Weather forecasters are having an AI moment

Big Tech’s arrival on the weather forecasting scene isn’t based solely on scientific curiositycalculates Oliver Fuhrer, head of the numerical forecasting department of MeteoSwiss, the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology.

Our economies are becoming increasingly weather-dependent, especially with the rise of renewable energy, Fuhrer says. The tech companies’ businesses are also tied to the weather, he adds, pointing to everything from logistics to the number of search queries for ice cream.

The field of weather forecasting could gain a lot from the addition of artificial intelligence. Countries track and record weather data, which means there is a lot of publicly available data to use to train AI models. When combined with human experience, AI could help speed up a painstaking process. The future is unclear, but the prospects are exciting. “Part of it is also just exploring the space and understanding what the potential services or business models might be,” says Fuhrer.

Deeper learning

AI text detection tools are really easy to fool

Within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch, there were fears that students would be using the chatbot to create passable essays in seconds. In response to these fears, startups have started making products that promise to detect whether text is written by a human or a machine. It turns out that it is relatively easy to fool these tools and avoid detection.

Snake Oil Alarm: I wrote about how It is difficult, if not impossible, to detect AI-generated text. As my colleague Rhiannon Williams reports, new research has found that most tools that claim to be able to locate such text malfunction. The researchers tested 14 detection tools and found that while they were good at spotting human-written text (with 96% accuracy on average), this dropped to 74% for AI-generated text, and even less, at 42%, when that text had been slightly retouched. to know more.

Bits and bytes

AI companies are facing a flood of privacy and copyright lawsuits
What America lacks in AI regulation, it makes up for in multimillion-dollar lawsuits. In late June, a California law firm launched a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the company violated the privacy of millions of people when it harvested data from the internet to train its model. Now, actor and comedian Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for scraping his copyrighted work into their AI models. These cases, along with existing ones copyright lawsuits by artistscould set an important precedent for the development of AI in the United States.

OpenAI introduced a new concept: “superalignment”
It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s super-aligned! OpenAI is assembling a team of researchers to work on ‘superintelligence alignment’. This means they will focus on solving the technical challenges that would be involved in controlling AI systems that are smarter than humans.