By Alexandra Alper and Karen Freifeld The Biden administration is considering closing a loophole that gives Chinese companies

In 2020, philosopher Toby Ord published The Precipice, a book on the risk of human extinction. The chances of "existential catastrophe" for humanity in the next century according to Ord? One in six. It was a shocking number that alarmed many. After years of being flooded with warnings over climate change, rogue AI, nuclear weapons and pandemics, it's hard to disagree that humans face worrying chances. In his book, Ord discusses a number of potential extinction events, some of which can be examined through history. His research involved looking at the number of space rocks that have hit the moon over its history to figure out the likelihood than an extinction-sized asteroid hitting Earth. This was, in fact, looked at in 2022 by French scientists Jean-Marc Salotti, he calculated the odds of an extinction-level hit in the next century to be roughly one in 300 million. By contrast, Ord estimated the risk to be one in a million, although he does point out a considerable degree of uncertainty. Probabilities can be hard to understand in this context. Traditional probability, for example, relies on observations and a collection of repeated events, but human extinction would be a one-off. But there is another way to think if, called Bayesianism, after the English statistician Thomas Bayes. It sees probabilities as a ranking system of sorts. Specific number predictions shouldn't be taken so literally, but rather compared to other probabilities to understand the likelihood of each outcome. Ord's book contains a table of potential causes of extinctions, accompanied by his personal estimates of their probability. From a Bayesian perspective, we can view these as relative ranks. Ord thinks extinction from an asteroid strike (one in a million) is much less likely than extinction from climate change (one in a thousand). However, even using Bayesianism traditionally requires the incorporation of observational evidence. So, what do we make of Ord's "one in six"? Well it's better to take it less literally but to think of it as a warning, to jump start action on issues such as climate change to hopefully reduce the risk of human extinction in the next century. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The stock market will need more than positive macroeconomic conditions to drive it to 10,000, DataTrek Research says.

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Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk now has a new artificial intelligence startup xAI, years after he left ChatGPT-owner OpenAI. The Twitter owner announced the “formation” of the new firm on Wednesday in a tweet, sharing that its goals are “to understand reality”. He did not reveal any more details about the company’s plans and the firms website also doesn’t say much other than that its aims are “to understand the true nature of the universe”. The startup, however, noted it is a separate entity from “X Corp” – the new name of the company formerly known as Twitter. However, the company mentions in its website that it would work closely with X Corp, Tesla, and firms owned by Mr Musk as well as other companies “to make progress towards our mission.” While xAI does not reveal a lot on its website about its “mission”, the new company’s sole Twitter post hints it would look into the “most fundamental unanswered questions” of the universe. The company’s website also reveals the names of its employees, led by Mr Musk and listing Dan Hendrycks – the director of the Centre for AI Safety – as an advisor. Employees listed with the company are all men, and people who have “previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.” “Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field,” xAI mentions in its website. “We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4,” the company noted about its employees. Mr Musk’s new venture also comes as companies including Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and even smaller firms and competitors in other countries like China continue to invest heavily in AI technology. The multibillionaire had previously co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the firm in 2018 to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla which had its own AI operations for the vehicles’ autopilot mode. Following the launch of the now popular ChatGPT AI chatbot by OpenAI, the Tesla titan had also hinted in interviews that he was planning to start his own new artificial intelligence firm. In April, he told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he planned to develop “TruthGPT,” which he called a “maximum truth-seeking AI”. This was followed by an xAI statement calling for the world to prioritise reducing AI’s dangers, signed by prominent members of the tech industry, and Mr Musk also reportedly acquired thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia seemingly to run a large language model like ChatGPT. The xAI team is planning to host a Twitter Spaces discussion on Friday – one in which listeners can “meet the team and ask us questions,” according to the startup’s website. Read More Elon Musk posts series of explicit tweets about Mark Zuckerberg Twitter gets strange endorsement from Taliban over rival Threads Tucker Carlson’s Twitter show is haemorrhaging viewers, reports says Mark Zuckerberg trains with UFC champions amid rumours of Elon Musk fight Threads: Elon Musk posts series of explicit tweets about Mark Zuckerberg Twitter traffic ‘tanking’ after record-breaking Threads launch

MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 14, 2023--

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President Joe Biden spoke on Monday to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a 2024 challenger, to tell him he