Issue 2309 - Wednesday 9 April 2025

The News

Meta’s new AI shows why you shouldn’t care about ‘benchmarks’

The latest release in the never-ending procession of “““““world-leading”””” AI models has come from Meta, which dropped its Llama 4 models over the weekend (Meta). These models, Meta said, smashed other models based on the de facto industry benchmarks from LMArena.

But when people started using Llama 4, they weren’t super impressed. Then someone noticed: the Meta AI model that was benchmarked wasn’t the same as what was released to the public, but instead was a different model that had been “optimized” to score well on the benchmarks (TechCrunch). This is more or less the AI equivalent of phonetically learning some words in a foreign language and then telling people you can speak Mandarin. Why does this matter beyond Meta’s AI woes? Well, it’s a reminder that these benchmarks are essentially bullshit that companies are hacking for marketing reasons. It’s no wonder that 2/3rds of Americans say they don’t trust AI to make important decisions, and the majority of them don’t trust anyone to use it responsibly (Pew Research).

Australia starts working on children-specific online privacy rules

One of the federal government’s most interesting privacy reforms is quietly playing out, with the Privacy Commissioner starting work on a children’s online privacy code. Last week, the Commissioner met with teens to start coming up with child specific privacy protections that platforms will need to abide by (LinkedIn) and met with civil society groups this week who have a list of things they’d like to see addressed (ElevenM). The code isn’t due to come into effect until end of 2026 — and yes, it is still relevant for platforms that won’t be swept up in the teen social media ban — but it’s great that Australia will finally follow the US and EU’s child-specific privacy rules. Another little tidbit of government tech news: the Commonwealth Ombudsman has slammed government agencies for not being upfront about merchant fees and surcharges (Ombudsman).

Here’s some cool government ideas: ’Murder prediction’ algorithms and public servant Trump loyalty AI surveillance

The UK government is working on a “murder prediction” algorithm that calculates who it thinks is most likely to kill using data including mental health records and information about when they were first recorded as a victim of crime (The Guardian). Documents obtained through a freedom of information request about the “homicide prediction project” suggested it used data of people who’ve never been convicted of a crime. The UK government denied this and said the project was purely for research reasons. In the US, Elon Musk’s DOGE team is now using AI to surveil government workers’ communications to see what they’re saying about President Trump (Reuters). They’re also using Grok — you know, the most racist AI model — “heavily” to slash government. Seems like things are going swimmingly abroad.

Leftovers

Oh, Also

People are fighting over whether dire wolves have been ‘de-extincted’

The dire wolf is back, they say! A company, Colossal, claims it has “de-extincted” the American wolf variant that died out more than 10,000 years ago (TIME) and is now showing off two cubs to journalists. Their scientists analysed two dire wolves fossils, and used that information to made changes to grey wolves’ DNAs to create some “dire wolves”. Wait! Now, I’m hearing that the dire wolf isn’t back (New Scientist). Critics (like this museum volunteer) are saying that these pups are just grey wolves who’ve had a few cosmetic changes to look like dire wolves and are hybrids at best.

Look, I accept it’s over-hyped and it’s not really a dire wolf but maybe that’s a good thing? As one Slashdot commenter said: “We barely understand the environment enough to safely bring back animals that went extinct in the past 250 years. Why would it be a good idea to bring back a super-predator that would outcompete the closest relatives, and decimate all their prey (and all kinds of other fun new things they will decide to eat)?”

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

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The End

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