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Business Wire
25-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Triple Helix Releases Report: 'Catalyzing U.S. AgTech Innovation: Opportunities for the Federal Government'
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Triple Helix Institute for Agriculture, Climate, and Society (Triple Helix), a nonprofit dedicated to building cross-sector awareness and engagement around agriculture technology (AgTech), today released its latest report Catalyzing U.S. AgTech Innovation: Opportunities for the Federal Government. The report, presented on Capitol Hill at a briefing supported by Congresswoman Nikki Budzinski (IL-13), describes opportunities for federal government action to support AgTech development as a vital component of America's agricultural competitiveness and prosperity. Congresswoman Budzinski stated, 'I'm excited to welcome Triple Helix to Capitol Hill as they lead the charge in advancing AgTech innovation.' Emerging innovations could transform U.S. agricultural productivity and resilience and need to be prioritized now to prepare us for generations to come. Share American dominance in agricultural innovation was historically driven by strong federal investment, in collaboration with research institutions and private sector actors. But decades of declining public sector support threaten U.S. agricultural leadership and national security. Today, both the EU and China significantly outspend the U.S. on agricultural research and development. With compounding challenges such as pests and diseases, extreme weather, and volatile supply chains, efforts to increase American agricultural resilience are critical. Emerging innovations could transform U.S. agricultural productivity and resilience and need to be prioritized now to prepare us for generations to come. Triple Helix's report is the culmination of an initiative to identify key inflection points in the U.S. AgTech pipeline where strategic federal support could drive growth. Through roundtable discussions held in New York, Illinois, California, and North Carolina, the organization gathered perspectives from academic researchers, startup founders, investors, commodity group representatives, farmers, and agribusiness leaders, among others. Stakeholders emphasized the federal government's crucial role across the U.S. AgTech ecosystem and stressed the need to close public sector support gaps in three key areas: Prioritizing proactive discovery-stage research and data accessibility Facilitating entrepreneurial translation and scale-up Building an efficient AgTech implementation ecosystem 'This report outlines actionable opportunities for the federal government to strengthen the U.S. AgTech innovation ecosystem,' said Dr. Sarah Garland, Founder and Executive Director of Triple Helix. 'Catalyzing the American AgTech sector requires effective collaboration across research, investment, and policy. Reestablishing and optimizing federal government leadership in this space is crucial.' 'I represent some of the best agricultural research institutions in Central and Southern Illinois and I've consistently fought for increased federal investment in the groundbreaking work our scientists do every day. Their research is essential to strengthening American agriculture, lowering food costs, improving nutrition, and supporting the farmers who power our economy. As Triple Helix highlights, staying at the top of agricultural technology is key to maintaining our global leadership in this vital sector," added Congresswoman Budzinski. To access the full report, please visit: About Triple Helix Triple Helix Institute for Agriculture, Climate, and Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to building cross-sector awareness and engagement around agriculture technology (AgTech). Led by scientists and rooted in evidence, Triple Helix presents an interdisciplinary and nuanced voice that is crucial for creating a more resilient future of agriculture. In a space often fraught with polarization and factions, Triple Helix emphasizes unity behind common goals and commitment to shared values. Triple Helix recently produced reports targeted at policymakers and investors on the topics AgTech for Biodiversity Conservation and AgTech for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions. These reports succinctly connect the dots between ambitious agricultural goals and various food and agriculture technologies that can help achieve them.
Time Magazine
17-06-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
California AI Policy Report Warns of ‘Irreversible Harms'
While AI could offer transformative benefits, without proper safeguards it could facilitate nuclear and biological threats and cause 'potentially irreversible harms,' a new report commissioned by California Governor Gavin Newsom has warned. 'The opportunity to establish effective AI governance frameworks may not remain open indefinitely,' says the report, which was published on June 17. Citing new evidence that AI can help users source nuclear-grade uranium and is on the cusp of letting novices create biological threats, it notes that the cost for inaction at this current moment could be 'extremely high.' The 53-page document stems from a working group established by Governor Newsom, in a state that has emerged as a central arena for AI legislation. With no comprehensive federal regulation on the horizon, state-level efforts to govern the technology have taken on outsized significance, particularly in California, which is home to many of the world's top AI companies. In 2023, California Senator Scott Wiener sponsored a first-of-its-kind bill, SB 1047, which would have required that large-scale AI developers implement rigorous safety testing and mitigation for their systems, but which critics feared would stifle innovation and squash the open-source AI community. The bill passed both state houses despite fierce industry opposition, but Governor Newsom ultimately vetoed it last September, deeming it 'well-intentioned' but not the 'best approach to protecting the public.' Following that veto, Newsom launched the working group to 'develop workable guardrails for deploying GenAI.' The group was co-led by 'godmother of AI' Fei-Fei Li, a prominent opponent of SB 1047, alongside Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Social and Ethical Implications of Computing Research, and Jennifer Tour Chayes dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley. The working group evaluated AI's progress, SB 1047's weak points, and solicited feedback from more than 60 experts. 'As the global epicenter of AI innovation, California is uniquely positioned to lead in unlocking the transformative potential of frontier AI,' Li said in a statement. 'Realizing this promise, however, demands thoughtful and responsible stewardship—grounded in human-centered values, scientific rigor, and broad-based collaboration,' she said. "Foundation model capabilities have rapidly advanced since Governor Newsom vetoed SB 1047 last September," the report states. The industry has shifted from large language AI models that merely predict the next word in a stream of text toward systems trained to solve complex problems and that benefit from "inference scaling," which allows them more time to process information. These advances could accelerate scientific research, but also potentially amplify national security risks by making it easier for bad actors to conduct cyberattacks or acquire chemical and biological weapons. The report points to Anthropic's Claude 4 models, released just last month, which the company said might be capable of helping would-be terrorists create bioweapons or engineer a pandemic. Similarly, OpenAI's o3 model reportedly outperformed 94% of virologists on a key evaluation. In recent months, new evidence has emerged showing AI's ability to strategically lie, appearing aligned with its creators' goals during training but displaying other objectives once deployed, and exploit loopholes to achieve its goals, the report says. While 'currently benign, these developments represent concrete empirical evidence for behaviors that could present significant challenges to measuring loss of control risks and possibly foreshadow future harm,' the report says. While Republicans have proposed a 10 year ban on all state AI regulation over concerns that a fragmented policy environment could hamper national competitiveness, the report argues that targeted regulation in California could actually 'reduce compliance burdens on developers and avoid a patchwork approach' by providing a blueprint for other states, while keeping the public safer. It stops short of advocating for any specific policy, instead outlining the key principles the working group believes California should adopt when crafting future legislation. It 'steers clear' of some of the more divisive provisions of SB1047, like the requirement for a "kill switch" or shutdown mechanism to quickly halt certain AI systems in case of potential harm, says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a lead-writer of the report. Instead, the approach centers around enhancing transparency, for example through legally protecting whistleblowers and establishing incident reporting systems, so that lawmakers and the public have better visibility into AI's progress. The goal is to 'reap the benefits of innovation. Let's not set artificial barriers, but at the same time, as we go, let's think about what we're learning about how it is that the technology is behaving,' says Cuéllar, who co-led the report. The report emphasizes this visibility is crucial not only for public-facing AI applications, but for understanding how systems are tested and deployed inside AI companies, where concerning behaviors might first emerge. 'The underlying approach here is one of 'trust but verify,'" Singer says, a concept borrowed from Cold War-era arms control treaties that would involve designing mechanisms to independently check compliance. That's a departure from existing efforts, which hinge on voluntary cooperation from companies, such as the deal between OpenAI and Center for AI Standards and Innovation (formerly the U.S. AI Safety Institute) to conduct pre-deployment tests. It's an approach that acknowledges the 'substantial expertise inside industry,' Singer says, but 'also underscores the importance of methods of independently verifying safety claims.'
The Journal
28-05-2025
- Business
- The Journal
Community Notes vanishes from X feeds, raising 'serious questions' amid ongoing EU probe
A USER-POWERED fact-checking system designed to curb misinformation on X, formerly Twitter, has quietly disappeared from user feeds. The unexplained disappearance of Community Notes, the social media site's main tool to stall the spread of misinformation, has raised questions whether the controversial Elon Musk-owned platform is meeting its legal obligations. Community Notes relies on user inputs to tag misleading posts on X and had been active since shortly after the takeover by Elon Musk in 2022 — a transition that saw the mass firing of staff whose jobs were to tackle hate speech, harassment, and misinformation. 'Persistent problems with Community Notes raise serious questions about X's capacity to meet its obligations under EU rules,' Eileen Culloty, Deputy Director of the DCU Institute for Media, Democracy, and Society told The Journal . 'Those rules say platforms need to have adequate measures for content moderation.' While the system still appears to be active — an official account that tracks posts tagged with community notes is still posting new content — these notes have not been appearing to users. A clear explanation for the disappearance is hard to glean from official X accounts. 'Community Notes on X are still active, with a recent update on May 19, 2025, to tackle manipulation, but many users report they're hard to see,' Grok, X's artificial intelligence chatbot said in response to a query on this. The most recent post from the official Community Notes account, on 26 May, reads, 'working to get notes appearing normally, as well,' in response to a post by X's official engineering account. That engineering post, published on 24 May, reads: 'We're still experiencing issues from yesterday's data center outage.' Posts from users complaining about this problem also appear on X at that date. A fire at a data centre in Oregon on 22 May has been suggested to have exacerbated technical issues at X. Advertisement 'X is a glitch-prone platform at the best of times and it recently suffered further disruption due to a fire at a data centre,' Culloty said. The Journal has reached out to X for further information. However, X's leader Elon Musk has been explicit that X does not respond to journalists queries, instead sending them 'infinite loops' of generic messages. Prior to that, the company would auto-respond with a poop emoji. The Community Notes system involves users signing up to be 'contributors' who leave notes on any X posts. 'If enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful, the note will be publicly shown on a post,' X says. However, the Community Notes system has itself been used as a vector to spread disinformation . Studies have shown major spikes in hate speech since Musk took over X, as well as major failures to take down child sexual abuse material . 'Community Notes have been shown to be far from perfect', Aoife Gallagher, a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think-tank, told The Journal. 'They are open to manipulation and are often not published at all because a consensus has not been reached, meaning that information debunking a claim never reaches regular users of X. 'In saying that, when it works, it has been found to be useful. Its absence makes users of the platform even more vulnerable to consuming falsehoods.' Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced in March that it was replacing its fact checking partnerships in the United States with a similar Community Notes feature to that used on X. A spokesperson for the European Commission's representative on Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, said that they could not comment on the outage as a legal proceeding against X is ongoing. 'The Commission opened an investigation into X regarding, among others, effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on the platform, notably the effectiveness of X's so-called 'Community Notes' system in the EU and the effectiveness of related policies mitigating risks to civic discourse and electoral processes,' they wrote. Preliminary findings released last July by the Commission found that X was in breach of the Digital Services Act, citing misleading practices, a lack of transparency, and a failure to provide data to researchers. However, the Community Notes system was not cited in these preliminary findings. 'The issue is now entangled in broader geopolitical tensions between the EU and the US given Musk's relationship to Trump and stated opposition to EU regulations,' Eilleen Culloty told The Journal. Want to be your own fact-checker? Visit our brand-new FactCheck Knowledge Bank for guides and toolkits Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... It is vital that we surface facts from noise. Articles like this one brings you clarity, transparency and balance so you can make well-informed decisions. We set up FactCheck in 2016 to proactively expose false or misleading information, but to continue to deliver on this mission we need your support. Over 5,000 readers like you support us. If you can, please consider setting up a monthly payment or making a once-off donation to keep news free to everyone. Learn More Support The Journal
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Non-monogamous people just as happy as monogamous people, study finds
Discussions of non-monogamy have boomed online in the past few years, as hookup apps like Feeld have made it easier for people to participate in "the lifestyle." As with any subject on the internet, though, there's been backlash to the non-monogamy hype. While some are looking for alternate relationship styles, others are trying to be tradwives who idealize monogamy and marriage. Even Feeld pointed out that, in research with the Kinsey Institute, that young adults fantasize about monogamy these days. SEE ALSO: How to get started with non-monogamy According to new research, however, they may not need to: An analysis of 35 studies involving over 24,000 people worldwide found no significant differences between monogamous and non-monogamous people. The peer-reviewed study published in The Journal of Sex Research states that both groups report similar levels of satisfaction in their relationships and sex lives. These satisfaction levels remained consistent across different demographics like LGBTQ and heterosexual people and differing non-monogamy types like open relationships and polyamory. (We explain the differences in our introduction to non-monogamy.) "Monogamous relationships are often assumed to offer greater satisfaction, intimacy, commitment, passion, and trust than non-monogamous ones. This widespread belief — what we term as the 'monogamy-superiority myth' — is often reinforced by stereotypes and media narratives," lead author, associate professor Joel Anderson, a principal research fellow at the Australian Research Centre in Sexuality, Health, and Society at La Trobe University, said in the press release. "Our findings challenge this long-standing assumption outside of academia, providing further evidence that people in consensually non-monogamous relationships experience similar levels of satisfaction in their relationships and sex lives as those in monogamous ones," Anderson continued. There were limitations to the study, however. They were all self-reported, so respondents could be swayed to respond a certain way to justify their life choices. Also, as the study relied on online sampling, that could've reduced its representativeness and generalizability, the press release stated. Despite these limitations, alternative relationship structures are unlikely to go away soon — and the same goes for social media conversations about them.
