Large-language models such as ChatGPT are still liable to distort the meaning of what they are summarising

• Seth Lazar is a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University and a distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI

What is the role of AI in democracy? Is it just a volcano of deepfakes and disinformation ? Or can it – as many activists and even AI labs are betting – help fix an ailing and ageing political system? The UK government, which loves to appear aligned with the bleeding edge of AI, seems to think the technology can enhance British democracy. It envisages a world where large-language models (LLMs) are condensing and analysing submissions to public consultations, preparing ministerial briefs, and perhaps even drafting legislation . Is this a valid initiative by a tech-forward administration? Or is it just a way of dressing up civil service cuts , to the detriment of democracy?

LLMs, the AI paradigm that that has taken the world by storm since ChatGPT’s 2022 launch, have been explicitly trained to summarise and distil information. And they can now process hundreds, even thousands, of pages of text at a time. The UK government, meanwhile, runs about 700 public consultations a year. So one obvious use for LLMs is to help analyse and summarise the thousands of pages of submissions they receive in response to each. Unfortunately, while they do a great job of summarising emails or individual newspaper articles , LLMs have a way to go before they are an appropriate replacement for civil servants analysing public consultations.

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Shares slumped 15% after Mark Zuckerberg said AI spending would have to grow before Meta could make much revenue from products

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Shares in Meta slumped 15% when Wall Street opened on Thursday, wiping about $190bn off the value of the Facebook and Instagram parent company, as investors reacted to a pledge to ramp up spending on artificial intelligence.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, said on a conference call on Wednesday that spending on the technology would have to grow “meaningfully” before the company could make “much revenue” from new AI products.

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Strict rules have led to a wild west of rentals, with visitors choosing between huge hotel bills or word-of-mouth deals

Until recently, visitors to New York basically had two options: hotel rooms or short-term rental platforms like Airbnb. But in September 2023, the city started enforcing a 2022 law that banned people from renting their homes for fewer than 30 days (unless the host stayed in the home with guests).

Now the only legit option for people visiting the city is hotel rooms – and they’re unaffordable for many. Most of the Times Square hotels don’t have rooms for less than $300 a night. A search for Thursday 2 May found the Muse at $356, Hampton Inn at $323 and the Hard Rock at $459 (although, because of dynamic pricing, these are subject to regular change). They’re getting more expensive still. Hotel rates have increased between the first quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2023 at twice the rate of inflation, said Jan Freitag, an analyst at the real-estate data firm CoStar Group.

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Energy watchdog warns pace must accelerate to hit targets after new batteries increased capacity by 130%

The rollout of batteries across the global electricity industry more than doubled last year but will need to be six times faster if the world hopes to meet its renewable energy targets, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

A report from the global energy watchdog found that new batteries totalling 42 gigawatts (GW) were plugged into electricity systems around the world last year, increasing total capacity by more than 130% from the year before to 85GW.

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Twenty-five years ago, peer-to-peer file-sharing took the Internet by storm.

The ability to search for and share content with complete strangers was nothing short of a revolution.

In the years that followed, media consumption swiftly moved online. This usually involved content shared without permission, but pirate pioneers ultimately paved the way for new business models.

The original ‘pirate’ ethos has long since gone. There are still plenty of unauthorized sites and services, but few today concern themselves with decentralization and similar technical advances; centralized streaming is the new king with money as the main motivator.

AI Meets BitTorrent

There are areas where innovation and technological progress still lead today, mostly centered around artificial intelligence. Every month, numerous new tools and services appear online, as developers embrace what many see as unlimited potential.

How these developments will shape the future is unknown, but they have many rightsholders spooked. Interestingly, an ‘old’ research group, that was already active during BitTorrent’s heyday, is now using AI to amplify its technology.

Researchers from the Tribler research group at Delft University of Technology have been working on their Tribler torrent client for nearly two decades . They decentralized search , removing the need for torrent sites, and implemented ‘ anonymity ‘ by adding an onion routing layer to file transfers.

Many millions of euros have been spent on the Tribler research project over the years. Its main goal is to advance decentralized technology, not to benefit corporations, but to empower the public at large.

“Our entire research portfolio is driven by idealism. We aim to remove power from companies, governments, and AI in order to shift all this power to self-sovereign citizens,” the Tribler team explains.

Decentralized AI-powered Search

While not every technological advancement has been broadly embraced, yet, Tribler has just released a new paper and a proof of concept which they see as a turning point for decentralized AI implementations; one that has a direct BitTorrent link.

The scientific paper proposes a new framework titled “De-DSI”, which stands for Decentralised Differentiable Search Index . Without going into technical details, this essentially combines decentralized large language models (LLMs), which can be stored by peers, with decentralized search.

This means that people can use decentralized AI-powered search to find content in a pool of information that’s stored across peers. For example, one can ask “find a magnet link for the Pirate Bay documentary,” which should return a magnet link for TPB-AFK, without mentioning it by name.

This entire process relies on information shared by users. There are no central servers involved at all, making it impossible for outsiders to control.

Endless Possibilities, Limited Use

While this sounds exciting, the current demo version is not yet built into the Tribler client. Associate Professor Dr. Johan Pouwelse, leader of the university’s Tribler Lab, explains that it’s just a proof of concept with a very limited dataset and AI capabilities.

“For this demo, we trained an end-to-end generative Transformer on a small dataset that comprises YouTube URLs, magnet links, and Bitcoin wallet addresses. Those identifiers are each annotated with a title and represent links to movie trailers, CC-licensed music, and BTC addresses of independent artists,” Pouwelse says.

We tried some basic searches with mixed results. That makes sense since there’s only limited content, but it can find magnet links and videos without directly naming the title. That said, it’s certainly not yet as powerful as other AI tools.

In essence, De-DSI operates by sharing the workload of training large language models on lists of document identifiers. Every peer in the network specializes in a subset of data, which other peers in the network can retrieve to come up with the best search result.

A Global Human Brain to Fight Torrent Spam and Censors

The proof of concept shows that the technology is sound. However, it will take some time before it’s integrated into the Tribler torrent client. The current goal is to have an experimental decentralized-AI version of Tribler ready at the end of the year.

While the researchers see this as a technological breakthrough, it doesn’t mean that things will improve for users right away. AI-powered search will be slower to start with and, if people know what they’re searching for, it offers little benefit.

Through trial and error, the researchers ultimately hope to improve things though, with a “global brain” for humanity as the ultimate goal.

Most torrent users are not looking for that, at the moment, but Pouwelse says that they could also use decentralized machine learning to fight spam, offer personal recommendations, and to optimize torrent metadata. These are concrete and usable use cases.

The main drive of the researchers is to make technology work for the public at large, without the need for large corporations or a central government to control it.

“The battle royale for Internet control is heating up,” Pouwelse says, in a Pirate Bay-esque fashion.

“Driven by our idealism we will iteratively take away their power and give it back to citizens. We started 18 years ago and will take decades more. We should not give up on fixing The Internet, just because it is hard.”

The very limited De-DSI proof of concept and all related code is available on Huggingface . All technological details are available in the associated paper . The latest Tribler version, which is fully decentralized without AI, can be found on the official project page .

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

TV journalist Scott Bryan looks back at the making of I Wanna Marry “Harry” – and the dubious ethics behind the show. Plus: five of the best podcasts hosted by pop stars

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The wild, format-pushing and often skin-crawling world of early 00s reality television has made for some brilliant retrospective podcast series in recent times.

There’s Something About Miriam was one of the most shocking examples, with its “six guys date the woman of their dreams and discover she is transgender” brief. Wondery’s gripping Harsh Reality revisited the murky series after its star Miriam Rivera was found dead a decade after filming.

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Tired of colonial artefacts being hoarded, Chidi Nwaubani and Ahmed Abokor use tech to redistribute them from museums in audacious digital heists

In March last year, two men in tracksuits, wearing hockey masks and carrying matching laundry bags, headed for the British Museum. Just outside, patrolling police asked the two strange-looking men where they were going. “We’re going to the British Museum to loot back stolen goods,” one of them said. “Well, we’ll see you in there then!” the policewoman answered.

But no arrests were made, as nothing incriminating happened. What did take place was a “digital heist” of one of the most famous objects in the British Museum, an artefact that is, according to Egyptologist Monica Hanna, “a symbol of western cultural power” and “of British imperialism”: the Rosetta Stone.

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Push to integrate AI into Meta products boosts financial results, with sales and profits beating analysts’ expectations

Meta’s drive to integrate artificial intelligence into its products yielded strong financial results for the second quarter in a row. But its share price slumped more than 12% as the company reported earnings Wednesday, as a weak sales forecast and higher spending guidance rattled investors.

Revenue at the world’s largest social media business increased 27% to $36.46bn during the first quarter in contrast to analyst expectations of $36.16bn. Earnings per share more than doubled to $4.71, surpassing expectations on Wall Street of $4.32.

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Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute closed this week in what Swedish-born philosopher says was ‘death by bureaucracy’

Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter.

The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Tesla chief Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book Superintelligence.

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