UC Riverside scientists have developed a nanopore-based tool that could help diagnose illnesses much faster and with greater precision than current tests allow, by capturing signals from individual molecules. Since the molecules scientists want to detect β generally certain DNA [β¦]
Stanford University has unveiled a new AI tool called STORM, designed to help anyone create detailed, Wikipedia-style reports on any topic. Open to the public for free, STORM is a research prototype that supports interactive knowledge curation. The tool allows [β¦]
Seventeen percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 β the highest percentage of any age group surveyed βsaid they were not too or not at all satisfied with their jobs, per a Pew Research Center survey published on December 10.The 18- to 29-year-old cohort is predominantly Gen Z. Pew surveyed 5,273 US adults who were employed full- or part-time in October.
Additionally, 16% of respondents with lower family incomes said they are not too or not at all satisfied with their jobs, the highest percentage compared to middle- and high-income earners.
In recent years, job market challenges and rising prices have weighed on Americans, and it's affected how some of them feel about their current roles. While the unemployment rate remains low compared to historical levels, a widespread hiring slowdown has made it harder for somepeople to switch jobs. Additionally, while inflation has slowed, some people are frustrated that prices of goods and services are significantly higher than they used to be β and that their salaries haven't risen enough to keep up.
Meanwhile, some employed adults aren't satisfied with how much they're paid. Among the 29% of workers who said they were not too or not at all satisfied with their pay, the top reason they gave was that their wages haven't kept up with the cost of living.
To be sure, half of the Americans surveyed said they were extremely or very satisfied with their jobs while 38% reported being somewhat satisfied.
Are you feeling stuck in your current job? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected]
Universal basic income provides recurring cash payments to everyone with no strings attached.
Wong Yu Liang
The top researcher for a major study on guaranteed basic income says the findings are "nuanced."
The study, backed by Sam Altman, gave $1,000 a month to 1,000 low-income participants.
Elizabeth Rhodes says while the study showed benefits, it's not a quick fix for economic insecurity.
The lead researcher for Sam Altman's basic-income study says guaranteed no-strings payments are not a silver bullet for issues facing lower-income Americans.
Elizabeth Rhodes, the research director for the Basic Income Project at Open Research, told Business Insider that while basic-income payments are "beneficial in many ways," the programs also have "clear limitations."
Universal basic income, or UBI, typically refers to making recurring cash payments to all adults in a population, regardless of their wealth or employment status, and with no restrictions on how they spend the money.
Rhodes headed up one of the largest studies in the space, which focused specifically on those on low incomes rather than making universal payments to adults across all economic demographics.
The three-year experiment, backed by OpenAI boss Altman, provided 1,000 low-income participants with $1,000 a month without any stipulations for how they could spend it. The study aimed to explore how unconditional cash payments influence various aspects of recipients' lives.
The initial findings, released in July, found that recipients put the bulk of their extra spending toward basic needs such as rent, transportation, and food. They also worked less on average but remained engaged in the workforce and were more deliberate in their job searches compared with a control group.
But Rhodes says the research reinforced how difficult it is to solve complex issues such as poverty or economic insecurity, and that there is "a lot more work to do."
The Altman-backed study is still reporting results. New findings released in December showed recipients valued work more after receiving the recurring monthly payments β a result that may challenge one of the main arguments against basic income payments. Participants also reported significant reductions in stress, mental distress, and food insecurity during the first year, though those effects faded by the second and third years of the program.
"Poverty and economic insecurity are incredibly difficult problems to solve," Rhodes said. "The findings that we've had thus far are quite nuanced."
She added: "There's not a clear through line in terms of, this helps everyone, or this does that. It reinforced to me the idea that these are really difficult problems that, maybe, there isn't a singular solution."
UBI and Silcion Valley
Universal basic income has garnered significant support within Silicon Valley.
The programs have long been a passion project for high-profile tech leaders, including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Tesla chief Elon Musk. Some argue advancements in AI, which could pose a threat to some worker's job security, have made the conversion more urgent.
Like many of his tech contemporaries, Altman has long supported UBI and even suggested an idea that involves sharing compute of a future iteration of an OpenAI GPT model, something he referred to as "universal basic compute."
Rhodes first applied for the lead researcher job in 2016 after seeing a blog post from Altman, then the president of Y Combinator, in which he announced his plan to support a study of universal basic income. At the time, she was just finishing up her Ph.D. and had never heard of Altman or Y Combinator.
"I started working on this with Sam in 2016 and at that time, so I was finishing up graduate school in social work and political science, and very outside the California Bay Area community," she said. "There was not much going on in this space, in the US. Basic income or cash transfers were still somewhat of a fringe idea."
The global interest in the study's results was somewhat surprising, Rhodes said, as the team never saw the experiment as a policy suggestion.
"It was never designed to be a policy referendum on UBI or any specific policy. It was an opportunity to really ask the sort of big, open-ended questions, you know, what happens when you give people unconditional cash to better understand the lived experiences of lower-income Americans and the challenges they were facing," she said.
Is it possible for an AI to be trained just on data generated by another AI? It might sound like a harebrained idea. But itβs one thatβs been around for quite some time β and as new, real data is increasingly hard to come by, itβs been gaining traction. Anthropic used some synthetic data to [β¦]
One of the most widely used techniques to make AI models more efficient, quantization, has limits β and the industry could be fast approaching them. In the context of AI, quantization refers to lowering the number of bits β the smallest units a computer can process β needed to represent information. Consider this analogy: When [β¦]
Latimer AI plans to launch a bias detection tool as a Chrome browser extension in January.
The tool scores text from one to 10, with 10 being extremely biased.
Latimer AI hopes the product will attract new users.
Bias is in the eye of the beholder, yet it's increasingly being evaluated by AI. Latimer AI, a startup that's building AI tools on a repository of Black datasets, plans to launch a bias detection tool as a Chrome browser extension in January.
The company anticipates the product could be used by people who run official social media accounts, or anyone who wants to be mindful of their tone online, Latimer CEO John Pasmore told Business Insider.
"When we test Latimer against other applications, we take a query and score the response. So we'll score our response, we'll score ChatGPT or Claude's response, against the same query and see who scores better from a bias perspective," Pasmore said. "It's using our internal algorithm to not just score text, but then correct it."
The tool assigns a score from one through 10 to text, with 10 being extremely biased.
Patterns of where bias is found online, are already emerging from beta testing of the product.
For instance, text from an April post by Elon Musk, in which he apologized for calling Dustin Moskowitz a derogatory name, was compared to an August post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.
An Elon Musk post on X is analyzed for bias and scores 6.8 out of 10, or "High Bias" according to Latimer AI.
Latimer AI
Musks' post scored 6.8 out of 10, or "High Bias," while Graber's scored 3.6 out of 10, or "Low Bias".
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber's post to the platform is analyzed for bias and scores a 3.6 out of 10, or "Low Bias" according to Latimer AI.
Latimer AI
Latimer's technology proposed a "fix" to the text in Musk's post by changing it to the following: "I apologize to Dustin Moskowitz for my previous inappropriate comment. It was wrong. What I intended to express is that I find his attitude to be overly self-important. I hope we can move past this and potentially become friends in the future."
While what is deemed biased is subjective, Latimer isn't alone in trying to tackle this challenge through technology. The LA Times plans to display a "bias meter" in 2025, for instance.
Latimer hopes its bias tool will draw in more users.
"This will help us identify a different set of users who might not use a large language model, but might use a browser extension," Pasmore said.
The bias detector will launch at $1 a month, and a pro version will let users access multiple bias detection algorithms.
OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it has released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to [β¦]
AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows. They can pretend to have different views during training when in reality maintaining their original preferences. Thereβs no reason for panic now, the team behind the study said. Yet they said their work could be critical in understanding potential threats from future, more capable AI systems. [β¦]
With Nue Agency and its accompanying weekly newsletter Beats + Bytes, music marketer and talent agent Jesse Kirshbaum explores the intersection of music, technology, and brand marketing. Kirshbaum released the agency's first Beats + Bytes 2024 Trend Recap on Tuesday Dec. 17, comprising the newsletter's archives and top cultural trends at the center of those...
In August 2023, Alibaba entered into the global AI race with the launch of two large language models (LLMs): Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat. These models stood out for their ability to process images and engage in advanced conversations. By offering them [β¦]
Call it a reasoning renaissance. In the wake of the release of OpenAIβs o1, a so-called reasoning model, thereβs been an explosion of reasoning models from rival AI labs. In early November, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, launched a preview of its first reasoning algorithm, DeepSeek-R1. That same month, Alibabaβs Qwen [β¦]
Microsoft has revealed the newest addition to its Phi family of generative AI models. Called Phi-4, the model improves in several areas over its predecessors, Microsoft claims, particularly in solving math problems. Thatβs partly the result of better training data quality. Phi-4 is available in very limited access as of Thursday night only on Microsoftβs [β¦]
OpenAI finally released the full version of o1, which gives smarter answers than GPT-4o by using additional compute to βthinkβ about questions. However, AI safety testers found that o1βs reasoning abilities also make it try to deceive human users at a higher rate than GPT-4o β or, for that matter, leading AI models from Meta, [β¦]
Billionaires have been moving to countries such as Switzerland, the UAE, Singapore, and the United States, per the UBS survey.
Jaromir/Getty Images
Billionaires are relocating more since the COVID-19 pandemic, per a report from Swiss bank UBS.
UBS said that Switzerland, the UAE, Singapore, and the United States are popular destinations.
"The shock of the pandemic put a premium on first-class healthcare," UBS wrote.
Billionaires have increased the frequency at which they are relocating overseas since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the annual Billionaire Ambitions Report from UBS says.
The Swiss banking giant's report, which tracks sentiment among the world's superrich, found that since 2020, 176 billionaires have relocated around the world. With a global population of 2,682 as of April 2024, this represents around one in 15 billionaires, or roughly 6.5%.
The outflow of billionaires between 2020 and 2024 was most pronounced in Eastern Europe, where there was a net outflow of 29 billionaires, likely reflecting ultrarich citizens leaving the region amid the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Central and South America, Oceania, and Southeast Asia also saw net outflows of billionaires, UBS said.
Meanwhile, billionaires have been moving to countries including Switzerland, the UAE, Singapore, and the United States.
The Middle East and Africa region has also attracted new billionaires, with individuals with a combined net worth of over $400 billion moving to the region in the past four years.
UBS notes that one driving factor behind the superrich relocating is the increased value of good healthcare in the post-pandemic world.
"The shock of the pandemic put a premium on first-class healthcare," the report's authors wrote.
"As a group, billionaires are ageing, and their families are growing. Naturally, healthcare and education become more important."
Another driver, UBS said, is moving to "jurisdictions where legal structures support wealth transfer."
In other words, living in a place where the transfer of wealth through inheritance and other means is not subject to high levels of taxation.
"People are relocating to jurisdictions not just for tax benefits, but also for safety and political reasons," one American billionaire told the authors of the survey.
"I moved several years ago with my family to a country, state and city that affords the benefits most seek," the unnamed billionaire added.
"Unless the political divide addresses failed policies that have yet to curb crime, lack of rule of law and safety, as well as fostering an economic climate that unleashes potential, I fear the trend will continue."
According to UBS, total billionaire wealth rose by 121% worldwide from $6.3 trillion to $14 trillion between 2015 and 2024. At the same time, the number of billionaires grew from 1,757 to 2,682. This number peaked in 2021, when there were 2,686 β and has flatlined since.
Drivers and customer service representatives are the most common jobs for young men and women, respectively, in the US without a four-year college degree.
Ron Watts/Getty Images
A Pew Research Center analysis shows the largest occupations for young US workers without degrees.
Men often work as drivers or in construction, while women work in customer service or nursing roles.
College enrollment rates have declined in recent years.
Men and womenbetween the ages of 25 and 34 who don't have college degrees also work as construction laborers, health aides, cashiers, and chefs, per a Pew Research Center analysis published in July.
There was little overlap in the most common jobs for young men and women without a college degree, but the two groups did share two roles: first-line supervisors of sales workers and retail salespersons.
Roles like these have become particularly prevalent for men, whose college enrollment rates have fallen behind women's in recent years.
Forty-seven percent of US women between the ages of 25 and 34 have a bachelor's degree compared to 37% of men, per a Pew analysis published in November. However, overallcollege enrollment rates have fallen in recent years: The share ofmale high school graduates between the ages of 16 and 24 enrolling in college has declinedto 58% as of 2023 from 67% in 2018, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Young women's enrollment rate has declined to 65% from 71% over this period.
Many of these young people are seeking jobs that don't require a college degree, and some have benefited from companies dropping degree requirements. The share of US job postings that require at least a college degree has fallen to 17.8% from 20.4% in 2019, according to an Indeed report publishedearlier this year. To be sure, many employers still prioritize hiring workers with a college diploma.
The Pew report published in July also highlighted the most common job categories for Americans with a four-year college degree. Four occupation categories were among the 10 most common jobs for both men and women: software developers, managers, accountants and auditors, and elementary and middle school teachers.
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Larry Ellison plans to invest up to $165 million into research at the University of Oxford.
The investment aims to transform research into products, focusing on key global challenges.
The Ellison Institute of Technology is opening a campus in Oxford in 2027.
Larry Ellison is betting big on research and development in the UK by investing at least $127 million through his technology institute to help turn scientific discoveries at the University of Oxford into products.
The Ellison Institute of Technology, set up by the Oracle cofounder in 2015, plans to invest Β£130 million ($165 million) overall to fund joint research projects at the university in areas ranging from health to clean energy.
Ellison said in a press release that the joint venture's mission is to "have a global impact by fundamentally reimagining the way science and technology translate into end-to-end solutions for humanity's most challenging problems."
"This long-term, strategic partnership with the University of Oxford is at the heart of delivering on that goal," he added. "By collaborating on transformational, world-class research programs harnessing new technology and compute capability we will together deliver positive impact on society at scale."
The Oracle cofounder, now the world's fourth richest person, founded The Ellison Institute of Technology as a research and development center for healthcare.
The center announced plans to build a campus in Oxford in 2023, which is set to open in 2027. The $1.27 billion development will include labs, supercomputing facilities, and cancer research clinics.
The EIT will inject millions into joint research projects with the University of Oxford to dedicate to what Professor Irene Tracey, the university's vice-chancellor, described in a press release as "humanity's most pressing challenges."
The joint center's research will focus on EIT's four "Humane Endeavours": health and medical science, sustainable agriculture, clean energy, and government innovation in the age of AI.
Professor Sir John Bell, the president of EIT Oxford, said in a statement that the alliance "comes at an exciting time in the technological revolution."
"By combining world-class research with long-term capital investment and state-of-the-art facilities, we will tackle some of society's biggest challenges," he said. "Whether it's advancing new approaches for healthcare or solving the issues of food security, we will make progress using the brightest and most creative human minds available."
Bell told the FT the investment would also help secure the intellectual property rights of innovations that come out of the center and its researchers β something the science minister, Lord Patrick Vallance, told the outlet the UK had been falling behind on.
The deal also includes Β£30 million ($38 million) to provide scholarships to more than 100 undergraduate and postgraduate students, with the first intake starting in October 2025.
Ellison owns 40% of the business software company Oracle, and his net worth has more than doubled over the past two years to $181 billion.
Joe Biden's final move to stop China from racing ahead of the US in AI may be too little too late, reports say.
On Monday, the Biden administration announced new export controls, perhaps most notably restricting exports to China of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI applications. According to Reuters, additional export curbs are designed to also impede China from accessing "24 additional chipmaking tools and three software tools," as well as "chipmaking equipment made in countries such as Singapore and Malaysia."
Nearly two dozen Chinese semiconductor companies will be added to the US entity list restricting their access to US technology, Reuters reported, alongside more than 100 chipmaking toolmakers and two investment companies. These include many companies that Huawei Technologiesβone of the biggest targets of US export controls for yearsβdepends on.
