YouTube’s lethal crafts, and DeepMind’s new chatbot

Ann Reardon might be the final particular person whose content material you’d anticipate to be banned from YouTube. A former Australian youth employee and a mom of three, she’s been instructing hundreds of thousands of loyal subscribers bake since 2011. However the removing e-mail was referring to a video that was not Reardon’s typical sugar-paste fare.

Since 2018, Reardon has used her platform to warn viewers about harmful new “craft hacks” which might be sweeping YouTube, tackling unsafe actions similar to poaching eggs in a microwave, bleaching strawberries, and utilizing a Coke can and a flame to pop popcorn.

Probably the most critical is “fractal wooden burning”, which includes capturing a high-voltage electrical present throughout dampened wooden to burn a twisting, turning branch-like sample in its floor. The observe has killed no less than 33 individuals since 2016.

On this event, Reardon had been caught up within the inconsistent and messy moderation insurance policies which have lengthy plagued the platform and in doing so, uncovered a failing within the system: How can a warning about dangerous hacks be deemed harmful when the hack movies themselves aren’t? Learn the total story.

—Amelia Tait

DeepMind’s new chatbot makes use of Google searches plus people to offer higher solutions

The information: The trick to creating a superb AI-powered chatbot is perhaps to have people inform it behave—and drive the mannequin to again up its claims utilizing the web, in keeping with a brand new paper by Alphabet-owned AI lab DeepMind. 

The way it works: The chatbot, named Sparrow, is educated on DeepMind’s giant language mannequin Chinchilla. It’s designed to speak with people and reply questions, utilizing a reside Google search or data to tell these solutions. Primarily based on how helpful individuals discover these solutions, it’s then educated utilizing a reinforcement studying algorithm, which learns by trial and error to attain a selected goal. Learn the total story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

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