Unsupervised Learning NO. 387

What if modern parenting's focus on vulnerability and trauma is creating people who only think about themselves?

- Microsoft researchers have discovered a distinct hacking group within the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) called "Cadet Blizzard"
- Cadet Blizzard has been active since at least 2020, focusing on government services, law enforcement, nonprofits, IT service providers, and emergency services
- The group uses a hacktivist front called "Free Civilian" to publish and share stolen data, including data from Ukrainian government agencies

NVIDIA introduces its AI red team philosophy and framework for assessing machine learning (ML) systems from an information security perspective. The cross-functional team combines offensive security professionals and data scientists to identify and mitigate risks in ML systems. The framework aims to provide a foundation for continuous security improvement throughout the ML development lifecycle.

Shell confirmed on Thursday it had been impacted by the Clop ransomware gang’s breach of the MOVEit file transfer tool after the group listed the British oil and gas multinational on its extortion site. This Clop/MOVEit situation is starting to look more and more like Solarwinds, but it’s not clear yet HOW much that’s true.

Detection-focused threat intelligence startup Silent Push launched with $10 million in seed funding, aiming to provide a comprehensive view of internet-facing infrastructure by mapping the entire web daily. Curious what opening they see in that market with Shodan, Expanse, and Censys already there.

Generative AI could unlock trillions of dollars in value and transform the nature of work, but it also presents new challenges that need to be addressed.

- Generative AI could add $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually across 63 use cases, increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent.
- About 75 percent of the value from generative AI use cases falls across four areas: Customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D.
- Industries like banking, high tech, and life sciences could see the biggest impact as a percentage of their revenues from generative AI.
- Generative AI has the potential to change the anatomy of work, automating work activities that absorb 60 to 70 percent of employees’ time today.
- The pace of workforce transformation is likely to accelerate, with half of today’s work activities potentially automated between 2030 and 2060.

Meta AI introduces Voicebox, a groundbreaking generative AI model for speech that generalizes across tasks with state-of-the-art performance.

- Voicebox can synthesize speech in six languages, perform noise removal, content editing, style conversion, and diverse sample generation.
- The model is based on Flow Matching, outperforming current state-of-the-art models like VALL-E and YourTTS in terms of intelligibility and audio similarity.
- Potential use cases include in-context text-to-speech synthesis, cross-lingual style transfer, speech denoising and editing, and diverse speech sampling.
- Due to potential risks of misuse, Meta AI is not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time.
- The researchers also developed a highly effective classifier to distinguish between authentic speech and audio generated with Voicebox.

Meta plans to make the next version of LLaMA, its open-source LLM, commercially available despite lawmaker inquiries and a recent leak to 4chan. The move reaffirms Meta's commitment to open-source AI and its integration into products. And it’s commitment to not letting OpenAI take all the good press.

A white supremacist participating in a scientific study took MDMA and subsequently questioned his extreme beliefs. Researchers are exploring the drug's potential to treat mental and physical illnesses, and its ability to influence values and priorities. I cannot wait for MDMA to be combined with Talk Therapy to help with all sorts of things.

Fewer Americans find same-sex relations morally acceptable, dropping from 71% to 64%, while support for the death penalty increased slightly. The decline in acceptance is mainly due to fewer Republicans holding that view.

Simon Farshid demonstrated using GPT-4's function calling feature to generate structured JSON data for a recipe app. This simplifies interaction with LLMs, reduces token usage, and lowers cognitive load on GPT, potentially increasing accuracy and enabling LLMs as backends for various applications.

The Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization completed a 5.7 terapixel mosaic of Mars' surface, covering 99.5% of the planet with 5.0 m/px resolution. The mosaic, sourced from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Context Camera, is available for streaming and download.