xAI, Facebook, the WNBA, & Gorilla Intelligence

September 12, 2024

Hello, readers – happy Thursday! Today, we’ll be talking about xAI, the Middle East, Facebook’s misdeeds down under, Typhoon Yagi, the WNBA, the CPI, and primate intelligence.

Here’s some good news: According to a new paper published in the journal Autism, playing “Dungeons & Dragons” helped boost players’ confidence with autism and gave them a strong sense of kinship or belonging. Also, YouTube will start restricting videos showing videos about weight and physical appearances from being promoted to teenagers on the platform.

“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.” – Stephen Hawking

The Beast Must Be Fed At Any Cost

(Elon Musk by Dimitrios Kambouris via Getty Images)

Elon Musk really, really believes in AI. He wants Teslas to have AI-piloted full self-driving capabilities, started building a humanoid AI-powered robot, and has even spun out his own AI firm named xAI, which built Grok, a chatbot like ChatGPT that you might be familiar with if you’re masochistic enough to still be on X whose goal is “to understand the true nature of the universe.”

To do something as impossible as that, the company needs a whole lot of money (xAI has secured over $6 billion in funding) and a whole lot of computers. xAI is looking to meet that need by building a supercomputer data center in South Memphis, a historically Black neighborhood with disproportionately bad air quality. The company has rented out 18 portable methane gas generators, which burn fuel around the clock to keep the lights (and computers) on. South Memphis’ air has failed multiple air quality tests in the past and life expectancy for residents is 10 years lower than other parts of Memphis.

The facility is set to suck up enough power for tens of thousands of homes annually and use about 1 million gallons of water a day. Unsurprisingly, residents are not happy with the development, but Elon Musk doesn’t care about anything besides getting his shiny new facility up and running. And tweeting about it.

No Ceasefire & No Surprises (Yet)

As the possibility of a ceasefire agreement shrinks, Israel might try some new tactics to secure the release of the hostages. An Israeli official has floated the possibility of providing a “get out of jail free” card to Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar. The deal would see Israel grant Sinwar, his family, and “anyone who wants to join him” free passage out of Gaza in exchange for Hamas returning all hostages held in Palestinian territory. According to a diplomat familiar with the Israel-Hamas ceasefire talks, Sinwar has never indicated that he wants to flee Gaza, as he believes he’s safer there than somewhere like Iran or Lebanon.

While the winds of change might not be fully blowing, there is a slight breeze with a whiff of change. On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a rare criticism of Israel, describing the IDF’s shooting of 26-year-old University of Washington graduate Aysenur Ezgi Eygi in the occupied West Bank as “unprovoked and unjustified.” An initial IDF investigation found that it was “highly likely” that Eygi was “hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire.” While Israel was taking fire from its closest ally, it was also opening fire on Palestinians in an area it had designated as a humanitarian zone, claiming to be aiming at Hamas operatives. At least five missiles were fired off at the humanitarian zone, killing at least 19 people and injuring over 60 others. Rescuers are still digging bodies out of the rubble.

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A Typhoon Tragedy

On Wednesday, a flash flood washed away a tiny village in northern Vietnam, killing at least 30 people and leaving dozens of others missing. The tragedy has brought Vietnam’s death total from Typhoon Yagi up to 155. 141 others have been reported missing and hundreds more have been injured.
Typhoon Yagi was the strongest storm to hit Vietnam in decades, bringing winds up to 149 kph (92 mph) and dumping tons of water into the country’s rivers. The deluge has caused massive flash floods and landslides in Vietnam’s northwestern Lao Cai province where the village was located. According to one expert, typhoons like Yagi are “getting stronger due to climate change, primarily because warmer ocean waters provide more energy to fuel the storms, leading to increased wind speeds and heavier rainfall.”

Mud On Meta’s Face

Facebook is coming clean and admitting its dirty deeds. During an Australian senate inquiry earlier this week, Meta’s global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh confessed that her company had been scraping Australian adult users’ public photos, posts, and other data in order to teach its generative AI engine. The company never offered users an option to opt out of the scraping, which sucked up data going back to 2007.
“The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?” asked one senator. Claybaugh could only answer, “Correct,” adding that Facebook only offered the opt-out option to users in the E.U. because there was “an ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training” in Europe. Maybe all those strongly worded letters by government agencies actually did something this time?

More Mixed Nuts

Inflation Deceleration

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index report for August yesterday, and it contained some encouraging numbers. The CPI rose just 0.2%, and in the 12 months through August, CPI rose 2.5% compared to the 2.9% in July, marking the lowest number since early February.
Core inflation (which removes food and energy costs) rose 0.3% for the month and 3.2% for the year. Overall, the numbers seem to point to a successful campaign by the Federal Reserve to lower inflation, which also likely means we’ll see a quarter percentage point rate cut during the central bank’s next meeting.

Not Exactly A Slam-Dunk Answer

WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert made an appearance on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Monday and was asked about how some fans say pretty awful (racist) things about the players in the league. Engelbert said, “The one thing I know about sports, you need rivalry. That’s what makes people watch. They want to watch games of consequence between rivals. They don’t want everybody being nice to one another.”
The executive director of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) – the union that represents WNBA players – said on Tuesday in response to Engelbert’s fumbling of the question, “Here is the answer that the Commissioner should have provided to the very clear question regarding the racism, misogyny, and harassment experienced by the Players: There is absolutely no place in sport — or in life — for the vile hate, racist language, homophobic comments, and the misogynistic attacks our players are facing on social media.”
Multiple players also spoke out about Engelbert’s disappointing answer. Late Tuesday night, the commissioner took to social media to clarify her comments. “To be clear, there is absolutely no place for hate or racism of any kind in the WNBA or anywhere else,” she said.

More Nuts In America

This Science Is Bananas

Researchers have increasingly turned to artificial intelligence to discover new chemicals for applications like medicine, energy, and agriculture. But what about gorilla intelligence? A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE examines the possibility of discovering new useful plants by watching gorillas.
The study involved botanists researching many species of plants eaten by wild gorillas in the central African nation of Gabon. They found that four of the plants consistently sought out by the great apes had powerful medicinal effects, with especially high levels of antioxidants and antimicrobials. All four of those plants showed antibacterial activity against drug-resistant strains of the E. coli bug, with one (the fromager tree) being effective against every drug-resistant strain of E. coli tested in the study.
“This suggests that gorillas evolved to eat plants that benefit them, and highlights the huge gaps in our knowledge of the Central African rainforests,” said one of the study’s authors. Unfortunately, unlike the ever-multiplying number of AI companies, Gabon’s population of western lowland gorillas has dwindled in recent years, meaning our PI (primate intelligence)-powered search for new medicinal plants might slow in the future.

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