Month: July 2025

Apple’s design team will report to Tim Cook

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Apple CEO Tim Cook is about to take over one of the most significant parts of Apple’s business: its design team. The team currently reports to COO Jeff Williams, but once Williams begins his just-announced retirement “late in the year,” the design team “will then transition to reporting directly to Cook,” Apple says. The company … Read more

Supreme Court gives Trump the green light to cut down the federal workforce

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In a significant albeit preliminary win for the president, the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to go ahead with its plans to drastically reshape federal agencies by laying off employees en masse. The unsigned decision lifts a lower court ruling that briefly stopped the Trump administration from cutting down the federal workforce while … Read more

OFAC’s Dropped Sanctions Against Tornado Cash Can’t Come Up at Trial, Judge Says

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NEW YORK, New York — The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC) sanctions against privacy tool Tornado Cash cannot be discussed at the upcoming trial of developer Roman Storm, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. At a status conference in Manhattan on Tuesday, District Judge Katherine Polk Failla initially waffled on whether she … Read more

‘Let It Wag!’ and the Limits of Machine Learning on Rare Concepts

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Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction 2 Concepts in Pretraining Data and Quantifying Frequency 3 Comparing Pretraining Frequency & “Zero-Shot” Performance and 3.1 Experimental Setup 3.2 Result: Pretraining Frequency is Predictive of “Zero-Shot” Performance 4 Stress-Testing the Concept Frequency-Performance Scaling Trend and 4.1 Controlling for Similar Samples in Pretraining and Downstream Data 4.2 Testing … Read more

AI Training Data Has a Long-Tail Problem

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Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction 2 Concepts in Pretraining Data and Quantifying Frequency 3 Comparing Pretraining Frequency & “Zero-Shot” Performance and 3.1 Experimental Setup 3.2 Result: Pretraining Frequency is Predictive of “Zero-Shot” Performance 4 Stress-Testing the Concept Frequency-Performance Scaling Trend and 4.1 Controlling for Similar Samples in Pretraining and Downstream Data 4.2 Testing … Read more

AI Models Trained on Synthetic Data Still Follow Concept Frequency Trends

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Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction 2 Concepts in Pretraining Data and Quantifying Frequency 3 Comparing Pretraining Frequency & “Zero-Shot” Performance and 3.1 Experimental Setup 3.2 Result: Pretraining Frequency is Predictive of “Zero-Shot” Performance 4 Stress-Testing the Concept Frequency-Performance Scaling Trend and 4.1 Controlling for Similar Samples in Pretraining and Downstream Data 4.2 Testing … Read more

Analyzing the Impact of Pretraining Frequency on Zero-Shot Performance in Multimodal Models

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Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction 2 Concepts in Pretraining Data and Quantifying Frequency 3 Comparing Pretraining Frequency & “Zero-Shot” Performance and 3.1 Experimental Setup 3.2 Result: Pretraining Frequency is Predictive of “Zero-Shot” Performance 4 Stress-Testing the Concept Frequency-Performance Scaling Trend and 4.1 Controlling for Similar Samples in Pretraining and Downstream Data 4.2 Testing … Read more

How AI Models Count and Match Concepts in Images and Text

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Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction 2 Concepts in Pretraining Data and Quantifying Frequency 3 Comparing Pretraining Frequency & “Zero-Shot” Performance and 3.1 Experimental Setup 3.2 Result: Pretraining Frequency is Predictive of “Zero-Shot” Performance 4 Stress-Testing the Concept Frequency-Performance Scaling Trend and 4.1 Controlling for Similar Samples in Pretraining and Downstream Data 4.2 Testing … Read more

What 300GB of AI Research Reveals About the True Limits of “Zero-Shot” Intelligence

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:::info Authors: (1) Vishaal Udandarao, Tubingen AI Center, University of Tubingen, University of Cambridge, and equal contribution; (2) Ameya Prabhu, Tubingen AI Center, University of Tubingen, University of Oxford, and equal contribution; (3) Adhiraj Ghosh, Tubingen AI Center, University of Tubingen; (4) Yash Sharma, Tubingen AI Center, University of Tubingen; (5) Philip H.S. Torr, University … Read more

Grok is “Improved” According to Elon, But It’s Raising More Concerns Now Than Ever

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Friday morning started with a bold claim from Elon Musk: his AI chatbot Grok has gotten a major upgrade. “We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” Musk posted on X (formerly Twitter). But within hours, people were asking a very different question: What exactly did he improve? Because if … Read more

One of Tim Cook’s possible successors is leaving Apple

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Jeff Williams will retire later this year. | Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Apple has announced that Sabih Khan, the company’s vice president of operations, will take over for Jeff Williams as chief operating officer later this month. In an announcement on Tuesday, Apple said the move is part of a “long-planned succession” … Read more