Medha

dhoom machale. chef's kiss.

ANALYSIS | Why OpenAI wants to help Canada build homegrown artificial intelligence | CBC News OpenAI wants to help Canada build a sovereign digital infrastructure for artificial intelligence, putting the country in a tough spot as it tries to distance itself from overreliance on U.S. tech comp...

I am once again asking Canadian journalists to ask the most basic-ass question of "on whose land will these be built?" How is it that every other major industry must consider Indigenous rights but with tech it's like "meh".
www.cbc.ca/news/busines...

Excerpt from an article that reads: Lehane met with AI Minister Evan Solomon on Monday. Solomon told The Logic in June that his mission is to “create sovereign AI.” But “sovereignty is not solitude,” Solomon said, noting that Canada still needs technology and capital from other countries. OpenAI is participating in similar initiatives in other advanced economies. In May, the firm launched OpenAI for Countries, a new program that localizes ChatGPT and its underlying models for a nation’s particular customs and the requirements of its public sector. It is also offering to build data centres for countries that help pay for the infrastructure. Countries are turning to OpenAI because of its “cutting-edge technology,” which can be used to build homegrown tools and applications, and because the firm can help stimulate their domestic AI ecosystems by building or buying compute capacity, Lehane said.

Looks like Canada's approach to "sovereign AI" will involve creating structural dependencies on large US tech companies

Working in AI policy rn is like being on a derailed train where the conductor is saying "haha check out this sick trick the train is going so much faster now" and you have to calmly explain to the conductor why actually maybe it is bad that the train has derailed

"OpenAI is Canadian sovereign AI" is astonishing mental gymnastics and it gets worse the more you think about it

M365 Copilot fails to up productivity in UK government trial : AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results:

1) Does UBI work? (yes)
2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World A 404 Media investigation reveals how the man who started Tea, the ‘women dating safety’ app, tried to hire a female ‘face’ for the company and then hijack her grassroots community.

Incredible, must-read investigation by @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social into how Tea's founder got women to join the app, how its founding story changed, how it spammed Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, how it hired an influencer marketing firm to promote it

www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...

Sam Altman spoke at my engineering graduation and basically said degrees are worthless lol 🫠

Say what you want IB but the world could really use some OPVL analysis skills atm

Washington Post: “Is fascism bad? The answer may surprise you”

Teen Vogue: “Here are three fun tips you can use this summer to disable an armored personnel carrier”

We got a power crisis on our hands, you get that nuclear power plant started like I asked?

Sure did boss, real far away, just like you asked, true story.

What.

Wesley LePatner, a 44-year-old Blackstone executive who oversaw its $53 billion real-estate investment fund, was killed in Manhattan's mass shooting "We cannot properly express the grief we feel upon the sudden and tragic loss of Wesley," the LePatner family told Fortune, adding she was a "driven and extraordinarily talented professional and colle...

if you use AI to write my obit, I'm going to haunt your ass. you will never get a good night's sleep again. fortune.com/2025/07/29/w...

Kathy Pham and I spoke with @donmoyn.bsky.social about civic tech & reflections on our oral history of USDS.

Thank you to Don for the opportunity, and to Kathy for being such a wonderful partner on all of this work ❤️🙏🏼

And the biggest thanks to our colleagues who trusted us with their stories ❤️

So much research is being done about LLMs that it's hard to stay on top of the literature.

To help with this, I've made a list of all the most important papers from the past 8 years:
rtmccoy.com/pubs/

I hope you enjoy!

it’s worth making this more explicit:
The NYT is suggesting Zohran lied by checking off both “Asian” & “African”, because (in their view) someone of Indian descent born & raised in Africa isn’t “truly” African. Which was also how Idi Amin justified expelling Zohran’s father & thousands of others.

It does suck that "AI" now means both generative AI (boo hiss) and a whole basket of incredibly useful machine learning techniques.

The New York Times and Amazon ink AI licensing deal | TechCrunch Nearly two years after suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, The New York Times has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon to train the tech giant’s AI platforms.

The New York Times, after suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, has now agreed to license its content to Amazon for training its AI models. This deal includes news, NYT Cooking, and The Athletic, potentially integrating with Alexa. Terms are undisclosed.
#MLSky

Not an endorsement of the candidate (if you're reading, Values and Ethics) but an endorsement of this cute family activity. My parents always brought me voting with them and it's been a foundational memory for me.

It is actually much more basic than this. They have absolutely no interest whatsoever in currently deployed, real world AI systems that operate in sensitive areas like criminal justice, hospitals, consumer finance, etc, that already affect and sometimes hurt many millions of people.

The transformer was invented in Google. RLHF was not invented in industry labs, but came to prominence in OpenAI and DeepMind. I took 5 of the most influential papers (black dots) and visualized their references. Blue dots are papers that acknowledge federal funding (DARPA, NSF).

Many people dismiss the idea that AI can work in the public interest (at the same time that tech moguls increasingly work against the "public interest").

Yet the idea of "AI in the public interest" is extremely important and under mortal threat.

Me: uncritical patriotism is a dangerous tool that can be abused to erase historic atrocities and give license for future cruelties

Also me: if Canada doesn’t win this hockey game I will have a mental breakdown

A widespread attitude seems to be “if I keep my head down the far-right won’t come after me” but the problem with that attitude is: for a growing section of the population, there are no good immigrants. For these people, immigration is a failed experiment and the failures must be purged, all of us.

How AI is helping Canadian farmers find the support they need – faster. Steve Rennie's team at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada built an AI chatbot to help farmers easily find information on government programmes, funding and services. Check it out -> shorturl.at/iOwFg
#AIinGovernment

It’s Time to Worry About DOGE’s AI Plans Welcome to the end of the human civil servant.

DOGE reportedly plans to integrate AI with federal-government systems while purging civil servants—potentially granting the president a level of power that hasn't previously been known, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders write.

When you hold a musician to a higher standard of truth-telling to power than your own newspaper.

Buy. This. Book. 👇🏾
Liberals, open your pro-capitalist wallets

We had to talk about Myles Lewis-Skelly, and how unfairly pundits are treating him.