Expert opinions on Research Policy

The University of Oxford has been selected to host a new, cross-university government-backed UK AI Research Lab. The new lab is part of a £60 million investment announced today by the UKRI's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) ...

Door samen met Europese partners te investeren in AI versterken we onze economie én onze digitale soevereiniteit.

Middle powers like the UK and Canada will not win the race for ever larger AI models, but through collaboration they can win the deployment race.

Developers publish broad, top-level safety and ethics frameworks that sound reassuring, but are publishing limited empirical evidence needed to actually understand the risks.

The draft implementing regulation should clearly differentiate between API access, which should be the preferred method for safety evaluations where access to documents and relevant information are deemed insufficient, and “further” means of access, ...

The confidentiality agreements often contain gagging language that violates an SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] law that says you can’t interfere with a whistleblower’s ability to report to external regulators.

Connecticut already has strong whistleblower laws that protect employees from retaliation. [...] creating a separate, AI-specific whistleblower regime could lead to confusion, duplication, and unintended consequences for employers operating in highly...

To give full effect to the right to erasure under applicable data protection law, the government shall interpret such right as extending to AI systems trained on personal data. Where an AI system has been trained using data that was unlawfully obtain...

Restricting access to training data, whether through mandatory compensation, expanded opt-out rights, or onerous compliance requirements, can have the effect of restricting AI development itself.

The vote marks an important step in the EU’s internal procedure for concluding the Framework Convention and reflects institutional support for the first international legally binding treaty addressing artificial intelligence in the context of human r...

For me, a one-sided moratorium which ties our hands behind our backs while the likes of North Korea and the al-Qaedas of the world crack on: no, I am afraid that that worries me even more.

Such technological advancement will provide society with invaluable tools to address critical global challenges, including drug discovery, economic growth and climate change.

This is going to be the most productive decade in the history of our species. But in order to truly reap the benefits of AI, we need to learn how to contain it. Paradoxically, part of that will mean collectively saying no to certain forms of progress...

There’s no such thing as AGI. There is human-level AI, but human intelligence is extremely specialised. So calling it general intelligence is complete nonsense.

Inkling reports reasoning, agentic, factuality, chat, vision, audio, and safety benchmark results at effort=0.99.

However, it is important to differentiate regulating applications (which we need) vs. regulating the technology (which is ill-advised).

AI should become a bridge for cooperation, not a tool for division. WAICO will also help ensure AI is managed in a safe, trustworthy, and ethical manner.

But the main regret I have with this talk is that I wish I had prepared a more for the section on a “CERN for AI.” The idea behind such a project is to pool many countries’ and companies’ resources into a single (possibly physically decentralized) ci...

Currently, so many needs for innovation are put under the label of AI that there will be no way to address them with a single organisation.

It always seemed entirely plausible to me that Covid escaped from a laboratory, but that doesn’t mean that it was deliberate or the result of nefarious activity.

This acknowledgement should not lead to the dismissal of the possibility (e.g., accidental leakage from a BSL-4 or lower biosafety level laboratory) or the legitimate concerns surrounding biosecurity and biosafety in general.

The story of lab leak in Wuhan is a fiction and it is as ridiculous as the counterclaim that Sars-CoV-2 comes from lab leaks in the US.

The problem is that argument doesn’t work — all evidence points to Covid starting around the same time the market outbreak started.

All he is saying in this Science article is that we need better, more comprehensive patient case and dated viral sequence data – at the time of first appearance of these viruses – to make this viral phylogenetic/evolutionary history approach more acc...

The data from the paper support the notion that Huanan market may have been just an amplifier of COVID-19 transmission, rather than the place where COVID-19 originated.

Much of the evidence used to shape the recommendations comes from epidemiological studies—large population surveys that look for associations between diet and disease. While these studies can generate hypotheses, they cannot prove cause and effect. T...

The evidence that cholesterol in one egg a day is safe for most people comes from huge studies — many conducted here at Harvard Medical School — that have followed hundreds of thousands of people over decades.

Bayesian reasoning serves as a bridge between quantitative and qualitative research that allows one to analyze any and all kinds of data within a single, unified inferential framework. This paper demonstrates the strength and flexibility of the Bayes...

The arguments around covid origins seem largely to fall into an inference trap Andrew has termed premature collapse of the wavefunction. Rather than maintaining multiple hypotheses with different levels of credibility, there seems to be a desire to c...

Determining the origin of an outbreak or pandemic can be divided into four stages: detection, identification, characterization, and attribution. Understanding how a specific pathogen entered and spread in a population to cause an outbreak is a multid...

Creating even a microscopic black hole or wormhole would require an accelerator the size of the whole universe, say researchers.

Scientists’ conclusions about risk cannot be taken at face value. Their assurances must be discounted by the probability of their own error. [...] It does not follow that LHC risk is zero: An accurate assessment of risk must include the possibility t...

Theoretical calculations show that the LHC could produce two kinds of dark matter—black holes and strange, ultradense quark matter—that are extremely dangerous, as both have been theoretically proven to swallow in a chain reaction the entirety of Ear...

Create a single, dedicated talent hub, accompanied by 1-5 separate compute hubs;

A semi-distributed structure, with a few core facilities, leveraging members' comparative advantages. Core facilities—fewer in number than the participating states—are necessary to create a critical mass of talent. Similarly, distributed compute can ...