Committee

Once again, it shows the importance of incorporating more domains beyond the traditional math and computer science into AI development.Read More

At Gamescom Latam, Roblox announced it has broken ground on a new data center in Brazil — slated to go live in early 2026.Read More

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A senior State Department official demanded records of communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between the staff of a small government office focused on online disinformation and a lengthy list of public and private figures—many of whom are longtime targets of the political right. The document, originally shared in person with roughly a dozen State Department employees in early March, requested staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation—including Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory—or have criticized President Donald Trump and his allies, such as the conservative anti-Trump commentator Bill Kristol.  The broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk. Read the full story. —Eileen Guo The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS. A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene editing. Not only did they succeed, but its pigs are now poised to enter the food chain following approval of the animals this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Read the full story. —Antonio Regalado This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly health and biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The US has closed a China tariff loopholeThe costs of plenty of goods are likely to shoot up in response. (NYT $)+ But China is still extremely dependent on US-made car chips. (WSJ $)+ Chinese retail giant Temu is pivoting its business model. (Bloomberg $)+ Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound. (MIT Technology Review) 2 DOGE’s future is looking uncertainIt’s fallen far short of its goal to slash $2 trillion in spending. (WP $)+ No more late-night ice cream for Elon Musk. (CNBC)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Microsoft is hiking the price of its Xbox games consoleBy a whopping 27% in the US. (The Guardian)+ Apple estimates that the tariffs will add $900 million to its costs. (WP $)+ But Apple isn’t announcing any price increases (yet.) (TechCrunch)+ Here’s what is—and isn’t—getting pricier under the tariffs. (Vox) 4 Tech giants have been accused of deliberately distorting AI rankingsA new study claims they’re making untrue claims about the best models. (New Scientist $)+ It accuses benchmark organisation LM Arena of unfair practices. (TechCrunch)+ The site’s operators refute the findings, saying its conclusions are wrong. (Ars Technica) 5 Europe wants to replicate America’s military-industrial complexAnd US contractors are likely to benefit. (WSJ $)+ US soldiers may finally be able to repair their own equipment. (404 Media)+ Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military. (MIT Technology Review) 6 Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI will move forwardA judge rejected OpenAI’s attempt to dismiss the case. (FT $) 7 What a post-4Chan internet looks likeWhat was once contained to a tiny corner of the web is now commonplace. (New Yorker $)+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review) 8 How North Korea infiltrates the USFully remote coders are not who they appear to be. (Wired $) 9 You no longer need a password to open a new Microsoft accountThe company’s gone passkey-first. (The Verge) 10 Fecal transplants are a possible way to treat gut disease And the approach is becoming more mainstream. (Undark)+ How bugs and chemicals in your poo could give away exactly what you’ve eaten. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “What about the next Taylor Swift?” —US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria questions how powerful musical AI tools will affect up-and-coming musicians during Meta’s copyright court battle, Wired reports. One more thing Your boss is watching Working today—whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car—can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-­ending consequences if your productivity flags. But what matters even more than the effects of this ubiquitous monitoring on privacy may be how all that data is shifting the relationships between workers and managers, companies and their workforce. We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power. Read the full story. —Rebecca Ackermann We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + This is cool: scientists have successfully triggered a lightning strike using a drone. + It’s the age-old question—why do so many men refuse to wear shorts in hot weather?+ The American accent that’s hardest for British actors to pull off seems to be either New York or Boston.+ Happy 50th birthday to David Beckham, best of British.

arXiv:2505.00367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive distortion refers to negative thinking patterns that can lead to mental health issues like depression and anxiety in adolescents. Previous studies using natural language processing (NLP) have focused mainly on small-scale adult datasets, with limited research on adolescents. This study introduces KoACD, the first large-scale dataset of cognitive distortions in Korean adolescents, containing 108,717 instances. We applied a multi-Large Language Model (LLM) negotiation method to refine distortion classification and generate synthetic data using two approaches: cognitive clarification for textual clarity and cognitive balancing for diverse distortion representation. Validation through LLMs and expert evaluations showed that while LLMs classified distortions with explicit markers, they struggled with context-dependent reasoning, where human evaluators demonstrated higher accuracy. KoACD aims to enhance future research on cognitive distortion detection.

arXiv:2504.19467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise for medical applications and are evolving rapidly, with new models being released at an accelerated pace. However, current evaluations of LLMs in clinical contexts remain limited. Most existing benchmarks rely on medical exam-style questions or PubMed-derived text, failing to capture the complexity of real-world electronic health record (EHR) data. Others focus narrowly on specific application scenarios, limiting their generalizability across broader clinical use. To address this gap, we present BRIDGE, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark comprising 87 tasks sourced from real-world clinical data sources across nine languages. We systematically evaluated 52 state-of-the-art LLMs (including DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o, Gemini, and Llama 4) under various inference strategies. With a total of 13,572 experiments, our results reveal substantial performance variation across model sizes, languages, natural language processing tasks, and clinical specialties. Notably, we demonstrate that open-source LLMs can achieve performance comparable to proprietary models, while medically fine-tuned LLMs based on older architectures often underperform versus updated general-purpose models. The BRIDGE and its corresponding leaderboard serve as a foundational resource and a unique reference for the development and evaluation of new LLMs in real-world clinical text understanding. The BRIDGE leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/YLab-Open/BRIDGE-Medical-Leaderboard

Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS. A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene editing. Not only did they succeed, but its pigs are now poised to enter the food chain following approval of the animals this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The pigs will join a very short list of gene-modified animals that you can eat. It’s a short list because such animals are expensive to create, face regulatory barriers, and don’t always pay off. For instance, the US took about 20 years to approve a transgenic salmon with an extra gene that let it grow faster. But by early this year its creator, AquaBounty, had sold off all its fish farms and had only four employees—none of them selling fish. Regulations have eased since then, especially around gene editing, which tinkers with an animal’s own DNA rather than adding to it from another species, as is the case with the salmon and many GMO crops. What’s certain is that the pig project was technically impressive and scientifically clever. Genus edited pig embryos to remove the receptor that the PRRS virus uses to enter cells. No receptor means no infection. According to Matt Culbertson, chief operating office of the Pig Improvement Company, a Genus subsidiary, the pigs appear entirely immune to more than 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus, although there is one rare subtype that may break through the protection. This project is scientifically similar to the work that led to the infamous CRISPR babies born in China in 2018. In that case a scientist named He Jiankui edited twin girls to be resistant to HIV, also by trying to remove a receptor gene when they were just embryos in a dish. That experiment on humans was widely decried as misguided. But pigs are a different story. The ethical concerns about experimenting are less serious, and the benefits of changing the genomes can be measured in dollars and cents. It’s going to save a lot of money if pigs are immune to the PRRS virus, which spreads quite easily, causing losses of $300 million a year or more in the US alone. Globally, people get animal protein mostly from chickens, with pigs and cattle in second and third place. A 2023 report estimated that pigs account for 34% of all meat that’s eaten. Of the billion pigs in the world, about half are in China; the US comes in a distant second, with 80 million. Recently, there’s been a lot of fairly silly news about genetically modified animals. A company called Colossal Biosciences used gene editing to modify wolves in ways it claimed made them resemble an extinct species, the dire wolf. And then there’s the L.A. Project, an effort run by biohackers who say they’ll make glow-in-the-dark rabbits and have a stretch goal of creating a horse with a horn—that’s right, a unicorn. Both those projects are more about showmanship than usefulness. But they’re demonstrations of the growing power scientists have to modify mammals, thanks principally to new gene-editing tools combined with DNA sequencing that lets them peer into animals’ DNA. Stopping viruses is a much better use of CRISPR. And research is ongoing to make pigs—as well as other livestock—invulnerable to other infections, including African swine fever and influenza. While PRRS doesn’t infect humans, pig and bird flus can. But if herds and flocks could be changed to resist those infections, that could cut the chances of the type of spillover that can occasionally cause dangerous pandemics.   There’s a chance the Genus pigs could turn out to be the most financially valuable genetically modified animal ever created—the first CRISPR hit product to reach the food system. After the approval, the company’s stock value jumped up by a couple of hundred million dollars on the London Stock Exchange. But there is still a way to go before gene-edited bacon appears on shelves in the US. Before it makes its sales pitch to pig farms, Genus says, it needs to also gain approval in Mexico, Canada, Japan and China which are big export markets for American pork. Culbertson says gene-edited pork could appear in the US market sometime next year. He says the company does not think pork chops or other meat will need to carry any label identifying it as bioengineered. “We aren’t aware of any labelling requirement,” Culbertson says. This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly health and biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here.

arXiv:2501.18265v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating the truthfulness of online content is critical for combating misinformation. This study examines the efficiency and effectiveness of crowdsourced truthfulness assessments through a comparative analysis of two approaches: one involving full-length webpages as evidence for each claim, and another using summaries for each evidence document generated with a large language model. Using an A/B testing setting, we engage a diverse pool of participants tasked with evaluating the truthfulness of statements under these conditions. Our analysis explores both the quality of assessments and the behavioral patterns of participants. The results reveal that relying on summarized evidence offers comparable accuracy and error metrics to the Standard modality while significantly improving efficiency. Workers in the Summary setting complete a significantly higher number of assessments, reducing task duration and costs. Additionally, the Summary modality maximizes internal agreement and maintains consistent reliance on and perceived usefulness of evidence, demonstrating its potential to streamline large-scale truthfulness evaluations.

arXiv:2505.00001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily trained on high-resource natural languages, limiting their effectiveness in low-resource settings and in tasks requiring deep logical reasoning. This research introduces Rosetta-PL, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ logical reasoning and generalization capabilities in a controlled environment. We construct Rosetta-PL by translating a dataset of logical propositions from Lean into a custom logical language, which is then used to fine-tune an LLM (e.g., GPT-4o). Our experiments analyze the impact of the size of the dataset and the translation methodology on the performance of the model. Our results indicate that preserving logical relationships in the translation process significantly boosts precision, with accuracy plateauing beyond roughly 20,000 training samples. These insights provide valuable guidelines for optimizing LLM training in formal reasoning tasks and improving performance in various low-resource language applications.