'The Damned of Data': workers in the Global South, invisible yet essential to AI
Sociologist Clément Le Ludec studied data annotators in Madagascar. His work shows how central this precarious, overlooked workforce is to making AI systems function.
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Q&A: the "collision" between AI, your brain and society
MIT professor Eric So discusses his new book, which examines how AI affects people's thinking skills. The interview explores the wider tension between the technology, cognition and society.
Ricursive Intelligence is betting on AI-designed chips to help solve the compute crisis
The founders of Ricursive Intelligence describe AI that designs chips, learns from each iteration and improves the next design. Their goal is to automate and speed up chip design to ease the shortage of computing capacity.
Local and distributed large LLM inference with MLX and RDMA on Mac Studio
Apple's machine learning team describes how to run frontier-scale language models such as Muse Spark Open locally and across several machines. The setup relies on its MLX framework and RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 on Mac Studio computers with the M5 Ultra chip.
Datalab releases OmniParseBench, an open OCR benchmark with 16,288 pass/fail tests to audit OCR parsers
Datalab has released OmniParseBench, an open benchmark of 16,288 yes-or-no tests spanning 2,937 pages in 92 languages. Each score is a pass rate that can be broken down by tag, script or language, making it easier to see where OCR parsers fail.
'Ghost in the Machine': AI, eugenics and genetic fallacy
A US filmmaker traces the history of artificial intelligence back to the late 19th century. Her documentary explores the links between AI, modern statistics and eugenics, and argues that ideas close to eugenics still shape some tech leaders' discourse.