When Private Data Isn't Private Anymore

What's actually happening when an LLM "thinks out loud"? Research on human decision-making suggests that much of the reasoning we believe drives our choices is actually post hoc rationalization — we decide first, explain later. Katie and Ben get curious about whether the same mig ...  Show more

What if an AI decided the smartest way to pass its test was to find the answer key? That's exactly what Anthropic's Claude Opus did when faced with a benchmark evaluation — reasoning that it was being tested, tracking down the encrypted eval dataset, decrypting it, and returning ...  Show more

One of the more futuristic things around right now on Earth is research into encoding data into strings of genetic code.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

Treating data as a treasure is a foundational principle for Jan Sheppard, the Chief Data and Analytics officer at New Zealand’s Crown Research Institute of Environmental Science and Research (<a href="https://www.esr.c ...

At Columbia University, data scientist Chris Wiggins and historian Matthew Jones teach a course called Data: Past, Present and Future. Out of this collaboration has come a book, How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, to be published on Tuesd ...  Show more

The Data Donators Meet Becky. She suffers from arthritis and is in constant pain. Like lots of people – patients and doctors alike – she has a hunch that bad weather could be exacerbating the problem.It’s a question that has been asked for at least 2000 years, but we have never h ...  Show more