AI
DeepMind claims its AI performs better than International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalists
An AI system developed by Google DeepMind, Google’s leading AI research lab, appears to have surpassed the average gold medalist in solving geometry problems in an international high-school level mathematics competition.
Anthropic CEO says DeepSeek was ‘the worst’ on a critical bioweapons data safety test
DeepSeek generated rare information about bioweapons in a safety test run by Anthropic.
DeepSeek’s performance was “the worst of basically any model we’d ever tested,” Amodei claimed. “It had absolutely no blocks whatsoever against generating this information.”
Researchers created an open rival to OpenAI’s o1 ‘reasoning’ model for under $50
They started with an off-the-shelf base model, then fine-tuned it through distillation, a process to extract the “reasoning” capabilities from another AI model by training on its answers.
The researchers said s1 is distilled from one of Google’s reasoning models, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. Distillation is the same approach Berkeley researchers used to create an AI reasoning model for around $450 last month.
Reasoning models can be distilled with a relatively small dataset using a process called supervised fine-tuning (SFT), in which an AI model is explicitly instructed to mimic certain behaviors in a dataset.
To train s1, the researchers created a dataset of just 1,000 carefully curated questions, paired with answers to those questions, as well as the “thinking” process behind each answer from Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental.
Training s1 took less than 30 minutes using 16 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
Huge investments may still be necessary to push the envelope of AI innovation. Distillation has shown to be a good method for cheaply re-creating an AI model’s capabilities, but it doesn’t create new AI models vastly better than what’s available today.
Cloudflare hopes to rebuild the Web for the AI age - with itself in the middle
Cloudflare wants to regulate what bots can access what content, and put a tollbooth in the middle somewhere so that content providers don’t end up giving away their stuff to AI.
Politics
U.S. intelligence, law enforcement candidates face Trump loyalty test
Candidates for top national security positions in the Trump administration have faced questions that appear designed to determine whether they have embraced the president’s false claims about the outcome of the 2020 election and its aftermath.
They were asked to give “yes” or “no” responses to the questions: Was Jan. 6 “an inside job?” And was the 2020 presidential election “stolen?”
Vance questions authority of US judges to challenge Trump
In Idaho, a preview of RFK Jr.’s vaccine-skeptical America
This Idaho health district banned public clinics from distributing the coronavirus vaccine. Public health experts said they fear other health boards across the country could follow the Idaho board’s lead in eschewing the medical consensus that the coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective at preventing hospitalizations and death as scientifically inaccurate information about vaccines swirls from the top of President Donald Trump’s potential health administration.
What Happened the Last Time a President Purged the Bureaucracy
The widespread political purges of the early 1950s echo clearly today.
1,456 federal employees were fired, despite the fact that no one was ever found to be involved in espionage. Many were removed simply for being gay.
Infosec
The NSA's "Big Delete"
The NSA is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion" in order to obey Trump's anti-DEI orders. All NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This will affect serious infosec content referring to "privilege escalation" and others. The NSA is trying to identify mission-related sites before the "Big Delete" is executed but appears to lack the personnel to do so.
New ‘BYOTB’ Attack Exploits Trusted Binaries to Evade Detection, Researchers Reveal
Bring Your Own Trusted Binary (BYOTB) uses egitimate, trusted binaries such as Cloudflare’s cloudflared and OpenSSH utilities.
Musk DOGE Pick Led Cybersecurity Cuts at Citrix. Hacks Followed
Citrix was a publicly traded company with results that disappointed Wall Street. Private equity firms in 2022 bought Citrix by loading up the company with debt—-and then started eliminating thousands of employees to cut costs. Its financial results are improving.
After the company instituted cuts, intruders infiltrated Citrix’s products in two major hacks. In 2023 CISA ranked two vulnerabilities in Citrix software as the No. 1 and No. 2 most exploited flaws by hackers.
The UK's Demands for Apple to Break Encryption Is an Emergency for Us All
The United Kingdom issued a secret order last month requiring Apple to create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data. The British government's undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies.
The core target is Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which is an optional feature that turns on end-to-end encryption for backups and other data stored in iCloud, making it so that even Apple cannot access that information. If Apple does comply, users should consider disabling iCloud backups entirely. Perhaps most concerning, the U.K. is apparently seeking a backdoor into users’ data regardless of where they are or what citizenship they have.
TikTok now offers its Android app for download outside of Google Play
TikTok is now offering US downloads of the Android version of the app on its own website.
The app still isn’t available on Google Play or the Apple App Store in the US.