
AI and the IRS
Given each's histories, what could possibly go wrong?
The US tax authority – the Internal Revenue Service – is looking at how AI can secure and protect taxpayers’ data held on its servers. It recently filed a request for information aimed at experts that can help guide the IRS into possibly developing a platform that uses machine learning to sniff out and react to threats. The …
“The Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Cybersecurity Division has a business need for an Artificial Intelligent (AI) machined-based analytical platform to proactively detect and respond to cyber- and insider-related threats,” it said in the request.
No, no, a million times no! The Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Cybersecurity Division has a business need to proactively detect and respond to cyber- and insider-related threats. Whether that's done with an AI-based thingummyjig*, by some other sort of program or by good old-fashioned sysadmin monitoring should be irrelevant.
Business needs are characterised by desired outcome, not by technology to be used. The confusion between the two is probably the single biggest driver of wasted spend in IT (and probably other areas too) projects.
*highly unlikely to succeed, I think, but that's besides the point I'm making here
@jmch, I tend to agree. There is no point in deciding on the technology, 'the how' when it it is passably likely that you do not know any of the rest of the deal. Certainly looking into the present 'systems' (I use the term 'systems' in its loosest sense) to see how much falls out when you so much as look, should be a first point. Adding quality, security or any other 'nice to have' as a bolt on extra is like adding a go faster stripe on an vehicle inspection failure. It is a waste of money. Sadly it takes time, money and a few bruised egos before you get anything worth having and it is doubtful that it is what the 'innocents with the cheque book' thought they wanted.
The lack of them ? The lack ??
Because you think that Apple, Google, Microsoft and Uber are paying their fair share of tax ?
Get those four to pay proper taxes and you could practically double the salary of every teacher in the States. And give them proper equipement. And probably refurbish their schools.
@ Pascal Monett
"Because you think that Apple, Google, Microsoft and Uber are paying their fair share of tax ?"
Actually no, the law says they are. They are paying what they owe as they should be. That doesnt stop people from trying to rob them or make them pay more as if that would reduce the tax burden on everyone else.
"Get those four to pay proper taxes and you could practically double the salary of every teacher in the States. And give them proper equipement. And probably refurbish their schools."
I recognise this dream. The idea that someone is rich so if we rob them we could have milk and honey and even some left over. The communists tried that, it went well. The bad news is if you are in the west you probably are that rich person. You talk of doubling salaries and yet around the world are places without a teacher never mind a school. The idea of equipment or a school building being beyond their dreams. Sorry to tell you but you probably are the rich. And that delusion that just squeezing you would pay for all that for the poor is still nothing more than a dream.
Instead of starting with green eyes start with a real position. What is proper taxes? They already pay what they owe by the law. So what is this proper they should be paying for you to demand spending elsewhere?
"Because you think that Apple, Google, Microsoft and Uber are paying their fair share of tax ?"
Actually no, the law says they are.
Seems to me you two are talking past each other. There is a consistent difference between legal and fair and this is just one example among many. But don't be deluded for one moment into thinking that if corporations that currently employ these very well known legal loopholes to dodge taxes were suddenly forced or enticed to pay their "fair share" that the money would go anywhere near school systems. It would go straight to the interests of the politicians who are currently protecting their corporate buddies.
Look how the tobacco settlement played out in the US. It was sold to the public as restitution for past wrongs to be applied to victims past, present and future but most of the money went to the general fund. The on-shoring taxes is not even being played as anything other than a way to bring money into the US as a whole, but it really means it will go to those better connected than others. I lay odds that a significant portion would be returned in one way or another to those being "taxed" in such a fashion.
Uh, politician pork money would go to schools, also.
Because schools are a fabulous business, plenty, plenty profit to be made, just ask Apple, Dell, Pearson...
School administrators are generally ignorant of the Real World, and wouldn't survive were they to do something productive, they will buy any nonsense with ease. Most teachers chose that profession as it gives them essentially unlimited power to control and mess with people weaker than they. Between one thing and another, plenty room for profit, reminds me of some BOFH stories. Universities are even worse. Maybe not as much as Google, but being in the educational provisioning field has great margins, and is big, big business.
... into a Subservient AIRole to Virtual Machines ... aka The Algorithm?
What Apple, Google, Microsoft and Uber have squirrelled away would easily build countless Brave New Virtualised Worlds with the Advanced IntelAIgent Technologies that Use and Build them.
Is that AI and Virtual Machinery Creating and Presenting Novel Futures for Humankind or its Reverse, Obverse and Converse ...... Humans Sharing Future Novel Creations for AI and Universal Virtual Machine Population ....... and would that be comfortably or uncomfortably too much like an Alien Colonisation to be anything else for Greater IntelAIgent Games Plays.
Would you put your Trust in Global Operating Devices to Remotely Provide All Future Needs with Feeds and Seeds Supplied to, and Handsomely Paid for from Immaculate Source Ponds/Really Deep Dark Pools, Grand AIMaster Pilots Commanding Control for Improving Proven Energy with Increasingly Almighty Power.
The secret in such exotic and erotic sectors/insidious, invidious jerk circles is not to let everything go rushing too quickly to the head, for then can it too easily explode prematurely and entertain disappointment rather than party to further and deeper heavenly fields in ecstasy.:-)
"The US tax authority – the Internal Revenue Service – is looking at how AI can secure and protect taxpayers’ data held on its servers."
And they are most certainely looking at how they can "protect" the corporates and drug barons that finance things on the darker side whilst ensuring that Joe Schmoe on his pitance has the book thrown at him...
I think it interesting that there was no mention of a requirement for the system to detect misuse of IRS resources by bureaucrats determined to weaponize them for political purposes.
Maybe I am being naive but that seems to be one of the IRS's most significant problems, practically since its inception.
This seems to be about hacking rather than fraud, but I agree with you anyway. Security is an area that AI techniques should adapt well to. The environment is finite and comprehensible - more so to software than to humans. The "normal" usage patterns are well known, and deviations are easy to spot. (Whether a particular deviation constitutes an attack, that's another matter. But that's where the "AI" comes in.) And a large part of the job is simply "being awake 24/7", and computers are good at that.
I can see it now IBM will get the contract. It will be behind schedule and over budget. Midway IBM will say we need to switch the data base to our proprietary data base. After a decade of being late and years of congressional hearings the contract will go to MS and housed on azure. At this point in time they few have way sane devs at MS will say we won't touch this kick it over to the windows 10 team. Sure it will be over budget and not do what the specs call for. But it will be a win as it will tie the IRS data base into the windows 10 spy server so the IRS can monitor your computer.
Not that the incompetents with the IRS will ever do it, how about a root cause analysis? One of the issues that makes them a target is the income tax as it requires all sorts of PID to process correctly. If there is no income tax, admittedly a different tax scheme will be needed, then there is no need to collect this treasure trove of information nicely centralized.
if I would not get any more "the IRS has filed a lawsuit against you" phone calls.
They're getting so cheeky, they even leave that as a recorded message, with a return phone number. (yes, I know that caller ID is easy to tamper with, no, to make sure of "catching" you, they leave a call back number as part of the voice message). It would be all too easy to track back this kind of calls to the perpetrators, etc. if you wanted to. Ergo, the pooh-bahs don't... Shame.
As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale.
For enterprises eager to leverage AI to a competitive advantage, a cheaper, pared-down alternative may be a better fit, especially if it can be tuned to particular industries or domains.
That’s where an emerging set of AI startups hoping to carve out a niche: by building sparse, tailored models that, maybe not as powerful as GPT-3, are good enough for enterprise use cases and run on hardware that ditches expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for commodity DDR.
AI is killing the planet. Wait, no – it's going to save it. According to Hewlett Packard Enterprise VP of AI and HPC Evan Sparks and professor of machine learning Ameet Talwalkar from Carnegie Mellon University, it's not entirely clear just what AI might do for – or to – our home planet.
Speaking at the SixFive Summit this week, the duo discussed one of the more controversial challenges facing AI/ML: the technology's impact on the climate.
"What we've seen over the last few years is that really computationally demanding machine learning technology has become increasingly prominent in the industry," Sparks said. "This has resulted in increasing concerns about the associated rise in energy usage and correlated – not always cleanly – concerns about carbon emissions and carbon footprint of these workloads."
Google has placed one of its software engineers on paid administrative leave for violating the company's confidentiality policies.
Since 2021, Blake Lemoine, 41, had been tasked with talking to LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his job on Google's Responsible AI team, looking for whether the bot used discriminatory or hate speech.
LaMDA is "built by fine-tuning a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, with up to 137 billion model parameters, and teaching the models to leverage external knowledge sources," according to Google.
Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.
It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.
But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.
The US Copyright Office and its director Shira Perlmutter have been sued for rejecting one man's request to register an AI model as the author of an image generated by the software.
You guessed correct: Stephen Thaler is back. He said the digital artwork, depicting railway tracks and a tunnel in a wall surrounded by multi-colored, pixelated foliage, was produced by machine-learning software he developed. The author of the image, titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, should be registered to his system, Creativity Machine, and he should be recognized as the owner of the copyrighted work, he argued.
(Owner and author are two separate things, at least in US law: someone who creates material is the author, and they can let someone else own it.)
GPUs are a powerful tool for machine-learning workloads, though they’re not necessarily the right tool for every AI job, according to Michael Bronstein, Twitter’s head of graph learning research.
His team recently showed Graphcore’s AI hardware offered an “order of magnitude speedup when comparing a single IPU processor to an Nvidia A100 GPU,” in temporal graph network (TGN) models.
“The choice of hardware for implementing Graph ML models is a crucial, yet often overlooked problem,” reads a joint article penned by Bronstein with Emanuele Rossi, an ML researcher at Twitter, and Daniel Justus, a researcher at Graphcore.
In brief Facebook and Instagram's parent biz, Meta, was hit with not one, not two, but eight different lawsuits accusing its social media algorithm of causing real harm to young users across the US.
The complaints filed over the last week claim Meta's social media platforms have been designed to be dangerously addictive, driving children and teenagers to view content that increases the risk of eating disorders, suicide, depression, and sleep disorders.
"Social media use among young people should be viewed as a major contributor to the mental health crisis we face in the country," said Andy Birchfield, an attorney representing the Beasley Allen Law Firm, leading the cases, in a statement.
A prankster researcher has trained an AI chatbot on over 134 million posts to notoriously freewheeling internet forum 4chan, then set it live on the site before it was swiftly banned.
Yannic Kilcher, an AI researcher who posts some of his work to YouTube, called his creation "GPT-4chan" and described it as "the worst AI ever". He trained GPT-J 6B, an open source language model, on a dataset containing 3.5 years' worth of posts scraped from 4chan's imageboard. Kilcher then developed a chatbot that processed 4chan posts as inputs and generated text outputs, automatically commenting in numerous threads.
Netizens quickly noticed a 4chan account was posting suspiciously frequently, and began speculating whether it was a bot.
Updated Australia's federal police and Monash University are asking netizens to send in snaps of their younger selves to train a machine-learning algorithm to spot child abuse in photographs.
Researchers are looking to collect images of people aged 17 and under in safe scenarios; they don't want any nudity, even if it's a relatively innocuous picture like a child taking a bath. The crowdsourcing campaign, dubbed My Pictures Matter, is open to those aged 18 and above, who can consent to having their photographs be used for research purposes.
All the images will be amassed into a dataset managed by Monash academics in an attempt to train an AI model to tell the difference between a minor in a normal environment and an exploitative, unsafe situation. The software could, in theory, help law enforcement better automatically and rapidly pinpoint child sex abuse material (aka CSAM) in among thousands upon thousands of photographs under investigation, avoiding having human analysts inspect every single snap.
After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future.
These ambitions were laid out at AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event on Thursday, where it signaled intentions to become a tougher competitor for Intel, Nvidia and other chip companies with a renewed focus on building better and faster chips for servers and other devices, becoming a bigger player in AI, enabling applications with improved software, and making more custom silicon.
"These are where we think we can win in terms of differentiation," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in opening remarks at the event. "It's about compute technology leadership. It's about expanding datacenter leadership. It's about expanding our AI footprint. It's expanding our software capability. And then it's really bringing together a broader custom solutions effort because we think this is a growth area going forward."
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022