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Lex Fridman Podcast 2026-01-31 22:17 UTC Score 34.0 AI-137-20260131-podcasts-and-bb3679c1 Full article

Transcript for State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #490

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #490 with Nathan Lambert & Sebastian Raschka. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links: Go back to this episode’s main page Watch the full YouTube version of the podcast Table of Contents Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation. Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript: 0:00 – Introduction 1:57 – China vs US: Who wins the AI

TWIML AI Podcast 2026-01-29 21:48 UTC Score 37.0 AI-148-20260129-podcasts-and-4af0356b Full article

The Evolution of Reasoning in Small Language Models with Yejin Choi - #761

Today, we're joined by Yejin Choi, professor and senior fellow at Stanford University in the Computer Science Department and the Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). In this conversation, we explore Yejin’s recent work on making small language models reason more effectively. We discuss how high-quality, diverse data plays a central role in closing the intelligence gap between small and large models, and how combining synthetic data generation, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning can unlock stronger reasoning capabilities in smaller models. Yejin explains the risks of homogeneity in model outputs and mode collapse highlighted in her “Artificial Hivemind” paper, and its impacts on human creativity and knowledge. We also discuss her team's novel approaches, including reinforcement learning as a pre-training objective, where models are incentivized to “think” before predicting the next token, and "Prismatic Synthesis," a gradient-based method for generating diverse synthetic math data while filtering overrepresented examples. Additionally, we cover the societal implications of AI and the concept of pluralistic alignment—ensuring AI reflects the diverse norms and values of humanity. Finally, Yejin shares her mission to democratize AI beyond large organizations and offers her predictions for the coming year. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/761.

Consultancy.lat AI & GenAI 2026-01-29 16:43 UTC Score 26.0 AI-177-20260129-regional-ai--25edf449

Leadership in AI depends on energy, not on chips

Leadership in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) will in the coming years increasingly depend on energy, instead of the current focus on chips, writes Alfonso Velazquez, Head of Data and AI at Kyndryl.

Consultancy.lat AI & GenAI 2026-01-29 16:42 UTC Score 18.0 AI-177-20260129-regional-ai--246f8685

Mauricio Torres Echenagucia (IBM) shares AI trends to watch in 2026

Over the past year, artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated headlines and rapidly scaled across the business landscape. This year, the technology is set to move beyond hype to deliver measurable business impact, writes Mauricio Torres Echenagucia, General Manager of Mexico at IBM.

Consultancy.lat AI & GenAI 2026-01-29 16:41 UTC Score 15.0 AI-177-20260129-regional-ai--e23b24c2

Mexico’s supply chains and trade logistics: Navigating tariffs and USMCA

As Mexico enters 2026, supply chain and logistics leaders are navigating the most complex trade environment the region has faced in over a decade. Rising tariff uncertainty, evolving US trade policy, and the upcoming USMCA review are no longer abstract geopolitical discussions; they are operational realities with direct impact on cost, service levels, network design, and strategic decision-making.

GitHub Engineering 2026-01-28 17:00 UTC Score 31.0 USR-0062-20260128-ai-specialis-9f24a538 Full article

From pixels to characters: The engineering behind GitHub Copilot CLI’s animated ASCII banner

Learn how GitHub built an accessible, multi-terminal-safe ASCII animation for the Copilot CLI using custom tooling, ANSI color roles, and advanced terminal engineering. The post From pixels to characters: The engineering behind GitHub Copilot CLI’s animated ASCII banner appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

Consultancy.lat AI & GenAI 2026-01-27 15:09 UTC Score 15.0 AI-177-20260127-regional-ai--c4e283af

Integration Consulting appoints Carolina Flores as partner in Brazil office

Integration Consulting, a Brazil-headquartered management consultancy with offices worldwide, has announced the appointment of Carolina Flores as partner. She becomes the firm’s 13th partner. Now in her 15th year at Integration Consulting, Carolina Flores leads complex projects for major Brazilian companies across retail, consumer goods, healthcare and financial services.

Practical AI Podcast 2026-01-27 13:58 UTC Score 34.0 AI-143-20260127-podcasts-and-62a93cfc Full article

How is AI shaping democracy?

As AI increasingly shapes geopolitics, elections, and civic life, its impact on democracy is becoming impossible to ignore. In this episode, Daniel and Chris are joined by security expert Bruce Schneier to explore how AI and technology are transforming democracy, governance, and citizenship. Drawing from his book Rewiring Democracy , they explore real examples of AI in elections, legislation, courts, and public AI models, the risks of concentrated power, and how these tools can both strengthen and strain democratic systems worldwide. Featuring: Bruce Schneier – X Chris Benson – Website , LinkedIn , Bluesky , GitHub , X Daniel Whitenack – Website , GitHub , X Links: Schneier on Security Sponsors: Framer - The website builder that turns your dot com from a formality into a tool for growth. Check it out at framer.com/PRACTICALAI Zapier - The AI orchestration platform that puts AI to work across your company. Check it out at zapier.com/practical Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here !

AI Expo Africa 2026-01-26 10:17 UTC Score 23.0 USR-0194-20260126-regional-new-69151b30 Full article

Inurgural ITU AI for Good Impact Africa Event in Partnership with AI Expo Africa Delivers Success

AI for Good Impact Africa, our second regional event brought together innovators, policymakers, startups, and youth from across the continent for the transformative week of dialogue and discovery. Held alongside AI Expo Africa in Johannesburg, the event marked a milestone in fostering local innovation, building capacity, and strengthening partnerships to advance responsible artificial intelligence across […]

The Brain Is Just Specialized Agents Talking To Each Other — Dr. Jeff Beck
Machine Learning Street Talk 2026-01-25 10:15 UTC Score 37.0 AI-141-20260125-podcasts-and-26837ebe Full article

The Brain Is Just Specialized Agents Talking To Each Other — Dr. Jeff Beck

What makes something truly *intelligent?* Is a rock an agent? Could a perfect simulation of your brain actually *be* you? In this fascinating conversation, Dr. Jeff Beck takes us on a journey through the philosophical and technical foundations of agency, intelligence, and the future of AI. Jeff doesn't hold back on the big questions. He argues that from a purely mathematical perspective, there's no structural difference between an agent and a rock – both execute policies that map inputs to outputs. The real distinction lies in *sophistication* – how complex are the internal computations? Does the system engage in planning and counterfactual reasoning, or is it just a lookup table that happens to give the right answers? *Key topics explored in this conversation:* *The Black Box Problem of Agency* – How can we tell if something is truly planning versus just executing a pre-computed response? Jeff explains why this question is nearly impossible to answer from the outside, and why the best we can do is ask which model gives us the simplest explanation. *Energy-Based Models Explained* – A masterclass on how EBMs differ from standard neural networks. The key insight: traditional networks only optimize weights, while energy-based models optimize *both* weights and internal states – a subtle but profound distinction that connects to Bayesian inference. *Why Your Brain Might Have Evolved from Your Nose* – One of the most surprising moments in the conversation. Jeff proposes that the…

Why AI Has a Plato Problem — Mazviita Chirimuuta
Machine Learning Street Talk 2026-01-23 10:25 UTC Score 28.0 AI-141-20260123-podcasts-and-8e636452 Full article

Why AI Has a Plato Problem — Mazviita Chirimuuta

Professor Mazviita Chirimuuta joins us for a fascinating deep dive into the philosophy of neuroscience and what it really means to understand the mind. *What can neuroscience actually tell us about how the mind works?* In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore the hidden assumptions behind computational theories of the brain, the limits of scientific abstraction, and why the question of machine consciousness might be more complicated than AI researchers assume. Mazviita, author of *The Brain Abstracted,* brings a unique perspective shaped by her background in both neuroscience research and philosophy. She challenges us to think critically about the metaphors we use to understand cognition — from the reflex theory of the late 19th century to today's dominant view of the brain as a computer. *Key topics explored:* *The problem of oversimplification* — Why scientific models necessarily leave things out, and how this can sometimes lead entire fields astray. The cautionary tale of reflex theory shows how elegant explanations can blind us to biological complexity. *Is the brain really a computer?* — Mazviita unpacks the philosophical assumptions behind computational neuroscience and asks: if we can model anything computationally, what makes brains special? The answer might challenge everything you thought you knew about AI. *Haptic realism* — A fresh way of thinking about scientific knowledge that emphasizes interaction over passive observation. Knowledge isn't about read…

AI Expo Africa 2026-01-23 09:22 UTC Score 20.0 USR-0194-20260123-regional-new-4715d565 Full article

Google’s study shows how public perceptions on AI have evolved

Ipsos’ and Google’s study shows how public perceptions on AI have evolved as people have come to see AI as a practical tool for learning, work, and daily life. In 2025, the world decisively crossed the AI adoption threshold. People moved past casual experimentation – the highest use case in 2024 – and embraced AI as an […]

Vector Institute News 2026-01-22 14:50 UTC Score 33.0 USR-0017-20260122-research-aca-3e437f10 Full article

The New Cartography of the Invisible

By John Knechtel From the telescope to the balance sheet – a Foundation Models for Science Workshop recap relates how scientists can help businesses solve their most stubborn data problems and […] The post The New Cartography of the Invisible appeared first on Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence .

Consultancy.lat AI & GenAI 2026-01-21 10:12 UTC Score 20.0 AI-177-20260121-regional-ai--3dbbf41e

Dutch sustainability consultancy Earthwise launches in Colombia

Earthwise, a boutique advisory firm from the Netherlands specialising in sustainability, has opened a new office in Colombia as part of its international expansion. Founded in 2024 by a team of “sustainability enthusiasts”, Earthwise advises mid-sized and large organisations on ESG and sustainability-related challenges.

Sourcegraph Blog 2026-01-21 00:00 UTC Score 20.0 USR-0064-20260121-ai-specialis-3b21e536

Cross-repository code navigation

Cross-repo search provides semantic code understanding across repositories.

Practical AI Podcast 2026-01-20 19:10 UTC Score 29.0 AI-143-20260120-podcasts-and-7a40ecd6 Full article

Controlling AI Models from the Inside

As generative AI moves into production, traditional guardrails and input/output filters can prove too slow, too expensive, and/or too limited. In this episode, Alizishaan Khatri of Wrynx joins Daniel and Chris to explore a fundamentally different approach to AI safety and interpretability. They unpack the limits of today’s black-box defenses, the role of interpretability, and how model-native, runtime signals can enable safer AI systems. Featuring: Alizishaan Khatri – LinkedIn Chris Benson – Website , LinkedIn , Bluesky , GitHub , X Daniel Whitenack – Website , GitHub , X Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here !

Consultancy.lat AI & GenAI 2026-01-19 10:12 UTC Score 15.0 AI-177-20260119-regional-ai--2c4ae10b

Study: Colombians supportive of ESG and renewable energy transition

Colombians are largely supportive of ESG initiatives, with a new study indicating that over 80% of the population believes it is essential for both the government and large corporations to transition toward renewable energy and make a real effort for a more sustainable system.

Why Every Brain Metaphor in History Has Been Wrong [SPECIAL EDITION]
Machine Learning Street Talk 2026-01-18 04:38 UTC Score 20.0 AI-141-20260118-podcasts-and-0098b08b Full article

Why Every Brain Metaphor in History Has Been Wrong [SPECIAL EDITION]

What if everything we think we know about the brain is just a really good metaphor that we forgot was a metaphor? This episode takes you on a journey through the history of scientific simplification, from a young Karl Friston watching wood lice in his garden to the bold claims that your mind is literally software running on biological hardware. We bring together some of the most brilliant minds we've interviewed — Professor Mazviita Chirimuuta, Francois Chollet, Joscha Bach, Professor Luciano Floridi, Professor Noam Chomsky, Nobel laureate John Jumper, and more — to wrestle with a deceptively simple question: *When scientists simplify reality to study it, what gets captured and what gets lost?* *Key ideas explored:* *The Spherical Cow Problem* — Science requires simplification. We're limited creatures trying to understand systems far more complex than our working memory can hold. But when does a useful model become a dangerous illusion? *The Kaleidoscope Hypothesis* — Francois Chollet's beautiful idea that beneath all the apparent chaos of reality lies simple, repeating patterns — like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope creating infinite complexity. Is this profound truth or Platonic wishful thinking? *Is Software Really Spirit?* — Joscha Bach makes the provocative claim that software is literally spirit, not metaphorically. We push back hard on this, asking whether the "sameness" we see across different computers running the same program exists in nature or only in our…

OpenMined Blog 2026-01-16 21:10 UTC Score 38.0 USR-0156-20260116-ai-specialis-a134880a Full article

OpenMined Joins Open Forum for AI to Advance Responsible Data Governance

We’re excited to announce that OpenMined has joined the Open Forum for AI (OFAI), an international initiative led by Carnegie Mellon University that’s bringing together academic institutions and nonprofit organizations to advance human-centered and ethical approaches to artificial intelligence. Launched at Carnegie Mellon University in 2024, OFAI was created to foster collaboration, transparency, and inclusion […] The post OpenMined Joins Open Forum for AI to Advance Responsible Data Governance appeared first on OpenMined .

GitHub Engineering 2026-01-15 20:54 UTC Score 26.0 USR-0062-20260115-ai-specialis-3d51142d Full article

When protections outlive their purpose: A lesson on managing defense systems at scale

User feedback led us to clean up outdated mitigations. See why observability and lifecycle management are critical for defense systems. The post When protections outlive their purpose: A lesson on managing defense systems at scale appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

AI Now Institute 2026-01-15 20:12 UTC Score 25.0 USR-0135-20260115-ai-specialis-3e757bbb Full article

Reframing Impact: AI Summit 2026

The 2026 AI Impact Summit in India is the latest iteration of an event that has become a bellwether for global discourse around the AI industry, especially the question of whether, and how, it can be governed. But it also demonstrates how important ideas can be invoked in ways that dilute their meaning or co-opt their force. In this series—produced by AI Now Institute, Aapti Institute, and The Maybe—we bring together leading advocates, builders, and thinkers from around the world who live and breathe substance, analysis, and meaningful action into these ideas. The post Reframing Impact: AI Summit 2026 appeared first on AI Now Institute .

OpenMined Blog 2026-01-15 10:00 UTC Score 33.0 USR-0156-20260115-ai-specialis-7e5ff244 Full article

OpenMined Featured in Communications of the ACM on the Future of Synthetic Data and AI Training

In a recent article published by the Communications of the ACM — the flagship publication of the Association for Computing Machinery — OpenMined’s Executive Director, Andrew Trask, was featured as a key voice in the growing conversation around synthetic data, AI training, and the critical importance of controlling how data shapes model behavior. The Growing […] The post OpenMined Featured in Communications of the ACM on the Future of Synthetic Data and AI Training appeared first on OpenMined .

As artificial intelligence reshapes news, media double down on investigations and field reporting
LatAm Journalism Review AI 2026-01-14 17:23 UTC Score 18.0 AI-176-20260114-regional-ai--dc2dba98 Full article

As artificial intelligence reshapes news, media double down on investigations and field reporting

“One newsroom response to the disruption of artificial intelligence in content generation is not technological but editorial. The Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report says that, in a world where generative systems can create and repackage information at scale, news outlets are redefining which content is worth producing. According to the report, prepared […] The post As artificial intelligence reshapes news, media double down on investigations and field reporting appeared first on LatAm Journalism Review by the Knight Center .

LatAm Journalism Review AI 2026-01-14 17:23 UTC Score 18.0 AI-176-20260114-regional-ai--a7575072 Full article

As artificial intelligence reshapes news, media double down on investigations and field reporting

“One newsroom response to the disruption of artificial intelligence in content generation is not technological but editorial. The Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report says that, in a world where generative systems can create and repackage information at scale, news outlets are redefining which content is worth producing. According to the report, prepared […] The post As artificial intelligence reshapes news, media double down on investigations and field reporting appeared first on LatAm Journalism Review by the Knight Center .

Lex Fridman Podcast 2026-01-13 20:15 UTC Score 17.0 AI-137-20260113-podcasts-and-08e4b755 Full article

#489 – Paul Rosolie: Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Jungle

Paul Rosolie is a naturalist, explorer, author of a new book titled Junglekeeper, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep489-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/paul-rosolie-3-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Junglekeeper (new book): https://amzn.to/4q7vpAp Paul’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/paulrosolie Junglekeepers Website: https://junglekeepers.org Paul’s Website: https://paulrosolie.com Mother

Lex Fridman Podcast 2026-01-13 19:53 UTC Score 17.0 AI-137-20260113-podcasts-and-d4ff8a88 Full article

Transcript for Paul Rosolie: Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Jungle | Lex Fridman Podcast #489

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #489 with Paul Rosolie. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links: Go back to this episode’s main page Watch the full YouTube version of the podcast Table of Contents Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation. Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript: 0:00 – Episode highlight 1:08 – Introduction 3:59 – Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon Jungle

MongoDB AI Blog 2026-01-12 16:00 UTC Score 52.0 USR-0070-20260112-ai-specialis-c3dd5859 Full article

Vision RAG: Enabling Search on Any Documents

Information comes in many shapes and forms. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) primarily focuses on plain text, it overlooks vast amounts of data along the way. Most enterprise knowledge resides in complex documents, slides, graphics, and other multimodal sources. Yet, extracting useful information from these formats using optical character recognition (OCR) or other parsing techniques is often low-fidelity, brittle, and expensive. Vision RAG makes complex documents—including their figures and tables—searchable by using multimodal embeddings, eliminating the need for complex and costly text extraction. This guide explores how Voyage AI’s latest model powers this capability and provides a step-by-step implementation walkthrough. Vision RAG: Building upon text RAG Vision RAG is an evolution of traditional RAG built on the same two components: retrieval and generation. In traditional RAG, unstructured text data is indexed for semantic search. At query time, the system retrieves relevant documents or chunks and appends them to the user’s prompt so the large language model (LLM) can produce more grounded, context-aware answers. Figure 1. Text RAG with Voyage AI and MongoDB. Text RAG with Voyage AI and MongoDB Enterprise data, however, is rarely just clean plain text. Critical information often lives in PDFs, slides, diagrams, dashboards, and other visual formats. Today, this is typically handled by parsing tools and OCR services. Those approaches create several problems:…

Berkeley AI Research Blog 2026-01-10 09:00 UTC Score 43.0 USR-0004-20260110-research-aca-61f2be7f Full article

Information-Driven Design of Imaging Systems

An encoder (optical system) maps objects to noiseless images, which noise corrupts into measurements. Our information estimator uses only these noisy measurements and a noise model to quantify how well measurements distinguish objects. Many imaging systems produce measurements that humans never see or cannot interpret directly. Your smartphone processes raw sensor data through algorithms before producing the final photo. MRI scanners collect frequency-space measurements that require reconstruction before doctors can view them. Self-driving cars process camera and LiDAR data directly with neural networks. What matters in these systems is not how measurements look, but how much useful information they contain. AI can extract this information even when it is encoded in ways that humans cannot interpret. And yet we rarely evaluate information content directly. Traditional metrics like resolution and signal-to-noise ratio assess individual aspects of quality separately, making it difficult to compare systems that trade off between these factors. The common alternative, training neural networks to reconstruct or classify images, conflates the quality of the imaging hardware with the quality of the algorithm. We developed a framework that enables direct evaluation and optimization of imaging systems based on their information content. In our NeurIPS 2025 paper , we show that this information metric predicts system performance across four imaging domains, and that optimizing it prod…

Practical AI Podcast 2026-01-09 20:08 UTC Score 42.0 AI-143-20260109-podcasts-and-59f43d07 Full article

2025 was the year of agents, what's coming in 2026?

In this start-of-year FC episode, Chris and Daniel break down what really mattered in AI in 2025, and what to expect in 2026. They explore the rise of AI agents, the practical reality of multimodal AI, and how reasoning models are reshaping workflows. The conversation dives into infrastructure and energy constraints, the continued value of predictive models, and why orchestration (not just better models) is becoming the defining skill for AI teams. The episode wraps with grounded 2026 predictions on where AI systems, tooling, and builders are headed next. Featuring: Chris Benson – Website , LinkedIn , Bluesky , GitHub , X Daniel Whitenack – Website , GitHub , X Sponsor: Framer - The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at framer.com/practicalai Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here !

TWIML AI Podcast 2026-01-08 21:27 UTC Score 42.0 AI-148-20260108-podcasts-and-d728c71c Full article

Intelligent Robots in 2026: Are We There Yet? with Nikita Rudin - #760

Today, we're joined by Nikita Rudin, co-founder and CEO of Flexion Robotics to discuss the gap between current robotic capabilities and what’s required to deploy fully autonomous robots in the real world. Nikita explains how reinforcement learning and simulation have driven rapid progress in robot locomotion—and why locomotion is still far from “solved.” We dig into the sim2real gap, and how adding visual inputs introduces noise and significantly complicates sim-to-real transfer. We also explore the debate between end-to-end models and modular approaches, and why separating locomotion, planning, and semantics remains a pragmatic approach today. Nikita also introduces the concept of "real-to-sim", which uses real-world data to refine simulation parameters for higher fidelity training, discusses how reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and teleoperation data are combined to train robust policies for both quadruped and humanoid robots, and introduces Flexion's hierarchical approach that utilizes pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for high-level task orchestration with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and low-level whole-body trackers. Finally, Nikita shares the behind-the-scenes in humanoid robot demos, his take on reinforcement learning in simulation versus the real world, the nuances of reward tuning, and offers practical advice for researchers and practitioners looking to get started in robotics today. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at…

Lyft Engineering 2026-01-06 18:10 UTC Score 59.0 USR-0059-20260106-ai-specialis-f289349e

Lyft’s Feature Store: Architecture, Optimization, and Evolution

Written by Rohan Varshney , with support from Devon Mittow & Janice Lee . This article expands upon a presentation from the Feature Store Summit 2025, which can be viewed in full here . There is also another video available on the evolution of Lyft’s Feature Store from DE4AI 2024. Introduction and Core Purpose Lyft’s Feature Store stands as a core infrastructural pillar within its Data Platform organization, designed to optimize the management and deployment of Machine Learning (ML) features at massive scale. Its primary objective is to centralize feature engineering efforts, guaranteeing uniformity across diverse models and workflows that perform important data-driven decision making across the entire rideshare stack. By streamlining the entire lifecycle — from feature creation and storage to low-latency access and high-throughput processing — it facilitates effective offline and online model training and inference. This post will provide a refreshed look ( since 5 years ago ) at the architectural evolution, practical applications, performance tuning, and significant improvements in developer experience we’ve performed over the past few years to improve efficiency, scalability, performance, and user accessibility. Ultimately, we aim to illustrate how the Feature Store empowers Lyft engineers to develop highly effective service components and ML models, a capability that is becoming vital for emerging AI and Large Language Model (LLM) applications. Defining Our Audience and…

Consultancy.lat AI & GenAI 2026-01-06 10:11 UTC Score 15.0 AI-177-20260106-regional-ai--861f9e0b

ESG obstacles immobilize 25% of global copper supply, says consultancy

As the international community accelerates its transition toward renewable energy and digital infrastructure, a significant paradox has emerged within the mining sector: More than a quarter of the total global output of copper remains inaccessible because of complications related to ESG, according to a study from GEM Mining Consulting.

OpenMined Blog 2026-01-05 14:55 UTC Score 44.0 USR-0156-20260105-ai-specialis-6cc1e2fc Full article

Zero-Setup Federated Learning: Train Models Across Private Datasets Using Only Google Colab

Have you ever wanted to train a machine learning model on distributed private data without anyone sharing their raw data? In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to run a complete federated learning workflow directly from Google Colab—no local setup required. We’ll use the PIMA Indians Diabetes dataset split across two data owners to train a […] The post Zero-Setup Federated Learning: Train Models Across Private Datasets Using Only Google Colab appeared first on OpenMined .

AutoGrad Changed Everything (Not Transformers) [Dr. Jeff Beck]
Machine Learning Street Talk 2025-12-31 19:35 UTC Score 34.0 AI-141-20251231-podcasts-and-92a71c06 Full article

AutoGrad Changed Everything (Not Transformers) [Dr. Jeff Beck]

Dr. Jeff Beck, mathematician turned computational neuroscientist, joins us for a fascinating deep dive into why the future of AI might look less like ChatGPT and more like your own brain. **SPONSOR MESSAGES START** — Prolific - Quality data. From real people. For faster breakthroughs. https://www.prolific.com/?utm_source=mlst — **END** *What if the key to building truly intelligent machines isn't bigger models, but smarter ones?* In this conversation, Jeff makes a compelling case that we've been building AI backwards. While the tech industry races to scale up transformers and language models, Jeff argues we're missing something fundamental: the brain doesn't work like a giant prediction engine. It works like a scientist, constantly testing hypotheses about a world made of *objects* that interact through *forces* — not pixels and tokens. *The Bayesian Brain* — Jeff explains how your brain is essentially running the scientific method on autopilot. When you combine what you see with what you hear, you're doing optimal Bayesian inference without even knowing it. This isn't just philosophy — it's backed by decades of behavioral experiments showing humans are surprisingly efficient at handling uncertainty. *AutoGrad Changed Everything* — Forget transformers for a moment. Jeff argues the real hero of the AI boom was automatic differentiation, which turned AI from a math problem into an engineering problem. But in the process, we lost sight of what actually makes intelligence work.…

Your Brain Doesn't Command Your Body. It Predicts It. [Max Bennett]
Machine Learning Street Talk 2025-12-30 07:17 UTC Score 20.0 AI-141-20251230-podcasts-and-b2aed3d6 Full article

Your Brain Doesn't Command Your Body. It Predicts It. [Max Bennett]

Tim sits down with Max Bennett to explore how our brains evolved over 600 million years—and what that means for understanding both human intelligence and AI. Max isn't a neuroscientist by training. He's a tech entrepreneur who got curious, started reading, and ended up weaving together three fields that rarely talk to each other: comparative psychology (what different animals can actually do), evolutionary neuroscience (how brains changed over time), and AI (what actually works in practice). *Your Brain Is a Guessing Machine* You don't actually "see" the world. Your brain builds a simulation of what it *thinks* is out there and just uses your eyes to check if it's right. That's why optical illusions work—your brain is filling in a triangle that isn't there, or can't decide if it's looking at a duck or a rabbit. *Rats Have Regrets* In a fascinating experiment called "Restaurant Row," rats make choices about waiting for food. When they skip a short wait for something they like and end up stuck with a long wait for something they don't—you can literally watch their brain imagine eating the food they passed up. They regret their choice and make different decisions next time. *Chimps Are Machiavellian* The most gripping story is about two chimps, Rock and Belle. Belle learns where food is hidden. Rock figures out he can just follow her and steal it. So Belle starts hiding the food when she finds it. Then Rock starts *pretending* not to watch her, then sprinting to grab the food o…

Consultancy.lat AI & GenAI 2025-12-29 10:10 UTC Score 12.0 AI-177-20251229-regional-ai--eba15de0

Atos exits South America following sale of regional business to Semantix

Global IT services company Atos has divested its South American business to Brazilian company Semantix, marking its exit from the regional market. The deal sees around 2,800 employees in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay and Peru transfer to Semantix, which now becomes one of the largest players in South America in the field of digital transformation and IT services.