Enlarge / ASIC evaluators found AI summaries were often "wordy and pointless—just repeating what was in the submission." (credit: Getty Images)

As large language models have continued to rise in prominence, many users and companies have focused on their useful ability to quickly summarize lengthy documents for easier human consumption. When Australia's Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) looked into this potential use case, though, it found that the summaries it was able to get from the Llama2-70B model were judged as significantly worse than those provided by humans.

ASIC's proof-of-concept study (PDF)—which was run in January and February, written up in March, and published in response to a Senate inquiry in May—has a number of limitations that make it hard to generalize about the summarizing capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs in the present day. Still, the government study shows many of the potential pitfalls large organizations should consider before simply inserting LLM outputs into existing workflows.

Keeping score

For its study, ASIC teamed up with Amazon Web Services to evaluate LLMs' ability to summarize "a sample of public submissions made to an external Parliamentary Joint Committee inquiry, looking into audit and consultancy firms." For ASIC's purposes, a good summary of one of these submissions would highlight any mention of ASIC, any recommendations for avoiding conflicts of interest, and any calls for more regulation, all with references to page numbers and "brief context" for explanation.

Enlarge (credit: BING-JHEN HONG | iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus )

The Department of Justice is reportedly deepening its probe into Nvidia . Officials have moved on from merely questioning competitors to subpoenaing Nvidia and other tech companies for evidence that could substantiate allegations that Nvidia is abusing its "dominant position in AI computing," Bloomberg reported .

When news of the DOJ's probe into the trillion-dollar company was first reported in June, Fast Company reported that scrutiny was intensifying merely because Nvidia was estimated to control "as much as 90 percent of the market for chips" capable of powering AI models. Experts told Fast Company that the DOJ probe might even be good for Nvidia's business, noting that the market barely moved when the probe was first announced.

But the market's confidence seemed to be shaken a little more on Tuesday, when Nvidia lost a "record-setting $279 billion" in market value following Bloomberg's report. Nvidia's losses became "the biggest single-day market-cap decline on record," TheStreet reported .

Enlarge / A ratgdo, version 2.53i. (credit: Ratcloud LLC )

I live in suburbia, which means I've got a garage (or a carhole , if you’re not so fancy). It's a detached garage, so part of my nightly routine when I check to make sure the house is all locked up is to peek out the back window. I like to know the garage door is closed and our cars are tucked in safely.

But actually looking out a window with my stupid analog eyeballs is lame, so I figured I could make things easier by adding some smarts to my garage. The first thing I did was use this fellow’s instructions (the original site is sadly offline, but the Wayback Machine is forever) to cobble together a Raspberry Pi-based solution that would fire off an email every time the garage door opened or closed. I couldn’t remotely open or close the door from inside the house myself (well, I mean, I could with the actual garage door opener remote control), but I could just glance at my inbox to see if the garage door was open or shut in the evenings.

This worked great for a couple of years, until Texas summers murdered the poor Pi. (This was possibly my fault, too, because of the PoE hat that I’d slapped onto the Pi, which resulted in extra heat.) So, I was back to peeking out my window to check on the garage in the evenings. Like a sucker.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that all dogs love to play fetch, while most cats would simply refuse to do so. But a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE suggests that cats not only play fetch with their owners, they do so far more frequently than previously believed. And while most dogs play fetch at least sometimes, about 12 percent do not. More-trainable dog breeds are more likely to exhibit fetching behavior, while in both species, animals that are more active and playful—and usually male—are more likely to enjoy playing fetch, suggesting that it is a form of play.

"We were surprised to find that there were very few studies of fetching behavior in dogs," said co-author Mikel Delgado, a veterinary medicine researcher at Purdue University. "And personally, as a life-long cat person, I have to admit that I thought all dogs fetched. So it was interesting to get a better sense of how common this behavior is in cats and dogs. We hope that the study draws more attention to fetching behavior in cats, who are often portrayed as independent and aloof. In fact, they can be very social, and this is a nice example of one way they are interactive with humans."

As previously reported , many different animal species exhibit play behavior, and it's most common in mammals and birds. Contrary to what one might expect from cats, fetching behavior has been observed across multiple cat breeds all over the world, usually emerging in kittenhood. One owner who participated in a 2022 study noted that their cat was so obsessed with fetch that it would sometimes drop its favorite toy on their face in the middle of the night.

Enlarge / Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI Chief Scientist, speaks at Tel Aviv University on June 5, 2023. (credit: JACK GUEZ via Getty Images )

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a new AI startup cofounded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in funding. The three-month-old company plans to focus on developing what it calls "safe" AI systems that surpass human capabilities.

The fundraising effort shows that even amid growing skepticism around massive investments in AI tech that so far have failed to be profitable, some backers are still willing to place large bets on high-profile talent in foundational AI research. Venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel participated in the SSI funding round.

SSI aims to use the new funds for computing power and attracting talent. With only 10 employees at the moment, the company intends to build a larger team of researchers across locations in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, Reuters reported.

Enlarge / Following the 2022 Hunga volcano eruption, a nearby hydrothermal vent was seen coated with a white mat of bacteria and surrounded by a thick layer of ash. The vent usually supports animal life that survives using chemical energy from the vent fluid, but those creatures were almost entirely wiped out. (credit: Beinart, et. al. )

In January 2022, a placid patch of the ocean’s surface near the islands of Tonga suddenly exploded with activity. After a month or so of activity, an underwater eruption of unprecedented scale from the Hunga volcano blasted ash up through the water column and more than 30 miles into the air , where it quickly spread out in a billowing plume spanning hundreds of miles.

The blast was so powerful that it rang Earth like a bell; it produced a shockwave that circled the globe multiple times and released a sonic boom heard as far away as Alaska. The eruption also triggered a tsunami that affected coastlines across the Pacific Ocean and made waves recorded in Japan, North and South America, and Antarctica.

Quite by surprise, scientists discovered that the eruption also had an underwater aftermath, recently described in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment .

Enlarge / There are different types of Space Marines. Some of them are traitors. All of them weigh as much as a Fiat 500.

If you had given me, at age 15 or so, a game in which you can fight seemingly hundreds of Tyranid bugs at once with two friends, alternately blasting them with bolt rifles or pulverizing them with a chainsword, then finishing the biggest of them by ripping off one of his claws and shoving it through his head, all of it happening to the sounds of action-movie orchestration and dialogue about stoic duty, would I have had any complaints?

No, I would not. But we're spoiled for choice now. How much you enjoy Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 (for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation and releasing on September 9) will depend on your ability to tap into the deep basement of your kill-'em-all mentality and fantasy lore engagement. You can enjoy it somewhat ironically, which I did at times, especially when playing co-op with friends who told me that they did not like the game's aesthetics at all. But strip away the grimdark trappings of zealotry, Chaos Marines, and skulls—so, so many skulls—and you have a competent, sometimes innovative third-person squad shooter. It feels like Gears of War , minus the cover, but with heavier characters, more melee combat, and somehow even fewer women.

Getting the most out of Space Marine 2 means suspending disbelief, feeling heavy metal, and wanting to kill a whole bunch of things with some very big dudes. In roughly a dozen hours of gameplay, I found the core gameplay loop relatively engaging, with enough mix-ups, upgrades, and challenges to keep it feeling more like the fun kind of endless war, not the real kind. It's pretty enjoyable to team up with friends, too, so long as they're cool with Warhammer 40K's vibes and some occasionally repetitive challenges.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Starlink said it is complying with Brazil's order to block Elon Musk's X platform, backtracking from its earlier position that it would not block X until Brazilian officials released Starlink's frozen assets. In an update on Tuesday afternoon , Starlink said it is blocking X while continuing to fight the asset freeze in court.

"Following last week's order from [Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes] that froze Starlink's finances and prevents Starlink from conducting financial transactions in Brazil, we immediately initiated legal proceedings in the Brazilian Supreme Court explaining the gross illegality of this order and asking the Court to unfreeze our assets," SpaceX's satellite broadband division said. "Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing of our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil. We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre's recent orders violate the Brazilian constitution."

Starlink previously said that a Brazilian court order froze its assets "based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied—unconstitutionally—against X." An Associated Press article said that "de Moraes froze Starlink's accounts last week as a means to compel it to cover X's fines that already exceeded $3 million, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group."

Enlarge / View of the Las Gobas cave site. (credit: Miguel Sotomayor via Getty )

In a new study , we have sequenced DNA from a Christian community in medieval Spain that lived in artificial caves carved into a rocky outcrop.

This is one of several medieval cave communities known to have lived on the Iberian Peninsula—which includes both Portugal and Spain. Why these groups favored caves over more conventional village dwellings is a subject of longstanding debate for archaeologists. While it may be tempting to speculate about hermits or religious groups, there’s scant evidence to support such theories.

Our study, published in Science Advances, explores the possibilities, adding genetic analysis to what we know about the physical remains of people from the site’s cemetery. DNA was able to shed light on the ancestry of this community, their relationships to each other and the diseases that afflicted them.