May 2026

The Ebola outbreak first reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Friday has seemingly escalated quickly into a large, uncontrolled multinational outbreak. As of May 17, there were 10 confirmed cases, 336 suspected cases, and 88 deaths in the DRC, as well as two confirmed cases and one death in neighboring Uganda, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has offices in the region. The numbers already put […]

Ver mais

An attempt to pressure Meta into removing a critical post from a Chicago Facebook group called “Are We Dating the Same Guy” may end in sanctions for lawyers whose takedown arguments appeared to rely on fake AI citations to support doxing claims. The case had already been dismissed with prejudice by a district court, which ruled there was no way to amend the complaint to possibly save it. But Nikko D’Ambrosio—who accused more than two dozen women of […]

Ver mais

Modern language models are trained on data with extremely uneven token distributions. A small number of words appear in almost every sentence, while many rare but meaningful tokens occur only occasionally. This creates a hidden optimization challenge: parameters associated with common tokens receive constant gradient updates, while parameters tied to rare tokens may go hundreds or thousands of steps without receiving any meaningful signal. Under standard Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), every parameter uses the same learning rate, so […]

Ver mais

NASA released a much-anticipated contract solicitation for a Mars-orbiting spacecraft late last week, kicking off what is sure to be a hotly contested and potentially controversial procurement. At issue is $700 million, already appropriated by Congress, to build a spacecraft, launch it to Mars, and once there to serve as a vehicle to relay communications between the red planet and Earth. But the stakes may be even bigger than this, including the possible resurrection of the recently canceled […]

Ver mais

If you moderate user-generated content at scale, you need a system that catches policy violations accurately without over-flagging legitimate posts. A moderation system that misses harmful content puts you at risk, while one that flags too aggressively frustrates your audience. Every organization defines its own policies, so a single classifier rarely works for every use case. In a previous post, we showed how to fine-tune Amazon Nova for content moderation tasks using Amazon SageMaker AI. Prompting requires no […]

Ver mais

A thousand years ago, the ancestors of today’s Barkindji people carefully buried a dingo (or garli, in the Barkindji language) in a mound of shells. Archaeologists recently studied the burial in what’s now New South Wales, Australia. They found that the Barkindji ancestors had buried the dingo with the same care and ceremony as any beloved human member of the community and looked after the grave for centuries. The burial reveals that dingoes were, as Australian Museum and […]

Ver mais