"Forward Deployed Engineering" is a Palantir-coined buzzword that is nothing but military-branded marketing fluff. Maybe it sounds 'fancy', but it simply is the same old practice of "on-site" engineers that places engineers directly within a customer’s location / infrastructure.
There’s nothing revolutionary about it other than the little spin for a standard industry role to make the sorry plantir bros feel more appreciated while helping tech-fascists destroy democracies.
Honestly, Hassabis and Amodei are the 2 last beacon of hopes for me in the AI race. What they have for them is that they both are scientists and not 'business-bros'. But are they genuine? Will they not be corrupted by power or pressure from shareholders?
The main problem is that in capitalism private companies have only the mission to serve their shareholders/owners.
Public institutions have the mission to serve the public.
The only real solution is to make AI a public good/utility which should be regulated on an international level and overseen by trustworthy institutions.
People doing frontier research in knowledge representation & reasoning are worrying that soon, with the merging of LLM and knowledge graphs, automated 'everything' from research to production, will be possible. This implies that 'human cleverness' will get you nowhere any more and the only limits will then be computation - a resource Big Tech is hard at work completely walling normal people out of.
Not a fan, but unfortunately a "digital proof of citizenship" seems to inevitable due to the en-shitification of the internet, autocratic state actor's doctrines to destabilise free societies through disinformation that matches well with social media's en-rage-ment business model, and the more recent AI slopification / AI bots running wild.
The question is whether citizens can build enough pressure for such verification systems to be state-based and truly zero-knowledge (akin to the EU's) versus having the private sector 'verify' each user to siphon data, profit off it (Thiel's Persona) and fortify surveillance-capitalism and autocratic administrations.
At the moment in the UK (where any mention of digital ID sends half the population mental) you have to email a whole raft of ID docs and personal data to estate agents, mortgage brokers, solicitors etc. to get an ID check done. Or use a private ID service that can have a cost associated and may not be any more secure than my passport scan sitting in someones M365 mailbox. You can't know.
I'd be happy to have a government service replace all that nonsense, where a one-time challenge code could verify my ID. There is now a UK.gov "One Login" authentication used by other government services that is essentially a digital ID as far as I can see. It just needs to be made mandatory for ID checks by law.
Such a service can also be used for age verification with the correct privacy controls in place, far better than all the dodgy age verification services that exist now.
Digital ID and age verification are going to be a part of the internet going forward. I'd rather have a government service that (in a functioning democracy) has accountability to the citizens that use it. ID verification is also a natural monopoly, so the government picks a winner anyway.
> Data for sale included people’s gender, age, month and year of birth, socioeconomic status, lifestyle habits, mental health, self-reported medical history, cognitive function, and physical measures.
If this is not traceable back to individuals, it would probably good to be made public. But I assume the UK Biobank only gives access to trusted partners since - as we know in our 'data analytics' day and age - with enough general data quantity you can trace back anything to anyone if you have the resources. And the capitalist-surveillance econonmy certainly provides the profit-motive.
> if we don't support truly independent, objective, investigative journalism, who will?
Like Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros and countless other billionaires through their "charities"? https://theguardian.org/
Just because they are liberal and non-profit doesn't mean they are independent, that only appears this way if you only think in the narrow confines of the Overton Window between "conservative" and "liberal" of mainstream discourse.
> We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty.
SuperagentLM made available on-edge PPI redaction models already a few years ago in sizes 20B, 3B, 200M. They still seem to be available via their legacy API - well worth checking out to compare against this one.
https://docs.superagent.sh/legacy/llms/superagent-lm-redact-...
> Gary Miller, one of the researchers who investigated these attacks, told TechCrunch that some clues point to an “Israeli-based commercial geo-intelligence provider with specialized telecom capabilities,” but did not name the surveillance provider. Several Israeli companies are known to offer similar services, such as Circles (later acquired by spyware maker NSO Group), Cognyte, and Rayzone.
There’s nothing revolutionary about it other than the little spin for a standard industry role to make the sorry plantir bros feel more appreciated while helping tech-fascists destroy democracies.
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