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Tag: MIT Technology Review

  • YouTube Makes a Play to Poach TikTok Creators

    YouTube Makes a Play to Poach TikTok Creators

    YouTube is ponying up cash in an effort to convince TikTok creators to jump ship to its platform.

    TikTok has made countless careers, with creators capitalizing on the platform’s short-form videos to gain fame. Unfortunately, the platform is notorious for paying its creators a paltry amount, compared to competitors, less than a nickel per thousand views, according to the MIT Technology Review.

    YouTube clearly sees an opportunity and has announced plans to split revenue with creators for YouTube Shorts. Creators will receive 45%, while the record labels behind the music that is often featured in such videos will receive the remaining amount.

    “​​It’s a really big moment for creators,” Amjad Hanif, YouTube’s vice president of product management, told The Washington Post. “When we launched the partner program 15 years ago, it was the first of its kind and kicked off the creator economy. This brings all the goodness and benefits creators have felt from revenue sharing and brings it over to short form as well.”

    While the 45% revenue split is generating a ton of excitement within the creator community, YouTube has yet to reveal how much that will amount to.

  • Norway Discontinues Contact Tracing App Over Privacy Concerns

    Norway Discontinues Contact Tracing App Over Privacy Concerns

    Norway has decided to halt its coronavirus contact tracing app efforts amid privacy concerns.

    Contact tracing has been touted as one of the key weapons in the war on COVID-19. Countries around the world have opted to use different types of tracing apps, with many basing their efforts on the privacy-focused API developed by Apple and Google. Norway, on the other hand, is not one of those countries, choosing to develop its own app that did not win any marks for privacy.

    With new cases plateaued for the last month, however, it appears that Norway has decided the privacy risks are not worth the minimal benefit the country is currently seeing. Officials have decided to stop collecting data, delete existing data and stop work on the app indefinitely.

    According to the MIT Technology Review, however, not everyone is in agreement. Specifically, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) believes the move is a mistake.

    “With this, we weaken an important part of our preparedness for increased spread of infection, because we lose time in developing and testing the app,” said NIPH director Camilla Stoltenberg. “At the same time, we have a reduced ability to fight the spread of infection that is ongoing. The pandemic is not over. We have no immunity in the population, no vaccine, and no effective treatment. Without the Smittestopp app, we will be less equipped to prevent new outbreaks that may occur locally or nationally.”

    This is just the latest in the privacy tightrope companies and countries alike are trying to walk as they battle the spread of the virus.

  • Elon Musk Believes AI Development Should Be Regulated, Even Tesla’s

    Elon Musk Believes AI Development Should Be Regulated, Even Tesla’s

    Elon Musk, a long-time critic of AI, has come out in favor of government regulation of AI development, including at his own company.

    While many working on AI believe it is the key to solving countless world problems, there are just as many who are convinced the technology will create far more problems than it solves, perhaps even bringing about the downfall of humanity. Musk has tended to be in the latter camp, even being quoted as saying “I have exposure to the most cutting-edge AI and I think people should be really concerned about it. I keep sounding the alarm bell but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal.”

    That concern didn’t stop Musk from co-founding OpenAI, dedicated to the ongoing development of the technology, however. In fact, Musk’s concerns were one of the driving motivations, as he believed the technology needed responsible development, as opposed to being left in the hands of just a few companies—such as Google and Facebook—who have poor track records protecting user privacy.

    Now, in response to a piece by Karen Hao in the MIT Technology Review that covers “OpenAI’s bid to save the world,” Elon Musk has tweeted his support of AI regulation.

    All orgs developing advanced AI should be regulated, including Tesla

    — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2020

    When a user asked whether that regulation should be enacted by local governments or on a global scale, Musk replied “both.”

  • Ransomware Responsible For $7.5 Billion Hit On Economy In 2019

    Ransomware Responsible For $7.5 Billion Hit On Economy In 2019

    The MIT Technology Review is reporting that ransomware may have cost the U.S. economy as much as $7.5 billion in 2019.

    Ransomware is a kind of computer malware that encrypts or locks out a system until the owner pays a ransom to the malware creator. In the last couple of years, ransomware has become big business for cyber criminals, as the risk/reward proposition is very favorable. Target the right type of organization—such as one in a fast-moving industry, one where lives are on the line or a government institution—and the target may have very little recourse other than to pay to get back up and running as quickly as possible.

    As the report highlights, governments, both local and national, as well as public institutions increasingly became targets. The cities of New Orleans and Baltimore were both hit in 2019, not to mention a U.S. Coast Guard base.

    These targets are often chosen because of a lax approach to security, especially on the state level. Here’s to hoping 2020 is the year governments, corporations and individuals alike put cybersecurity first.

  • Baidu Takes AI Crown, Achieves New Level of Language Understanding

    Baidu Takes AI Crown, Achieves New Level of Language Understanding

    The ability to talk with an artificial intelligence (AI), be it a computer or robot, has been a staple of science fiction for decades. Despite modern advances, anyone who has used Siri, Alexa, Cortana or the Google Assistant knows we’re still a ways off from what’s portrayed in science fiction.

    Chinese tech giant Baidu has just taken a big step in that direction, however. According to the MIT Technology Review, Baidu has leapfrogged Microsoft and Google in helping AI better understand language.

    General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) is the industry benchmark used to gauge an AI’s language comprehension skills. For perspective, most humans manage a score of 87 out of 100. Baidu’s model, however, scored a 90—a first for AI models.

    The team attributed their breakthrough with ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration) to the steps they needed to take in order to help it understand Chinese. The most advanced AI language models use a technique called “masking,” where the AI randomly hides words in order to predict the meaning of the sentence. Because of the differences between Chinese and English, Baidu “researchers trained ERNIE on a new version of masking that hides strings of characters rather than single ones. They also trained it to distinguish between meaningful and random strings so it could mask the right character combinations accordingly.”

    Not only did this method allow ERNIE to better understand Chinese language, but those lessons also improved its English processing, enabling it to achieve the highest GLUE score yet. Hopefully, this breakthrough will help pave the way for the type of AI interactions that have, so far, existed only in the realm of science fiction.