AI chatbot is officially hacked

Hello! Today, we are covering:

👉 Potential US government shutdown 

👉 AI can easily be tricked

👉 Interesting AI features are coming to Instagram

and many more!

Today’s issue is a 4.9-minute read.

📧 Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe here for free to get more of these everyday!

Quote of the day

“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around”

Willie Nelson

Must Know

Google is so back in the AI game

🤖 Google has launched a new AI model called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, designed to enhance reasoning capabilities and compete with OpenAI's o1 model. This experimental model is available on Google's AI Studio platform and aims to provide deeper thinking on complex problems by using self-checking mechanisms.

🧐 However, early tests have shown some accuracy issues, such as miscounting letters in words. The Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model pauses to consider multiple prompts before delivering an answer, which can take longer than traditional models. Google DeepMind's chief scientist, Jeff Dean, noted that this approach allows the model to explain its thought process, potentially leading to better results.

Apparently AI can easily be tricked

📃 Anthropic, the creator of Claude chatbot, has released new research showing that it is still relatively easy to manipulate large language models (LLMs) to generate harmful content. In collaboration with researchers from Oxford and Stanford, they developed a technique called Best-of-N (BoN) Jailbreaking.

This method uses a simple algorithm to bypass the safety measures in advanced AI systems like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude 3.5. The BoN Jailbreaking technique works by tweaking prompts through random alterations, such as changing capitalization (LIke tHiS) or shuffling words, until the model provides a harmful response.

The researchers achieved over a 50% success rate in getting these models to respond to dangerous queries. They also found that similar techniques could be applied to speech and image prompts, demonstrating the versatility of this approach.

Will US government shutdown?

👨‍⚖️ A potential U.S. government shutdown is approaching after the House of Representatives rejected a spending bill backed by Donald Trump. The bill failed to pass due to opposition from 38 Republicans who joined Democrats in voting against it. If Congress does not reach an agreement by midnight on Friday, many federal services will begin shutting down.

The situation stems from Trump's criticism of a bipartisan funding deal that House Speaker Mike Johnson had negotiated. Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk urged Republicans to oppose the existing plan, leading to its downfall.

Essential services, such as border protection and law enforcement, will continue during a shutdown, but non-essential services like food assistance and national parks will be affected.

⚡Speed-Round: The Most Impactful Stories

Apple has teamed up with NVIDIA to enhance the speed of text generation in large language models (LLMs) using a new technique called Recurrent Drafter (ReDrafter). This method achieves a 3x increase in the speed of generating tokens. By integrating ReDrafter into NVIDIA's TensorRT-LLM framework, developers can now run LLMs faster and more efficiently on NVIDIA GPUs, reducing both latency and power consumption for AI applications.

A malicious Android spyware app named BMI CalculationVsn was discovered on the Amazon Appstore, posing as a health tool while secretly stealing data. Found by McAfee Labs, it has since been removed, but users must manually uninstall it and scan for remnants. The app records screens and collects SMS messages, including sensitive information like one-time passwords.

Top-levels

Markets & Business

• 📉 Shares of Novo Nordisk, Danish pharmaceutical giant, slipped more than 24% due to reported disappointing results in a late-stage trial for its experimental CagriSema weight loss drug that missed expectations.

• 🥤 Workers United, representing Starbucks baristas, has announced a five-day strike starting Friday in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle due to stalled contract negotiations and unfair labor practices, with plans for the strike to potentially expand nationwide by Christmas Eve.

• ⚡🚗 Tesla recalls nearly 700,000 vehicles in US over tire pressure monitoring system issue. The issue, affecting some Model 3, Model Y and Cybertruck vehicles, will be resolved with an over-the-air software update.

Science & Tech News

• 📱 Instagram has plans to launch generative AI features that will allow creators to “change nearly any aspect” of their videos using only text prompts. For example, users can add a snowy background to the original video or completely transform it and make it animated.

• Odyssey, an American AI startup, is developing an AI-powered tool called "Explorer" that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. This could be beneficial to film and gaming industries.

• 🤖🖥 A large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system that lets robots practice tasks in simulated reality 430,000 times faster than in the real world.

Did You Know?

💰 1 out of 5 people in the world (1.1 billion people) live on less than $1 per day.

🐮 It's possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs.

📞 More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

Thank you for staying with us like always! If you are not subscribed, subscribe here for free to get more of these emails in your inbox! Cheers!