." In most cases, these parasomnias are normal and harmless, except when physical danger or pain is involved.EHS was first named and discovered in 1876 by Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who wrote of patients who had heard "gunshots" and "pistols." He called the phenomenon "sensory shock." In the 1980s, neurologist J.M.S. Pearce changed it to EHS. Sharpless and colleague Peter Goadsby, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, are pushing for a name change to "episodic cranial sensory shock."
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S9It's harder than ever to identify a manipulated photo. Here's where to start. - Photography (No paywall)  Meanwhile experts have special tools, including “digital forensic techniques and resources like geolocation, satellite imagery, and sensor data to make sure we—and our audience—can trust what we’re seeing,” says Christopher Looft, coordinating producer of the visual verification unit at ABC News. “Generative artificial intelligence is advancing at such a rate that the ‘tells’ we’d look for a year ago are probably out of date by now.”But what about trusted news outlets, which are businesses too? Farid says you can still rely on those with a history of objective coverage. “They're incentivized to get it right,” he says. When photo agencies had to notify customers to stop distributing the Kensington photo, it was “bad for business” as it hurts their credibility, Farid says.
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S12Stick or twist: How to improve the outcomes of your big life decisions - New Scientist (No paywall)  LIFE, it could be argued, is like a long game of blackjack. In one common version of this, each person is initially dealt two playing cards. The aim is for your hand to add to 21, or as close to this as you can get without busting. Players can either “stick” with their existing hand or “twist” – asking to be dealt another card to add to their total. The risk, of course, is that you exceed 21 and are eliminated.This may sound far removed from everyday choices, but many of our most important life decisions boil down to such dilemmas. Should I stay put or take the leap and move house? Should I remain in my job or start my own business? Should I put up with an unsatisfying relationship or try my luck at love another time? In each case, we must weigh the security of what we have against a riskier, but potentially more rewarding, alternative.
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S13Want More Out of Generative AI? Here Are 9 Useful Resources - WIRED (No paywall)  That said, there's still a lot to learn about how to get the most out of these tools and about the technology underpinning them, especially if you want to do something truly creative with the help of these tools. Spend some time with the resources we've listed here and you'll quickly become a smarter-than-average AI operator.Some of the best resources out there when it comes to generative AI are Substacks, and Inside My Head is a case in point. Run by technologist Linus Ekenstam, it features a host of useful AI-related material, covering tutorials on getting the optimum results from these tools and crafting the smartest prompts.
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S8Who Should Be Tracking Their Glucose?  Monitoring blood sugar levels used to be something only people with diabetes did. But in recent years, glucose has become one of the trendiest biometrics to track for people striving to optimize their health. That’s in large part because of the increasing accessibility of a tool called a continuous glucose monitor, or C.G.M.The devices were originally developed more than 20 years ago for people with diabetes who rely on insulin shots. Now, there are at least five companies that market and sell apps and C.G.M.s to people without diabetes, claiming that knowing your glucose levels can help you lose weight and improve your health.
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S5S3Inflation rose for a second straight month, endangering prospect of Fed rate cuts this summer - Fortune (No paywall)  Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so called “core” prices also climbed 0.4% from January to February, matching the previous month’s increase and a faster pace than is consistent with the Fed’s 2% target. Core inflation is watched especially closely because it typically provides a better read of where inflation is likely headed.Voter perceptions of inflation are sure to occupy a central place in this year’s presidential election. Despite a healthy job market and a record-high stock market, polls show that many Americans blame Biden for the surge in consumer prices that began in 2021. Though inflationary pressures have significantly eased, average prices remain well above where they stood three years ago.
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S17How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  The common climate concern when it comes to airlines is that planes produce a lot of carbon dioxide emissions as they burn fuel. But jets also release heat, water vapor, and particulate matter that can produce thin clouds in the sky, known as “contrails,” in particularly cold, humid, icy parts of the atmosphere.Last summer, Breakthrough Energy, Google Research, and American Airlines announced some promising results from a research collaboration, as first reported in the New York Times. They employed satellite imagery, weather data, software models, and AI prediction tools to steer pilots over or under areas where their planes would be likely to produce contrails. American Airlines used these tools in 70 test flights over six months, and subsequent satellite data indicated that they reduced the total length of contrails by 54%, relative to flights that weren’t rerouted.
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S1The 53 Best Movies Under 90 Minutes  Sure, it’s great to turn off your mind and immerse yourself in a three-hour-long orgy of cinematic excess. But sometimes you just want a good story, capably told, that gets in and out in less than 90 minutes. Hollywood might love making long films — just take a look at the run time on most of the recent Best Picture nominees — but some of our favorite titles are short movies. A great comedy doesn’t need five acts to be hilarious, a stirring romance can unfold at a breezy pace, and many animated masterpieces barely need over an hour to enrapture audiences of all ages. You’re a busy person, and these (relatively) brief films are worth your limited time.
Disney’s fourth animated movie was conceived as a model of simplicity and efficiency, made to recoup the losses of Fantasia. Even so, in just 64 minutes we get flying elephants, a valuable lesson in an interspecies mouse-elephant friendship, and what was, for at least one 5-year-old watching it on video, the astounding experience of seeing an adult have to explain why Dumbo was drunk. (For other time-efficient nostalgia trips, nearly every pre-1990s Disney movie clocks in under 80 minutes, including Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, and The Jungle Book.)
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S4Experimental weight loss pill seems to be more potent than Ozempic - New Scientist (No paywall)  The medicine, called amycretin, caused people to lose 13 per cent of their weight over three months, more than twice the amount seen with Ozempic and Wegovy specifically. “This approach seems to be a little bit more exciting, from the limited data that we have,” says Daniel Drucker at the University of Toronto in Canada.The results are from a placebo-controlled trial lasting three months, so it is too soon to know how amycretin stacks up against the other medicines for long-term effectiveness and safety, says Drucker, who wasn’t involved in the trial but has consulted for the manufacturer Novo Nordisk, as well as other pharmaceutical firms.
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S6Why it's hard to write a good book about the tech world - The Economist (No paywall)  One is “The Studio” (1969) by John Gregory Dunne, an American writer who spent a year inside 20th Century Fox watching films get made and executives try to balance creativity with profit-seeking. The other, “Swimming Across” (2001) by Andy Grove, the former boss of Intel, a chipmaker, is a memoir about surviving the Holocaust. It shows how adversity can engender grit, which every entrepreneur needs.
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S7When wind turbine blades get old what's next?  Innovative solutions such as repurposing blades into playgrounds or bike sheds have been shown to be effective at a local level but, with some experts predicting up to 43 million tonnes of wind turbine blade waste by 2050, there is a pressing need for a system that will work on a bigger scale.
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S14S15Anti-AI sentiment gets big applause at SXSW 2024 as moviemaker dubs AI cheerleading as 'terrifying bullsh**' | TechCrunch  A whiff of anti-AI sentiment got big applause at the SXSW conference in Austin on Tuesday afternoon. Award-winning writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as “DANIELS,” originally premiered their film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” at SXSW in 2022. The movie later went on to win seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. In a conversation about the future of storytelling at this year’s SXSW on Tuesday, the duo commented on the inevitable rise of AI and how to approach it, calling the technology both “amazing” and “terrifying.”“We had to change the story we told ourselves and say that ‘your value is your job,” he told the audience. “You are only worth what you can do, and we are no longer beings with an inherent worth. And this is why it’s so hard to find fulfillment in this current system. The system works best when you’re not fulfilled,” he said, then paused. “Which brings me back to AI,” Kwan continued to a thunder of applause and cheers.
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S16LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  Since their inception, it’s been clear that large language models like ChatGPT absorb racist views from the millions of pages of the internet they are trained on. Developers have responded by trying to make them less toxic. But new research suggests that those efforts, especially as models get larger, are only curbing racist views that are overt, while letting more covert stereotypes grow stronger and better hidden.Even when the two sentences had the same meaning, the models were more likely to apply adjectives like “dirty,” “lazy,” and “stupid” to speakers of AAE than speakers of Standard American English (SAE). The models associated speakers of AAE with less prestigious jobs (or didn’t associate them with having a job at all), and when asked to pass judgment on a hypothetical criminal defendant, they were more likely to recommend the death penalty.
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S18What Sets Successful Startup Accelerators Apart - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  What role do business accelerators play in boosting the growth of early-stage companies? Accelerators provide a structured environment of mentorship, education, and resources in exchange for equity. And they work. Research involving numerous accelerator programs and interviews with various stakeholders reveals that startups in these programs typically achieve higher funding and survival rates. Three key strategies identified for their effectiveness include compressed advice, which offers intensive mentorship and customer feedback to refine business strategies quickly; friendly sibling rivalry, encouraging open sharing and competition among startups for accelerated learning and execution; and schedule transitions, enforcing structured developmental activities to balance broad learning with focused execution. These strategies, effective in the high-paced startup environment, are also applicable to broader organizational contexts for driving innovation and growth.Business accelerators, often termed “startup accelerators” or “startup factories,” are organizations dedicated to fostering the rapid growth of early-stage companies. Typically operated by investors, corporations, or independent entities, they offer structured programs that usually span three to four months, providing selected startups with a combination of mentorship, educational workshops, networking opportunities, and often a modest amount of capital and office space. In exchange for these resources, accelerators usually require a small percentage of equity in participating startups.
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