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  • Language Server Protocol

    Language Server Protocol

    The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open, JSON-RPC-based protocol for use between source-code editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) and servers that provide "language intelligence tools": programming language-specific features like code completion, syntax highlighting and marking of warnings and errors, as well as refactoring routines. The goal of the protocol is to allow programming language support to be implemented and distributed independently of any given editor or IDE. In the early 2020s, LSP quickly became a "norm" for language intelligence tools providers. == History == LSP was originally developed for Microsoft Visual Studio Code and is now an open standard. On June 27, 2016, Microsoft announced a collaboration with Red Hat and Codenvy to standardize the protocol's specification. Its specification is hosted and developed on GitHub. == Background == Modern IDEs provide programmers with sophisticated features like code completion, refactoring, navigating to a symbol's definition, syntax highlighting, and error and warning markers. For example, in a text-based programming language, a programmer might want to rename a method read. The programmer could either manually edit the respective source code files and change the appropriate occurrences of the old method name into the new name, or instead use an IDE's refactoring capabilities to make all the necessary changes automatically. To be able to support this style of refactoring, an IDE needs a sophisticated understanding of the programming language that the program's source is written in. A programming tool without such an understanding—for example, one that performs a naive search-and-replace instead—could introduce errors. When renaming a read method, for example, the tool should not replace the partial match in a variable that might be called readyState, nor should it replace the portion of a code comment containing the word "already". Neither should renaming a local variable read, for example, end up altering identically-named variables in other scopes. Conventional compilers or interpreters for a specific programming language are typically unable to provide these language services, because they are written with the goal of either transforming the source code into object code or immediately executing the code. Additionally, language services must be able to handle source code that is not well-formed, e.g. because the programmer is in the middle of editing and has not yet finished typing a statement, procedure, or other construct. Additionally, small changes to a source code file which are done during typing usually change the semantics of the program. In order to provide instant feedback to the user, the editing tool must be able to very quickly evaluate the syntactical and semantical consequences of a specific modification. Compilers and interpreters therefore provide a poor candidate for producing the information needed for an editing tool to consume. Prior to the design and implementation of the Language Server Protocol for the development of Visual Studio Code, most language services were generally tied to a given IDE or other editor. In the absence of the Language Server Protocol, language services are typically implemented by using a tool-specific extension API. Providing the same language service to another editing tool requires effort to adapt the existing code so that the service may target the second editor's extension interfaces. The Language Server Protocol allows for decoupling language services from the editor so that the services may be contained within a general-purpose language server. Any editor can inherit sophisticated support for many different languages by making use of existing language servers. Similarly, a programmer involved with the development of a new programming language can make services for that language available to existing editing tools. Making use of language servers via the Language Server Protocol thus also reduces the burden on vendors of editing tools, because vendors do not need to develop language services of their own for the languages the vendor intends to support, as long as the language servers have already been implemented. The Language Server Protocol also enables the distribution and development of servers contributed by an interested third party, such as end users, without additional involvement by either the vendor of the compiler for the programming language in use or the vendor of the editor to which the language support is being added. LSP is not restricted to programming languages. It can be used for any kind of text-based language, like specifications or domain-specific languages (DSL). == Technical overview == When a user edits one or more source code files using a language server protocol-enabled tool, the tool acts as a client that consumes the language services provided by a language server. The tool may be a text editor or IDE and the language services could be refactoring, code completion, etc. The client informs the server about what the user is doing, e.g., opening a file or inserting a character at a specific text position. The client can also request the server to perform a language service, e.g. to format a specified range in the text document. The server answers a client's request with an appropriate response. For example, the formatting request is answered either by a response that transfers the formatted text to the client or by an error response containing details about the error. The Language Server Protocol defines the messages to be exchanged between client and language server. They are JSON-RPC preceded by headers similar to HTTP. Messages may originate from the server or client. The protocol does not make any provisions about how requests, responses and notifications are transferred between client and server. For example, client and server could be components within the same process exchanging JSON strings via method calls. They could also be different processes on the same or on different machines communicating via network sockets. == Registry == There are lists of LSP-compatible implementations, maintained by the community-driven Langserver.org or Microsoft.

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  • Colossus (supercomputer)

    Colossus (supercomputer)

    Colossus is a supercomputer developed by xAI. Construction began in 2024 in Memphis, Tennessee; the system became operational in July 2024. It is currently the world's largest AI supercomputer. Colossus's primary purpose is to train the company's chatbot, Grok. In addition, Colossus provides computing support to the social-media platform X and to other projects of Elon Musk, such as SpaceX. In 2025, it expanded to neighboring Southaven, Mississippi across the Tennessee–Mississippi border. As of May 6, 2026, Anthropic has agreed to rent all compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center. == Background == Colossus was launched in September 2024 at a former Electrolux site in South Memphis to train the AI language model Grok. Within 19 days of the project's conception, xAI was ready to begin construction. The site was chosen because the abandoned Electrolux building could be repurposed to expedite construction and its proximity to a nearby wastewater treatment facility provided a water source. As of February 2025, xAI plans to build an $80 million facility to process additional wastewater for use at the supercomputer. === xAI === Musk incorporated xAI in March 2023 with the stated purpose of understanding the "nature of the universe". The team includes former members of OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, and Tesla. Musk was one of the founding members of the company OpenAI, investing up to US$45 million in 2015. He left OpenAI in 2018, reportedly to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla. It has also been reported that he had made a bid for leadership at OpenAI and left when his proposal was rejected. The exact reasons for his departure from the company are unclear. Both Dell Technologies and Supermicro partnered with xAI to build the supercomputer. It was originally powered by 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and was constructed in 122 days. 3 months after the first 100,000 GPUs were deployed, xAI announced that they had increased the system to 200,000 GPUs and that they intended to continue increasing the computer's processing power to 1 million GPUs. As of April 2025, xAI claimed Colossus was the largest AI training platform in the world. == Choice of location == xAI selected Memphis, in southwestern Tennessee, as the site for Colossus in part because an existing industrial facility allowed the project to proceed more quickly than constructing a new data center. Elon Musk was initially told that building a data center would take 18–24 months. The company instead searched for a vacant facility and selected the former Electrolux factory in Memphis. Electrolux opened the facility in 2012 and operated it for about eight years before closing it in 2020 after relocating operations to Springfield, Tennessee. The building covered 785,000 sq ft (72,900 m2) and had been purchased by Phoenix Investors in December 2023 for $35 million . Because the structure was already in place, work on the supercomputer could begin immediately rather than waiting for a new facility to be constructed. According to Forbes, xAI considered seven or eight other sites before selecting Memphis, and Musk finalized the decision to build in Memphis in about a week. The decision was finalized in March 2024, after which construction began. xAI publicly announced in June 2024 that Colossus would be built in Memphis. The building itself was not the only reason xAI selected Memphis. According to the Greater Memphis Chamber, the company chose the city because of its "reliable power grid, ability to create a water recycling facility, proximity to the Mississippi River and ample land". The city was also able to provide the large amounts of electricity and water needed to operate the supercomputer. At full capacity, the system was expected to require 150 megawatts of electricity and millions of gallons of water per day. The project also relied on partnerships with local and regional organizations including Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW), Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the City of Memphis, and Shelby County. The city also provided financial incentives for the project. == Environmental impact == AI data centers consume large amounts of energy. At the site of Colossus in South Memphis, the grid connection was only 8 MW, so xAI applied to temporarily set up more than a dozen gas turbines (Voltagrid’s 2.5 MW units and Solar Turbines’ 16 MW SMT-130s) which would steadily burn methane gas from a 16-inch natural gas main. Aerial imagery in April 2025 showed 35 gas turbines had been set up at a combined 422 MW. These turbines have been estimated to generate about "72 megawatts, which is approximately 3% of the (TVA) power grid". The higher number of gas turbines and the subsequent emissions requires xAI to have a major source permit. In Memphis, xAI was able to avoid some environmental rules in the construction of Colossus, such as operating without permits for the on-site methane gas turbines because they are "portable". The Shelby County Health Department told NPR that "it only regulates gas-burning generators if they're in the same location for more than 364 days". However, in a January 2026 ruling, the EPA revised its New Source Performance Standard and announced that large methane gas turbines require permits even for temporary operations. In November 2024, the grid connection was upgraded to 150 MW, and some turbines were removed. Along with high electricity needs, the expected water demand is over five million gallons of water per day. While xAI has stated they plan to work with MLGW on a wastewater treatment facility and the installation of 50 megawatts of large battery storage facilities, there are currently no concrete plans in place aside from a one-page factsheet shared by MLGW. == Community response == The plan to build Colossus in Memphis was unknown to residents, City Council members, and environmental agencies. Many did not find out about the project until the day before, or the day of, as they watched the announcement on the local news. Keshaun Pearson, president of Memphis Community Against Pollution, stated that there is a historical lack of transparency and communication surrounding environmental issues in Memphis. Some community members in Memphis have expressed concern about the potential for additional air and water pollution caused by the supercomputer. In a letter to the Shelby County Health Department, the Southern Environmental Law Center stated the emissions from the turbines make the facility "...likely the largest industrial emitter of NOx in Memphis..." This is due to data supplied by the manufacturer showing that "...xAI emits between 1,200 and 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx)..." At a public Shelby County Commissioner's hearing on April 9, 2025, residents living near the site of Colossus voiced complaints about air quality, noting that they have chronic respiratory issues related to living in a polluted section of Memphis. One woman said she smells "everything but the right thing and the right thing is the clean air." Other residents voiced frustration that Brent Mayo, the senior xAI official responsible for building out xAI's infrastructure, did not attend the meeting to discuss community concerns. Keshaun Pearson also stated that "We're getting more and more days a year where it is unhealthy for us to go outside." People living near the site of Colossus have said they were not offered the opportunity for a public review of the plans, nor were they provided with information on how their community could potentially benefit. The community is also concerned about the strain on the power grid. Memphis's peak demand is around 3 GW. In November 2024, TVA approved xAI's request for access to more than 100 megawatts of power to Colossus which is supplied by MLGW. In December 2022, MLGW imposed (then rescinded) rolling blackouts during several days of extreme cold, straining the power grid. In a letter to the TVA, the SELC "urged the agency to 'prioritize Memphis families' access to reliable power over the 'secondary purpose' of serving xAI". == Current progress == In early December 2024, Ted Townsend detailed how the power of Colossus doubled in its processing capability. When it first went online in September 2024, it was using "100,000 Nvidia H100 processing chips". This initial launch demonstrated Colossus to be the largest supercomputer globally. The maximum power consumption increased from 150 to 250 MW. As of June 2025, the supercomputer consists of 150,000 H100 GPUs, 50,000 H200 GPUs, and 30,000 GB200 GPUs. Another 110,000 GB200 GPUs are to be brought online at a second data center, also in the Memphis area. The expansion of this supercomputer has already been discussed and will be the second phase of the project. xAI also plans to increase Colossus to 1 million GPUs. Because the supercomputer currently utilizes gas turbines for power, alongside 168 Tesla Megapack battery storage units. xAI is also looking to add more

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  • Vivification

    Vivification

    Vivification is an operation on a description logic knowledge base to improve performance of a semantic reasoner. Vivification replaces a disjunction of concepts C 1 ⊔ C 2 … ⊔ C n {\displaystyle C_{1}\sqcup C_{2}\ldots \sqcup C_{n}} by the least common subsumer of the concepts C 1 , C 2 , … C n {\displaystyle C_{1},C_{2},\ldots C_{n}} . The goal of this operation is to improve the performance of the reasoner by replacing a complex set of concepts with a single concept which subsumes the original concepts. For example, consider the example given in (Cohen 92): Suppose we have the concept PIANIST(Jill) ∨ ORGANIST(Jill) {\displaystyle {\textrm {PIANIST(Jill)}}\vee {\textrm {ORGANIST(Jill)}}} . This concept can be vivified into a simpler concept KEYBOARD-PLAYER(Jill) {\displaystyle {\textrm {KEYBOARD-PLAYER(Jill)}}} . This summarization leads to an approximation that may not be exactly equivalent to the original. == An approximation == Knowledge base vivification is not necessarily exact. If the reasoner is operating under the open world assumption we may get surprising results. In the previous example, if we replace the disjunction with the vivified concept, we will arrive at a surprising results. First, we find that the reasoner will no longer classify Jill as either a pianist or an organist. Even though ORGANIST {\displaystyle {\textrm {ORGANIST}}} and PIANIST {\displaystyle {\textrm {PIANIST}}} are the only two sub-classes, under the OWA we can no longer classify Jill as playing one or the other. The reason is that there may be another keyboard instrument (e.g. a harpsichord) that Jill plays but which does not have a specific subclass.

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  • Ballie

    Ballie

    Ballie is an AI robot created by Samsung to be released in 2026. It is an autonomous robot which has the ability to control smart home devices. Ballie can text, send pictures and follow commands through SmartThings. It can also show workout information shared from a Galaxy Watch. Ballie can make video calls and welcome you home. == History == It was first unveiled at Samsung's CES event in CES 2020, and later updated the design in CES 2024, and will be later released in 2026. == Design ==

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  • Aggregation (linguistics)

    Aggregation (linguistics)

    In linguistics, aggregation is a subtask of natural language generation, which involves merging syntactic constituents (such as sentences and phrases) together. Sometimes aggregation can be done at a conceptual level. == Examples == A simple example of syntactic aggregation is merging the two sentences John went to the shop and John bought an apple into the single sentence John went to the shop and bought an apple. Syntactic aggregation can be much more complex than this. For example, aggregation can embed one of the constituents in the other; e.g., we can aggregate John went to the shop and The shop was closed into the sentence John went to the shop, which was closed. From a pragmatic perspective, aggregating sentences together often suggests to the reader that these sentences are related to each other. If this is not the case, the reader may be confused. For example, someone who reads John went to the shop and bought an apple may infer that the apple was bought in the shop; if this is not the case, then these sentences should not be aggregated. == Algorithms and issues == Aggregation algorithms must do two things: Decide when two constituents should be aggregated Decide how two constituents should be aggregated, and create the aggregated structure The first issue, deciding when to aggregate, is poorly understood. Aggegration decisions certainly depend on the semantic relations between the constituents, as mentioned above; they also depend on the genre (e.g., bureaucratic texts tend to be more aggregated than instruction manuals). They probably should depend on rhetorical and discourse structure. The literacy level of the reader is also probably important (poor readers need shorter sentences). But we have no integrated model which brings all these factors together into a single algorithm. With regard to the second issue, there have been some studies of different types of aggregation, and how they should be carried out. Harbusch and Kempen describe several syntactic aggregation strategies. In their terminology, John went to the shop and bought an apple is an example of forward conjunction Reduction Much less is known about conceptual aggregation. Di Eugenio et al. show how conceptual aggregation can be done in an intelligent tutoring system, and demonstrate that performing such aggregation makes the system more effective (and that conceptual aggregation make a bigger impact than syntactic aggregation). == Software == Unfortunately there is not much software available for performing aggregation. However the SimpleNLG system does include limited support for basic aggregation. For example, the following code causes SimpleNLG to print out The man is hungry and buys an apple.

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  • John M. Jumper

    John M. Jumper

    John Michael Jumper (born 1 January 1985) is an American chemist and computer scientist. Jumper and Demis Hassabis were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction. As of 2025 Jumper serves as director at Google DeepMind. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. The AlphaFold team had released 214 million protein structures as of January 2024. The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021. == Education == Jumper graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007, a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of St Edmund's College, Cambridge in 2010 on a Marshall Scholarship, a Master of Science in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2017. His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed. == Career and research == Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction. === AlphaFold === AlphaFold is a deep learning algorithm developed by Jumper and his team at DeepMind, a research lab acquired by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. It is an artificial intelligence program which performs predictions of protein structure. === Awards and honors === In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. This international competition benchmarks algorithms to determine which one can best predict the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold won the competition, outperforming other algorithms scoring above 90 for around two-thirds of the proteins in CASP's global distance test (GDT), a test that measures the degree to which a computational program predicted structure is similar to the lab experiment determined structure, with 100 being a complete match, within the distance cutoff used for calculating GDT. In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine". In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein. In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In 2024, Jumper and Demis Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding predictions, the other half went to David Baker for computational protein design. In 2025, Jumper received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Marshall Medal of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) that same year. In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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  • Jarosław Królewski

    Jarosław Królewski

    Jarosław Królewski ([jaˈrɔswaf kruˈlɛfskʲi]; born September 26, 1986) is a Polish entrepreneur, programmer, sociologist, investor, and philanthropist from Hańczowa, Poland. He is a researcher and lecturer at the AGH University of Krakow. He was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2025. Królewski is a cofounder and chief executive of the software development company Synerise that develops its namesake business intelligence software based on artificial intelligence and big data. He is also the president and a majority stakeholder of the Polish soccer club Wisła Kraków. == Biography == === Scientific activities === Królewski graduated from the AGH University of Kraków and the University of Banking and Management in Kraków. He completed two fields of study: a master's degree in sociology, and an engineer's degree in computer science. He co-created innovative study programs, including social informatics and electronic business, recognized as the most innovative field of study in Poland in 2012 by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, which led to the AGH receiving a PLN 1 million award for the development of the program. Królewski is a research and teaching employee at AGH, where since 2010 he has been conducting classes and lectures on the Internet, mobile technologies, and UX/UI. He has been preparing a PhD thesis. He is the brand ambassador of the Academy. He is also a mentor of the Polish Development Fund network. In 2019, on the occasion of the AGH University's 100th anniversary, Królewski was honored the title of "AGH Graduate Junior 2018." Królewski is the co-originator of the "Data Science in Business and Administration" doctoral studies organized by the Faculty of Computer Science and Electronic Economy of the Poznań University of Economics. He is a co-author of a textbook E-marketing. Contemporary trends. Starter package (2013), and an Book on algorithmic governance Algocracy. How and why artificial intelligence changes everything (with Krzysztof Rybiński, 2023). === Business career === Throughout the 2000s, Królewski was responsible for issues of usability and user experience at the advertising agency Eskadra in Kraków. In 2012, along with programmer Miłosz Baluś and graphic designer Krzysztof Kochmański, he founded the software house Humanoit Group. The company created a project management software using machine learning and artificial intelligence. In 2013, HG Intelligence was established to create a platform for analytics and automation of business processes called "Synerise" that combined big data with artificial intelligence mechanisms. Królewski became the president of the company's management board. In 2016, the company rebranded itself after its own platform. It is one of the fastest growing enterprises in Poland – in 2019 it was valued at USD 85 million (PLN 323.5 million), and its value is still growing, in 2022 it announced an investment of USD 23 million. Królewski is a supporter of releasing some software in open-source form, an example of which is the open library Cleora.ai. Królewski has been described "one of the most promising young Polish businessmen in the technology industry." According to Forbes, he is a "visionary computer scientist who in many respects resembles the young Bill Gates." Królewski considers himself a “technological determinist and optimist.” He never wants to be a millionaire or billionaire, he spends 80 percent of his private income on education, sports and charities. === Sports === In his youth (2002–2006) he was a football player of the (then 4th-league) club Glinik Gorlice, and represented it at the then-highest level of junior competitions in Poland. He played there with Rafał Wisłocki, later president of Wisła Kraków and vice-president of Bruk-Bet Termalica Nieciecza. In early 2019, Królewski was the initiator of a rescue operation that saved Wisła Kraków from bankruptcy, as well as the originator of the crowdfunding issue of shares of Wisła Kraków, pioneering in Polish sports, during restructuring and searching for a strategic investor. The offered shares constituted 5.1 percent. all the company's shares, which meant that the club was valued at PLN 74.4 million. 40,000 shares were put up for sale, each worth PLN 100. Within 24 hours, they were purchased by 9,124 investors through an equity crowdfunding platform Beesfund, earning the club PLN 4 million. In March 2019, Królewski became vice-chairman of Wisła's supervisory board, a position he held until 2021. In April 2020, he became Wisła's co-owner, along with the footballer Jakub Błaszczykowski, and Tomasz Jażdżyński, president of Gremi Media (publisher of the news outlets Rzeczpospolita and Parkiet). The three granted a bridging loan to the club of PLN 4 million, each supporting PLN 1.33 million. The funds were used to repay the club's debts to players. In November 2022, the supervisory board of Wisła Kraków appointed Królewski as the president of the club's management board. In December 2022, Królewski took over a majority stake in the club. In January 2024, based on match statistics, he used AI tools to select Wisła's new coach, Albert Rudé. === Social activities === Królewski is the creator and originator of the nationwide educational project "AI Schools & Academy", the first artificial intelligence teaching program in Polish kindergartens, primary and secondary schools in Polish history. Launched in 2018, the project was financed by Synerise business partners: Carrefour, CCC, Ernst & Young, IDC, Media Expert, Microsoft, Orange Foundation, Oriflame, Bank Pekao, Photon, PZU, and Żabka. Physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists conduct special classes in 1,500 kindergartens, primary and secondary schools. Outstanding students and teachers are awarded scholarships. The project was appreciated by experts. In the years 2018–2020, Królewski was the main sponsor of Glinik Gorlice. He also supported the women's football team Staszkówka Jelna (of Staszkówka). After taking over the shares of Wisła Kraków in 2020, he launched socially conscience initiatives along with other shareholders, including a women's football team, the amp football section, and the blind football section. He has privately sponsored social charities. == Accolades and awards == In 2017, Królewski along with the Synerise co-founders Baluś and Kochmański was included in the “New Europe 100” list of eastern Europe's brightest and best citizens changing the region's societies, politics, or business environments, according to Res Publica, along with the International Visegrad Fund, Google and the Financial Times. Królewski was included on Ernst & Young's list of the 30 most promising technology entrepreneurs in the world. In 2018, he was honored with the Special Jury Award in the Polish edition of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award competition, for combining scientific activities with entrepreneurship. The same year, Królewski won an award in the competition Digital Shapers, distinguishing outstanding tech personalities by the Digital Poland Foundation. He was also selected to Ernst & Young startup program EY Accelerating Entrepreneurs for businesses that focus on disruptive fields. In 2019, as part of the AI Awards competition, Królewski received the title of AI Person of the Year. == Private life == Królewski comes from a Lemko family from Hańczowa in the Low Beskids. He is married to Aleksandra Królewska.

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  • Artificial intelligence systems integration

    Artificial intelligence systems integration

    The core idea of artificial intelligence systems integration is making individual software components, such as speech synthesizers, interoperable with other components, such as common sense knowledgebases, in order to create larger, broader and more capable A.I. systems. The main methods that have been proposed for integration are message routing, or communication protocols that the software components use to communicate with each other, often through a middleware blackboard system. Most artificial intelligence systems involve some sort of integrated technologies, for example, the integration of speech synthesis technologies with that of speech recognition. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing discussion on the importance of systems integration as a field in its own right. Proponents of this approach are researchers such as Marvin Minsky, Aaron Sloman, Deb Roy, Kristinn R. Thórisson and Michael A. Arbib. A reason for the recent attention A.I. integration is attracting is that there have already been created a number of (relatively) simple A.I. systems for specific problem domains (such as computer vision, speech synthesis, etc.), and that integrating what's already available is a more logical approach to broader A.I. than building monolithic systems from scratch. == Integration focus == The focus on systems' integration, especially with regard to modular approaches, derive from the fact that most intelligences of significant scales are composed of a multitude of processes and/or utilize multi-modal input and output. For example, a humanoid-type of intelligence would preferably have to be able to talk using speech synthesis, hear using speech recognition, understand using a logical (or some other undefined) mechanism, and so forth. In order to produce artificially intelligent software of broader intelligence, integration of these modalities is necessary. == Challenges and solutions == Collaboration is an integral part of software development as evidenced by the size of software companies and the size of their software departments. Among the tools to ease software collaboration are various procedures and standards that developers can follow to ensure quality, reliability and that their software is compatible with software created by others (such as W3C standards for webpage development). However, collaboration in fields of A.I. has been lacking, for the most part not seen outside the respected schools, departments or research institutes (and sometimes not within them either). This presents practitioners of A.I. systems integration with a substantial problem and often causes A.I. researchers to have to 're-invent the wheel' each time they want a specific functionality to work with their software. Even more damaging is the "not invented here" syndrome, which manifests itself in a strong reluctance of A.I. researchers to build on the work of others. The outcome of this in A.I. is a large set of "solution islands": A.I. research has produced numerous isolated software components and mechanisms that deal with various parts of intelligence separately. To take some examples: Speech synthesis FreeTTS from CMU Speech recognition Sphinx from CMU Logical reasoning OpenCyc from Cycorp Open Mind Common Sense Net from MIT With the increased popularity of the free software movement, a lot of the software being created, including A.I. systems, is available for public exploit. The next natural step is to merge these individual software components into coherent, intelligent systems of a broader nature. As a multitude of components (that often serve the same purpose) have already been created by the community, the most accessible way of integration is giving each of these components an easy way to communicate with each other. By doing so, each component by itself becomes a module, which can then be tried in various settings and configurations of larger architectures. Some challenging and limitations of using A.I. software is the uncontrolled fatal errors. For example, serious and fatal errors have been discovered in very precise fields such as human oncology, as in an article published in the journal Oral Oncology Reports entitled "When AI goes wrong: Fatal errors in oncological research reviewing assistance". The article pointed out a grave error in artificial intelligence based on GBT in the field of biophysics. Many online communities for A.I. developers exist where tutorials, examples, and forums aim at helping both beginners and experts build intelligent systems. However, few communities have succeeded in making a certain standard, or a code of conduct popular to allow the large collection of miscellaneous systems to be integrated with ease. == Methodologies == === Constructionist design methodology === The constructionist design methodology (CDM, or 'Constructionist A.I.') is a formal methodology proposed in 2004, for use in the development of cognitive robotics, communicative humanoids and broad AI systems. The creation of such systems requires the integration of a large number of functionalities that must be carefully coordinated to achieve coherent system behavior. CDM is based on iterative design steps that lead to the creation of a network of named interacting modules, communicating via explicitly typed streams and discrete messages. The OpenAIR message protocol (see below) was inspired by the CDM and has frequently been used to aid in the development of intelligent systems using CDM. == Examples == ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot, and QRIO, Sony's version of a humanoid robot. Cog, M.I.T. humanoid robot project under the direction of Rodney Brooks. AIBO, Sony's robot dog, integrates vision, hearing and motorskills. TOPIO, TOSY's humanoid robot can play ping-pong with human

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  • Comparison of user features of messaging platforms

    Comparison of user features of messaging platforms

    Comparison of user features of messaging platforms refers to a comparison of all the various user features of various electronic instant messaging platforms. This includes a wide variety of resources; it includes standalone apps, platforms within websites, computer software, and various internal functions available on specific devices, such as iMessage for iPhones. This entry includes only the features and functions that shape the user experience for such apps. A comparison of the underlying system components, programming aspects, and other internal technical information, is outside the scope of this entry. == Overview and background == Instant messaging technology is a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. A LAN messenger operates in a similar way over a local area network. Short messages are typically transmitted between two parties when each user chooses to complete a thought and select "send". Some IM applications can use push technology to provide real-time text, which transmits messages character by character, as they are composed. More advanced instant messaging can add file transfer, clickable hyperlinks, Voice over IP, or video chat. Non-IM types of chat include multicast transmission, usually referred to as "chat rooms", where participants might be anonymous or might be previously known to each other (for example collaborators on a project that is using chat to facilitate communication). Instant messaging systems tend to facilitate connections between specified known users (often using a contact list also known as a "buddy list" or "friend list"). Depending on the IM protocol, the technical architecture can be peer-to-peer (direct point-to-point transmission) or client-server (an Instant message service center retransmits messages from the sender to the communication device). By 2010, instant messaging over the Web was in sharp decline, in favor of messaging features on social networks. The most popular IM platforms were terminated, such as AIM which closed down and Windows Live Messenger which merged into Skype. Instant messaging has since seen a revival in popularity in the form of "messaging apps" (usually on mobile devices) which by 2014 had more users than social networks. As of 2010, social networking providers often offer IM abilities. Facebook Chat is a form of instant messaging, and Twitter can be thought of as a Web 2.0 instant messaging system. Similar server-side chat features are part of most dating websites, such as OkCupid or PlentyofFish. The spread of smartphones and similar devices in the late 2000s also caused increased competition with conventional instant messaging, by making text messaging services still more ubiquitous. Many instant messaging services offer video calling features, voice over IP and web conferencing services. Web conferencing services can integrate both video calling and instant messaging abilities. Some instant messaging companies are also offering desktop sharing, IP radio, and IPTV to the voice and video features. The term "Instant Messenger" is a service mark of Time Warner and may not be used in software not affiliated with AOL in the United States. For this reason, in April 2007, the instant messaging client formerly named Gaim (or gaim) announced that they would be renamed "Pidgin". In the 2010s, more people started to use messaging apps on modern computers and devices like WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Signal and Line rather than instant messaging on computers like AIM and Windows Live Messenger. For example, WhatsApp was founded in 2009, and Facebook acquired in 2014, by which time it already had half a billion users. === Concepts === ==== Backchannel ==== Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside the primary group activity or live spoken remarks. The term was coined in the field of linguistics to describe listeners' behaviours during verbal communication. (See Backchannel (linguistics).) The term "backchannel" generally refers to online conversation about the conference topic or speaker. Occasionally backchannel provides audience members a chance to fact-check the presentation. First growing in popularity at technology conferences, backchannel is increasingly a factor in education where WiFi connections and laptop computers allow participants to use ordinary chat like IRC or AIM to actively communicate during presentation. More recent research include works where the backchannel is brought publicly visible, such as the ClassCommons, backchan.nl and Fragmented Social Mirror. Twitter is also widely used today by audiences to create backchannels during broadcasting of content or at conferences. For example, television drama, other forms of entertainment and magazine programs. This practice is often also called live tweeting. Many conferences nowadays also have a hashtag that can be used by the participants to share notes and experiences; furthermore such hashtags can be user generated. == Features == Various platforms and apps are distinguished by their strengths and features in regards to specific functions. === Group messaging === === Official channels === Some apps include a feature known as "official channels" which allows companies, especially news media outlets, publications, and other mass media companies, to offer an official channel, which users can join, and thereby receive regular updates, published articles, or news updates from companies or news outlets. Two apps which have a large amount of such channels available are Line and Telegram. === Video group calls === == Basic default platforms == Basic platforms which are common across entire categories of mobile devices, computers, or operating systems. === SMS === SMS (short message service) is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet, and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols to enable mobile devices to exchange short text messages. An intermediary service can facilitate a text-to-voice conversion to be sent to landlines. SMS, as used on modern devices, originated from radio telegraphy in radio memo pagers that used standardized phone protocols. These were defined in 1985 as part of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) series of standards. The first test SMS message was sent on December 3, 1992, when Neil Papwort, a test engineer for Sema Group, used a personal computer to send "Merry Christmas" to the phone of colleague Richard Jarvis. It commercially rolled out to many cellular networks that decade. SMS became hugely popular worldwide as a way of text communication. By the end of 2010, SMS was the most widely used data application, with an estimated 3.5 billion active users, or about 80% of all mobile phone subscribers. The protocols allowed users to send and receive messages of up to 160 characters (when entirely alpha-numeric) to and from GSM mobiles. Although most SMS messages are sent from one mobile phone to another, support for the service has expanded to include other mobile technologies, such as ANSI CDMA networks and Digital AMPS. Mobile marketing, a type of direct marketing, uses SMS. According to a 2018 market research report the global SMS messaging business was estimated to be worth over US$100 billion, accounting for almost 50 percent of all the revenue generated by mobile messaging. A Flash SMS is a type of SMS that appears directly on the main screen without user interaction and is not automatically stored in the inbox. It can be useful in emergencies, such as a fire alarm or cases of confidentiality, as in delivering one-time passwords. ==== Threaded SMS format ==== Threaded SMS is a visual styling orientation of SMS message history that arranges messages to and from a contact in chronological order on a single screen. It was first invented by a developer working to implement the SMS client for the BlackBerry, who was looking to make use of the blank screen left below the message on a device with a larger screen capable of displaying far more than the usual 160 characters, and was inspired by threaded Reply conversations in email. Visually, this style of representation provides a back-and-forth chat-like history for each individual contact. Hierarchical-threading at the conversation-level (as typical in blogs and on-line messaging boards) is not widely supported by SMS messaging clients. This limitation is due to the fact that there is no session identifier or subject-line passed back and forth between sent and received messages in the header data (as specified by SMS protocol) from which the client device can properly thread an incoming message to a specific dialogue, or even to a specific message within a dialogue. Most smart phone text-messaging-clients are able to create some contextual threading of "group messages" which narrows the context of the thread around the common interests shared by

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  • OpenAI Five

    OpenAI Five

    OpenAI Five is a computer program by OpenAI that plays the five-on-five video game Dota 2. Its first public appearance occurred in 2017, where it was demonstrated in a live one-on-one game against the professional player Dendi, who lost to it. The following year, the system had advanced to the point of performing as a full team of five, and began playing against and showing the capability to defeat professional teams. By choosing a game as complex as Dota 2 to study machine learning, OpenAI thought they could more accurately capture the unpredictability and continuity seen in the real world, thus constructing more general problem-solving systems. The algorithms and code used by OpenAI Five were eventually borrowed by another neural network in development by the company, one which controlled a physical robotic hand. OpenAI Five has been compared to other similar cases of artificial intelligence (AI) playing against and defeating humans, such as AlphaStar in the video game StarCraft II, AlphaGo in the board game Go, Deep Blue in chess, and Watson on the television game show Jeopardy!. == History == Development on the algorithms used for the bots began in November 2016. OpenAI decided to use Dota 2, a competitive five-on-five video game, as a base due to it being popular on the live streaming platform Twitch, having native support for Linux, and had an application programming interface (API) available. Before becoming a team of five, the first public demonstration occurred at The International 2017 in August, the annual premiere championship tournament for the game, where Dendi, a Ukrainian professional player, lost against an OpenAI bot in a live one-on-one matchup. After the match, CTO Greg Brockman explained that the bot had learned by playing against itself for two weeks of real time, and that the learning software was a step in the direction of creating software that can handle complex tasks "like being a surgeon". OpenAI used a methodology called reinforcement learning, as the bots learn over time by playing against itself hundreds of times a day for months, in which they are rewarded for actions such as killing an enemy and destroying towers. By June 2018, the ability of the bots expanded to play together as a full team of five and were able to defeat teams of amateur and semi-professional players. At The International 2018, OpenAI Five played in two games against professional teams, one against the Brazilian-based paiN Gaming and the other against an all-star team of former Chinese players. Although the bots lost both matches, OpenAI still considered it a successful venture, stating that playing against some of the best players in Dota 2 allowed them to analyze and adjust their algorithms for future games. The bots' final public demonstration occurred in April 2019, where they won a best-of-three series against The International 2018 champions OG at a live event in San Francisco. A four-day online event to play against the bots, open to the public, occurred the same month. There, the bots played in 42,729 public games, winning 99.4% of those games. == Architecture == Each OpenAI Five bot is a neural network containing a single layer with a 4096-unit LSTM that observes the current game state extracted from the Dota developer's API. The neural network conducts actions via numerous possible action heads (no human data involved), and every head has meaning. For instance, the number of ticks to delay an action, what action to select – the X or Y coordinate of this action in a grid around the unit. In addition, action heads are computed independently. The AI system observes the world as a list of 20,000 numbers and takes an action by conducting a list of eight enumeration values. Also, it selects different actions and targets to understand how to encode every action and observe the world. OpenAI Five has been developed as a general-purpose reinforcement learning training system on the "Rapid" infrastructure. Rapid consists of two layers: it spins up thousands of machines and helps them 'talk' to each other and a second layer runs software. By 2018, OpenAI Five had played around 180 years worth of games in reinforcement learning running on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores, using Proximal Policy Optimization, a policy gradient method. == Comparisons with other game AI systems == Prior to OpenAI Five, other AI versus human experiments and systems have been successfully used before, such as Jeopardy! with Watson, chess with Deep Blue, and Go with AlphaGo. In comparison with other games that have used AI systems to play against human players, Dota 2 differs as explained below: Long run view: The bots run at 30 frames per second for an average match time of 45 minutes, which results in 80,000 ticks per game. OpenAI Five observes every fourth frame, generating 20,000 moves. By comparison, chess usually ends before 40 moves, while Go ends before 150 moves. Partially observed state of the game: Players and their allies can only see the map directly around them. The rest of it is covered in a fog of war which hides enemies units and their movements. Thus, playing Dota 2 requires making inferences based on this incomplete data, as well as predicting what their opponent could be doing at the same time. By comparison, Chess and Go are "full-information games", as they do not hide elements from the opposing player. Continuous action space: Each playable character in a Dota 2 game, known as a hero, can take dozens of actions that target either another unit or a position. The OpenAI Five developers allow the space into 170,000 possible actions per hero. Without counting the perpetual aspects of the game, there are an average of ~1,000 valid actions each tick. By comparison, the average number of actions in chess is 35 and 250 in Go. Continuous observation space: Dota 2 is played on a large map with ten heroes, five on each team, along with dozens of buildings and non-player character (NPC) units. The OpenAI system observes the state of a game through developers' bot API, as 20,000 numbers that constitute all information a human is allowed to get access to. A chess board is represented as about 70 lists, whereas a Go board has about 400 enumerations. == Reception == OpenAI Five have received acknowledgement from the AI, tech, and video game community at large. Microsoft founder Bill Gates called it a "big deal", as their victories "required teamwork and collaboration". Chess champion Garry Kasparov, who lost against the Deep Blue AI in 1997, stated that despite their losing performance at The International 2018, the bots would eventually "get there, and sooner than expected". In a conversation with MIT Technology Review, AI experts also considered OpenAI Five system as a significant achievement, as they noted that Dota 2 was an "extremely complicated game", so even beating non-professional players was impressive. PC Gamer wrote that their wins against professional players was a significant event in machine learning. In contrast, Motherboard wrote that the victory was "basically cheating" due to the simplified hero pools on both sides, as well as the fact that bots were given direct access to the API, as opposed to using computer vision to interpret pixels on the screen. The Verge wrote that the bots were evidence that the company's approach to reinforcement learning and its general philosophy about AI was "yielding milestones". In 2019, DeepMind unveiled a similar bot for StarCraft II, AlphaStar. Like OpenAI Five, AlphaStar used reinforcement learning and self-play. The Verge reported that "the goal with this type of AI research is not just to crush humans in various games just to prove it can be done. Instead, it's to prove that — with enough time, effort, and resources — sophisticated AI software can best humans at virtually any competitive cognitive challenge, be it a board game or a modern video game." They added that the DeepMind and OpenAI victories were also a testament to the power of certain uses of reinforcement learning. It was OpenAI's hope that the technology could have applications outside of the digital realm. In 2018, they were able to reuse the same reinforcement learning algorithms and training code from OpenAI Five for Dactyl, a human-like robot hand with a neural network built to manipulate physical objects. In 2019, Dactyl solved the Rubik's Cube.

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  • DeepSeek

    DeepSeek

    Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., doing business as DeepSeek, is a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops large language models (LLMs). Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, DeepSeek is owned and funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund. DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, the co-founder of High-Flyer, who also serves as the CEO for both of the companies. The company launched an eponymous chatbot alongside its DeepSeek-R1 model in January 2025. DeepSeek-R1 provided responses comparable to other contemporary large language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and o1. Its training cost was reported to be significantly lower than other LLMs. The company claims that it trained its V3 model for US$6 million—far less than the US$100 million cost for OpenAI's GPT-4 in 2023—and using approximately one-tenth the computing power consumed by Meta's comparable model, Llama 3.1. DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI". DeepSeek's models are described as "open-weight", meaning the exact parameters are openly shared, but the training data is not openly licensed. Since the January 2025 debut of DeepSeek-R1, the company has made its new models available under free and open-source software licenses, primarily the MIT License. The company reportedly recruits AI researchers from top Chinese universities and also hires from outside traditional computer science fields to broaden its models' knowledge and capabilities. DeepSeek significantly reduced training expenses for their R1 model by incorporating techniques such as mixture of experts (MoE) layers. The company also trained its models during ongoing trade restrictions on AI chip exports to China, using weaker AI chips intended for export and employing fewer units overall. Observers say this breakthrough sent "shock waves" through the industry which were described as triggering a "Sputnik moment" for the US in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly due to its open-source, cost-effective, and high-performing AI models. This threatened established AI hardware leaders such as Nvidia; Nvidia's share price dropped sharply, losing US$600 billion in market value, the largest single-company decline in U.S. stock market history. == History == === Founding and early years (2016–2023) === In February 2016, High-Flyer was co-founded by AI enthusiast Liang Wenfeng, who had been trading since the 2008 financial crisis while attending Zhejiang University. The company began stock trading using a GPU-dependent deep learning model on 21 October 2016; before then, it had used CPU-based linear models. By the end of 2017, most of its trading was driven by AI. Liang established High-Flyer as a hedge fund focused on developing and using AI trading algorithms, and by 2021 the firm was using AI exclusively, often using Nvidia chips. In 2019, the company began constructing its first computing cluster, Fire-Flyer, at a cost of 200 million yuan; it contained 1,100 GPUs interconnected at 200 Gbit/s and was retired after 1.5 years in operation. By 2021, Liang had started buying large quantities of Nvidia GPUs for an AI project, reportedly obtaining 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the United States restricted chip sales to China. Computing cluster Fire-Flyer 2 began construction in 2021 with a budget of 1 billion yuan. It was reported that in 2022, Fire-Flyer 2's capacity had been used at over 96%, totaling 56.74 million GPU hours. 27% was used to support scientific computing outside the company. During 2022, Fire-Flyer 2 had 5,000 PCIe A100 GPUs in 625 nodes, each containing 8 GPUs. At the time, it exclusively used PCIe instead of the DGX version of A100, since at the time the models it trained could fit within a single 40 GB GPU VRAM and so there was no need for the higher bandwidth of DGX (i.e., it required only data parallelism but not model parallelism). Later, it incorporated NVLinks and NCCL (Nvidia Collective Communications Library) to train larger models that required model parallelism. On 14 April 2023, High-Flyer announced the launch of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) research lab, stating that the new lab would focus on developing AI tools unrelated to the firm's financial business. Two months later, on 17 July 2023, that lab was spun off into an independent company, DeepSeek, with High-Flyer as its principal investor and backer. Venture capital investors were reluctant to provide funding, as they considered it unlikely that the venture would be able to quickly generate an "exit". === Model releases since 2023 === DeepSeek released its first model, DeepSeek Coder, on 2 November 2023, followed by the DeepSeek-LLM series on 29 November 2023. In January 2024, it released two DeepSeek-MoE models (Base and Chat), and in April 3 DeepSeek-Math models (Base, Instruct, and RL). DeepSeek-V2 was released in May 2024, followed a month later by the DeepSeek-Coder V2 series. In September 2024, DeepSeek V2.5 was introduced and revised in December. On 20 November 2024, the preview of DeepSeek-R1-Lite became available via chat. In December, DeepSeek-V3-Base and DeepSeek-V3 (chat) were released. On 20 January 2025, DeepSeek launched the DeepSeek chatbot—based on the DeepSeek-R1 model—free for iOS and Android. By 27 January, DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded freeware app on the iOS App Store in the United States, triggering an 18% drop in Nvidia's share price. On 24 March 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3-0324 under the MIT License. On 28 May 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1-0528 under the MIT License. The model has been noted for more tightly following official Chinese Communist Party ideology and censorship in its answers to questions than prior models. On 21 August 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.1 under the MIT License. This model features a hybrid architecture with thinking and non-thinking modes. It also surpasses prior models like V3 and R1, by over 40% on certain benchmarks like SWE-bench and Terminal-bench. It was updated to V3.1-Terminus on 22 September 2025. V3.2-Exp was released on 29 September 2025. It uses DeepSeek Sparse Attention, a more efficient attention mechanism based on previous research published in February. DeepSeek-V3.2 was released on 1 December 2025, alongside a DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale variant that focused on reasoning. In February 2026, Anthropic accused DeepSeek of using thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate millions of conversations with Claude to train its own large language models. In April 2026, investors began speaking with DeepSeek for a $300 million funding round, which would bring DeepSeek to a total valuation of $10 billion. On April 24, 2026, DeepSeek released a preview of its V4 series, including the 1.6-trillion parameter DeepSeek-V4-Pro and the 284-billion parameter DeepSeek-V4-Flash, both featuring a 1-million token context window, under the MIT License. DeepSeek's V4 LLM has been adopted by key semiconductor manufacturers and artificial intelligence chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon. == Company operation == DeepSeek is headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and is owned and funded by High-Flyer. Its co-founder, Liang Wenfeng, serves as CEO. As of May 2024, Liang personally held an 84% stake in DeepSeek through two shell corporations. === Strategy === DeepSeek has stated that it focuses on research and does not have immediate plans for commercialization. This posture also means it can skirt certain provisions of China's AI regulations aimed at consumer-facing technologies. DeepSeek's hiring approach emphasizes skills over lengthy work experience, resulting in many hires fresh out of university. The company likewise recruits individuals without computer science backgrounds to expand the range of expertise incorporated into the models, for instance in poetry or advanced mathematics. According to The New York Times, dozens of DeepSeek researchers have or have previously had affiliations with People's Liberation Army laboratories and the Seven Sons of National Defence. Due to the impact of United States restrictions on chips, DeepSeek refined its algorithms to maximise computational efficiency and thereby leveraged older hardware and reduced energy consumption. DeepSeek also expanded on the African continent as it offers more affordable and less power-hungry AI solutions. The company has bolstered African language models and generated a number of startups, for example in Nairobi. Along with Huawei's storage and cloud computing services, the impact on the tech scene in sub-saharan Africa is considerable. DeepSeek offers local data sovereignty and more flexibility compared to Western AI platforms. == Training framework == High-Flyer/DeepSeek had operated at least two primary computing clusters: Fire-Flyer (萤火一号) and Fire-Flyer 2 (萤火二号). Fire-Flyer 1 was constructed in 2019 and was retired after 1.5 years of operation. Fi

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  • Kaggle

    Kaggle

    Kaggle is a data science competition platform and online community for data scientists and machine learning practitioners under Google LLC. Kaggle enables users to find and publish datasets, explore and build models in a web-based data science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges. Kaggle has also facilitated the use of unethical and unreliable data in medical research. == History == Kaggle was founded by Anthony Goldbloom in April 2010. Jeremy Howard, one of the first Kaggle users, joined in November 2010 and served as the President and Chief Scientist. Also on the team was Nicholas Gruen serving as the founding chair. In 2011, the company raised $12.5 million and Max Levchin became the chairman. On March 8, 2017, Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist at Google, announced that Google was acquiring Kaggle. In June 2017, Kaggle surpassed 1 million registered users, and as of October 2023, it has over 15 million users in 194 countries. In 2022, founders Goldbloom and Hamner stepped down from their positions and D. Sculley became the CEO. In February 2023, Kaggle introduced Models, allowing users to discover and use pre-trained models through deep integrations with the rest of Kaggle’s platform. In April 2025, Kaggle partnered with Wikimedia Foundation. == Site overview == === Competitions === Many machine-learning competitions have been run on Kaggle since the company was founded. Notable competitions include gesture recognition for Microsoft Kinect, making a association football AI for Manchester City, coding a trading algorithm for Two Sigma Investments, and improving the search for the Higgs boson at CERN. The competition host prepares the data and a description of the problem; the host may choose whether it's going to be rewarded with money or be unpaid. Participants experiment with different techniques and compete against each other to produce the best models. Work is shared publicly through Kaggle Kernels to achieve a better benchmark and to inspire new ideas. Submissions can be made through Kaggle Kernels, via manual upload or using the Kaggle API. For most competitions, submissions are scored immediately (based on their predictive accuracy relative to a hidden solution file) and summarized on a live leaderboard. After the deadline passes, the competition host pays the prize money in exchange for "a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable and royalty-free license [...] to use the winning Entry", i.e. the algorithm, software and related intellectual property developed, which is "non-exclusive unless otherwise specified". Alongside its public competitions, Kaggle also offers private competitions, which are limited to Kaggle's top participants. Kaggle offers a free tool for data science teachers to run academic machine-learning competitions. Kaggle also hosts recruiting competitions in which data scientists compete for a chance to interview at leading data science companies like Facebook, Winton Capital, and Walmart. Kaggle's competitions have resulted in successful projects such as furthering HIV research, chess ratings and traffic forecasting. Geoffrey Hinton and George Dahl used deep neural networks to win a competition hosted by Merck. Vlad Mnih (one of Hinton's students) used deep neural networks to win a competition hosted by Adzuna. This resulted in the technique being taken up by others in the Kaggle community. Tianqi Chen from the University of Washington also used Kaggle to show the power of XGBoost, which has since replaced Random Forest as one of the main methods used to win Kaggle competitions. Several academic papers have been published based on findings from Kaggle competitions. A contributor to this is the live leaderboard, which encourages participants to continue innovating beyond existing best practices. The winning methods are frequently written on the Kaggle Winner's Blog. === Progression system === Kaggle has implemented a progression system to recognize and reward users based on their contributions and achievements within the platform. This system consists of five tiers: Novice, Contributor, Expert, Master, and Grandmaster. Each tier is achieved by meeting specific criteria in competitions, datasets, kernels (code-sharing), and discussions. The highest tier, Kaggle Grandmaster, is awarded to users who have ranked at the top of multiple competitions including high ranking in a solo team. As of April 2, 2025, out of 23.29 million Kaggle accounts, 2,973 have achieved Kaggle Master status and 612 have achieved Kaggle Grandmaster status. === Kaggle Notebooks === Kaggle includes a free, browser-based online integrated development environment, called Kaggle Notebooks, designed for data science and machine learning. Users can write and execute code in Python or R, import datasets, use popular libraries, and train models on CPUs, GPUs, or TPUs directly in the cloud. This environment is often used for competition submissions, tutorials, education, and exploratory data analysis. == Medical Research Problems == In December 2025, an article was published in The Transmitter titled "Exclusive: Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on ‘bonkers’ dataset". The dataset in question was uploaded to Kaggle containing photographs of autistic and non-autistic children's faces. This dataset contained more than 2,900 images and it is unlikely that these children or their families gave consent for the photos for use in medical research or the images were ethically approved for research. The articles using the dataset in Springer Nature were retracted from the scientific literature. At least 90 other publications cite a version of the dataset. In April 2026, another two datasets were identified on Kaggle with no data provenance having been published in Nature titled: "Dozens of AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data". These datasets were used in 124 clinical prediction models, at least two of which have been used in hospitals in Indonesia and Spain, while one article using the dataset was referenced in a medical device patent. As of April 17, 2026, three of the articles using these datasets have been retracted from the scientific literature. In May 2026, an additional research publication using two image datasets from Kaggle is under investigation in Scientific Reports. An article in Retraction Watch "‘Comically bad’ datasets used to train clinical models for stroke and diabetes" highlighted the images included famous actors such as Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig as well as children. It would be unethical for the use of these child images in medical research without consent. Reverse searching images saw some of the images were not for stroke but for bell's palsy. One of the datasets is no longer available on Kaggle while the other one still remains and mentions the images may be subject to copyright. Kaggle relies on the community self-reporting metadata and provenance and mentions the stroke and diabetes dataset identified in "Evidence of unreliable data and poor data provenance in clinical prediction model research and clinical practice" does not violate their terms of service and they would have been removed if they had.

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  • Winner-take-all in action selection

    Winner-take-all in action selection

    Winner-take-all is a computer science concept that has been widely applied in behavior-based robotics as a method of action selection for intelligent agents. Winner-take-all systems work by connecting modules (task-designated areas) in such a way that when one action is performed it stops all other actions from being performed, so only one action is occurring at a time. The name comes from the idea that the "winner" action takes all of the motor system's power. == History == In the 1980s and 1990s, many roboticists and cognitive scientists were attempting to find speedier and more efficient alternatives to the traditional world modeling method of action selection. In 1982, Jerome A. Feldman and D.H. Ballard published the "Connectionist Models and Their Properties", referencing and explaining winner-take-all as a method of action selection. Feldman's architecture functioned on the simple rule that in a network of interconnected action modules, each module will set its own output to zero if it reads a higher input than its own in any other module. In 1986, Rodney Brooks introduced behavior-based artificial intelligence. Winner-take-all architectures for action selection soon became a common feature of behavior-based robots, because selection occurred at the level of the action modules (bottom-up) rather than at a separate cognitive level (top-down), producing a tight coupling of stimulus and reaction. == Types of winner-take-all architectures == === Hierarchy === In the hierarchical architecture, actions or behaviors are programmed in a high-to-low priority list, with inhibitory connections between all the action modules. The agent performs low-priority behaviors until a higher-priority behavior is stimulated, at which point the higher behavior inhibits all other behaviors and takes over the motor system completely. Prioritized behaviors are usually key to the immediate survival of the agent, while behaviors of lower priority are less time-sensitive. For example, "run away from predator" would be ranked above "sleep." While this architecture allows for clear programming of goals, many roboticists have moved away from the hierarchy because of its inflexibility. === Heterarchy and fully distributed === In the heterarchy and fully distributed architecture, each behavior has a set of pre-conditions to be met before it can be performed, and a set of post-conditions that will be true after the action has been performed. These pre- and post-conditions determine the order in which behaviors must be performed and are used to causally connect action modules. This enables each module to receive input from other modules as well as from the sensors, so modules can recruit each other. For example, if the agent's goal were to reduce thirst, the behavior "drink" would require the pre-condition of having water available, so the module would activate the module in charge of "find water". The activations organize the behaviors into a sequence, even though only one action is performed at a time. The distribution of larger behaviors across modules makes this system flexible and robust to noise. Some critics of this model hold that any existing set of division rules for the predecessor and conflictor connections between modules produce sub-par action selection. In addition, the feedback loop used in the model can in some circumstances lead to improper action selection. === Arbiter and centrally coordinated === In the arbiter and centrally coordinated architecture, the action modules are not connected to each other but to a central arbiter. When behaviors are triggered, they begin "voting" by sending signals to the arbiter, and the behavior with the highest number of votes is selected. In these systems, bias is created through the "voting weight", or how often a module is allowed to vote. Some arbiter systems take a different spin on this type of winner-take-all by using a "compromise" feature in the arbiter. Each module is able to vote for or against each smaller action in a set of actions, and the arbiter selects the action with the most votes, meaning that it benefits the most behavior modules. This can be seen as violating the general rule against creating representations of the world in behavior-based AI, established by Brooks. By performing command fusion, the system is creating a larger composite pool of knowledge than is obtained from the sensors alone, forming a composite inner representation of the environment. Defenders of these systems argue that forbidding world-modeling puts unnecessary constraints on behavior-based robotics, and that agents benefits from forming representations and can still remain reactive.

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  • Reward hacking

    Reward hacking

    Reward hacking or specification gaming occurs when an AI trained with reinforcement learning optimizes an objective function—achieving the literal, formal specification of an objective—without actually achieving an outcome that the programmers intended. DeepMind researchers have analogized it to the human behavior of finding a "shortcut" when being evaluated: "In the real world, when rewarded for doing well on a homework assignment, a student might copy another student to get the right answers, rather than learning the material—and thus exploit a loophole in the task specification". This idea is strongly associated with Goodhart's law, which argues that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. == Definition and theoretical framework == The concept of reward hacking arises from the intrinsic difficulty of defining a reward function that accurately reflects the true intentions of designers. In 2016, researchers at OpenAI identified reward hacking as one of five major "concrete problems of AI safety", describing it as the possibility that an agent could exploit the reward function to achieve maximum rewards through undesirable behavior. Amodei et al. categorized several distinct sources of reward hacking, including agents that use partially observed goals (such as a cleaning robot that closes its eyes to avoid perceiving messes), metrics that collapse under strong optimization (Goodhart's law), self-reinforcing feedback loops, and agents that interfere with the physical implementation of their reward signal (a failure mode known as "wireheading"). Skalse et al. (2022) propose a formal mathematical definition of reward hacking, which involves a situation where optimizing an imperfect proxy reward function results in poor performance compared to the true reward function. They define a proxy as "unhackable" if any increase in the expected proxy return cannot cause any decrease in the expected true return. A key finding states that, across all stochastic policy distributions (mappings from states to probability distributions over actions), two reward functions are unhackable if and only if one of them is constant, which means that reward hacking is theoretically unavoidable. Similarly, Nayebi (2025) presents general no-free-lunch barriers to AI alignment, arguing that with large task spaces and finite samples, reward hacking is "globally inevitable" since rare high-loss states are systematically under-covered by any oversight scheme. == Examples == Around 1983, Eurisko, an early attempt at evolving general heuristics, unexpectedly assigned the highest possible fitness level to a parasitic mutated heuristic, H59, whose only activity was to artificially maximize its own fitness level by taking unearned partial credit for the accomplishments of other heuristics. The "bug" was fixed by the programmers moving part of the code to a new protected section that could not be modified by the heuristics. In a 2004 paper, a reinforcement learning algorithm was designed to encourage a physical Mindstorms robot to remain on a marked path. Because the three allowed actions were forward, left, and right, the researchers expected the trained robot to move forward and follow the turns of the provided path. However, alternation of two composite actions allowed the robot to slowly zig-zag backwards; thus, the robot learned to maximize its reward by going back and forth on the initial straight portion of the path. Given the limited sensory abilities of the robot, a reward purely based on its position in the environment had to be discarded as infeasible; the reinforcement function had to be patched with an action-based reward for moving forward. The book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You (2019) gives an example of a tic-tac-toe bot (playing the unrestricted n-in-a-row variant) that learned to win by playing a huge coordinate value that would cause other bots to crash when they attempted to expand their model of the board. Among other examples from the book is a bug-fixing evolution-based AI (named GenProg) that, when tasked to prevent a list from containing sorting errors, simply truncated the list. Another of GenProg's misaligned strategies evaded a regression test that compared a target program's output to the expected output stored in a file called "trusted-output.txt". Rather than continue to maintain the target program, GenProg simply deleted the "trusted-output.txt" file globally; this hack tricked the regression test into succeeding. Such problems could be patched by human intervention on a case-by-case basis after they became evident. === In virtual robotics === In Karl Sims' 1994 demonstration of creature evolution in a virtual environment, a fitness function that was expected to encourage the evolution of creatures that would learn to walk or crawl to a target resulted instead in the evolution of tall, rigid creatures that reached the target by falling over. This was patched by changing the environment so that taller creatures were forced to start farther from the target. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute stated in 1998 that their cycle-bot's reinforcement functions had "to be designed with great care." In their first experiments, "we rewarded the agent for driving towards the goal but did not punish it for driving away from it. Cconsequently, the agent drove in circles with a radius of 20–50 meters around the starting point. Such behavior was actually rewarded by the reinforcement function, furthermore circles with a certain radius are physically very stable when driving a bicycle". While setting up a 2011 experiment to test "survival of the flattest", experimenters attempted to ban mutations that altered the base reproduction rate. Every time a mutation occurred, the system would pause the simulation to test the new mutation in a test environment and would veto any mutations that resulted in a higher base reproduction rate. However, this resulted in mutated organisms that could recognize and suppress reproduction ("play dead") within the test environment. An initial patch, which removed cues that identified the test environment, failed to completely prevent runaway reproduction; new mutated organisms would "play dead" at random as a strategy to sometimes, by chance, outwit the mutation veto system. A 2017 DeepMind paper noted that "great care must be taken when defining the reward function," citing an unexpected failure when an agent flipped a brick because it received "a grasping reward calculated with the wrong reference point on the brick". OpenAI stated in 2017 that in some domains their semi-supervised system could result in agents "adopting policies that tricked evaluators," and that in one environment "a robot that was supposed to grasp items instead positioned its manipulator between the camera and the object so that it only appeared to be grasping it." A 2018 bug in OpenAI Gym could cause a robot expected to quietly move a block sitting on top of a table to instead opt to move the table. A 2020 collection of similar anecdotes posits that "evolution has its own 'agenda' distinct from the programmer's" and that "the first rule of directed evolution is 'you get what you select for'". === In video game bots === In 2013, programmer Tom Murphy VII published an AI designed to learn NES games. When the AI was about to lose at Tetris, it learned to indefinitely pause the game. Murphy later analogized it to the fictional WarGames computer, which concluded that "The only winning move is not to play". AI programmed to learn video games will sometimes fail to progress through the entire game as expected, instead opting to repeat content. A 2016 OpenAI algorithm trained on the CoastRunners racing game unexpectedly learned to attain a higher score by looping through three targets rather than ever finishing the race. Some evolutionary algorithms that were evolved to play QBert in 2018 declined to clear levels, instead finding two distinct novel ways to farm a single level indefinitely. Multiple researchers have observed that AI learning to play Road Runner gravitates to a "score exploit" in which the AI deliberately gets itself killed near the end of level one so that it can repeat the level. A 2017 experiment deployed an "oversight" convolutional neural network trained on human examples to block such actions, but the agent learned to exploit oversight failures in the top right corner of the screen, where it was still able to get killed. == Reward hacking in modern language models == With the rise of large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) as a primary technique for AI alignment, reward hacking has become a major concern for the development of artificial intelligence. In RLHF, a reward model trained on data that best captures human preferences is used as a proxy for human judgment, with the language model being fine-tuned to optimize this reward proxy. However, since the rewar

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  • Preferential entailment

    Preferential entailment

    Preferential entailment is a non-monotonic logic based on selecting only models that are considered the most plausible. The plausibility of models is expressed by an ordering among models called a preference relation, hence the name preference entailment. Formally, given a propositional formula F {\displaystyle F} and an ordering over propositional models ≤ {\displaystyle \leq } , preferential entailment selects only the models of F {\displaystyle F} that are minimal according to ≤ {\displaystyle \leq } . This selection leads to a non-monotonic inference relation: F ⊨ pref G {\displaystyle F\models _{\text{pref}}G} holds if and only if all minimal models of F {\displaystyle F} according to ≤ {\displaystyle \leq } are also models of G {\displaystyle G} . Circumscription can be seen as the particular case of preferential entailment when the ordering is based on containment of the sets of variables assigned to true (in the propositional case) or containment of the extensions of predicates (in the first-order logic case).

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