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- The Know Daily - Wednesday 1 November 2023
The Know Daily - Wednesday 1 November 2023
🤖 The UK’s AI safety summit, the power of hot yoga + rail ticket offices to stay.
Read in 5m 34s ∙ Listening to Taylor Swift
Our latest giveaway - a three-night stay in a digital detox cabin with Unplugged - closes at midnight tonight. You’ve been automatically entered just by being a reader, but you can get five extra entries by becoming a friend of The Know. 👉 Click here to join us today! 👈
🤖 AI summit: Around 100 world leaders, tech experts and academics are meeting in the UK today and tomorrow to discuss safety in artificial intelligence.
🧘 And, breathe…: Hot yoga can significantly reduce symptoms of depression, a new clinical trial has found.
🚂 Government U-turn: Cost-cutting plans to close almost all of England’s remaining rail ticket offices have been scrapped, following a backlash.
A teenager from Virginia has been named “America’s top young scientist” after developing an affordable bar of soap that could be useful in the treatment of skin cancer. Heman Bekele, 14, says he wants to help “as many people as possible” - and his incredible soap, which delivers cancer-fighting drugs via lipid nanoparticles, will hopefully do just that. 👏
This is Heman Bekele.
He was just named America's top young scientist after he invented a bar of soap that can treat skin cancer. It costs just 50 cents, and he plans to create a non-profit to distribute it to communities in need.
He's only 14.
— Goodable (@Goodable)
4:22 PM • Oct 25, 2023
🤖 The UK’s AI safety summit
Today and tomorrow, around 100 world leaders, tech experts and academics are gathering in the UK for a landmark summit on safety in artificial intelligence (AI).
What’s on the agenda?
The AI Safety Summit, convened by UK PM Rishi Sunak, is taking place at Bletchley Park, the home of Second World War codebreakers.
Discussions will be aimed at minimising the risks of AI, with a specific focus on so-called “frontier AI” systems, which do not yet exist but may do soon. “The main concern is the future”, said The Guardian. “How can [AI] be tested and monitored to ensure they do not cause harm?”
Who’s going?
High-profile attendees include US Vice President Kamala Harris and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. But other world leaders - including French President Emmanuel Macron - declined to attend, with Downing Street saying on Monday that this did not count as a “snub” to the PM.
ChatGPT founder Sam Altman and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk have also jetted in for the summit, with the Twitter/X owner set to take part in a live interview with Sunak on Thursday evening.
How has the summit been received?
Some experts feel that the specific risks that the summit is focusing on - such as bio-terrorism and advanced AI controlling itself - are “pretty extreme”, said the BBC’s technology editor Zoe Kleinman.
Instead, they have argued that the summit should be focusing on more immediate problems. “We’re concerned about what’s going to happen to our jobs, what's going to happen to our news,” one expert told Kleinman.
What’s the overall aim?
“The main objective [...] is to find some level of international coordination when it comes to agreeing some principles on the ethical and responsible development of AI models,” said CNBC.
Sunak intends for today’s meeting to be the first in a series of international AI summits - and the motivation could also be personal, said The Guardian’s Chris Stokel-Walker. “Sunak appears to want progress on AI to become his lasting legacy,” he wrote.
🙋♀️ TRIVIA TIME
Sweden’s tourist board has launched a new campaign aimed at explaining what to tourists?
A) That not everyone in Sweden drives a Volvo
B) That Sweden is not the same country as Switzerland
C) That not all Swedes love ABBA
Scroll to the very bottom for the answer.
Reply