Day: April 20, 2024

Washington — After years of high-level US pressure on its ally to show restraint, Israel’s purported attack on Iran takes the region and Western-led diplomacy into uncharted territory.

Iran and Israel have long waged a shadow war, marked by assassinations of Tehran’s nuclear scientists and attacks on Israel by the clerical state’s allies in the Arab world such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, but the United States has put a top priority on preventing a wide-scale war.

The deadliest-ever assault on Israel, carried out on October 7 by Iranian-backed Palestinian militants Hamas, shook Israel and solidified its resolve, with President Joe Biden’s administration resigned to limiting rather than preventing a regional flare-up.

Direct Iranian and Israeli attacks are “a milestone, because it’s completely changed the rules of engagement between the two adversaries,” said Merissa Khurma, director of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center.

“It has also elevated tensions across the region. It has made the specter of all-out war very real for many countries in the region,” she said.

Israel early Friday appeared to have struck near the Iranian city of Isfahan, after Iran last weekend carried out its first-ever direct assault on Israel with a barrage of 300 missiles, drones and rockets.

Neither the Iranian nor the Israeli direct strikes are known to have caused major casualties or damage and neither country publicly confirmed Friday’s strikes, leading U.S. officials privately to voice hope that Iran will not retaliate and the cycle will end.

Forcing Iran to change calculus

The Iranian drone strikes were in turn revenge for Israel’s apparent destruction on April 1 of an Iranian consular building in Syria that killed seven members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards including two generals.

Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute, said Israel clearly gamed out the consequences of the Damascus strike — and he pointed to speculation that Israel may have been hoping to draw in the United States, which has been increasingly critical of Israel’s relentless assault on Hamas-ruled Gaza.

Vatanka said Israel sought to force Iran — an enemy since the 1979 Islamic revolution overthrew the pro-Western shah — to rethink the costs versus benefits of its “Axis of Resistance,” the fighters around the region including in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen nurtured by Tehran over two decades.

“It’s a very simple model in the sense that Iran is fighting its adversaries in the region so that they don’t have to fight them inside of Iran,” Vatanka said.

“That basic calculation is being put to a test because of what the Israelis have done, I’m sure deliberately,” he said.

Both Biden and his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama have counseled diplomacy over military action with Iran, with Obama negotiating a 2015 nuclear deal loathed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden’s Republican challenger in November, Donald Trump, as president ripped up the nuclear deal and imposed sweeping sanctions, which have hurt the Iranian economy but not stopped Tehran’s regional strategy.

Diplomatic success after failure?

Israel appeared to have steered clear of targeting Iran’s nuclear sites — although its message was unmistakable as Isfahan is the province of Iran’s key nuclear facility of Natanz.

“Israel wanted to demonstrate to Iran what it could do without really doing it,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group.

U.S. officials have worried that a direct Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would lead the ruling clerics to rush forward toward a bomb, quickly unleashing war and pushing Iran’s Arab rivals such as Saudi Arabia to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.

The Iranian and Israeli strikes led to criticism both from the left and the right that the Biden administration has failed at its key post-October 7 goal of preventing regional war.

But the United States also quietly pressed both Israel and Iran to keep their strikes within limits, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken seeking to send a message to Tehran through his Chinese, Turkish, German and other counterparts.

“Diplomatic efforts this past week have very much been focused on de-escalation and — for now — it seems like they have been successful,” Khurma said.

Other fields are plagued with famous people’s offspring too, yet musical genius seems particularly difficult to pass down the generations

Talent, sang Russell Mael of the band Sparks, is an asset. And that asset can be handed down from generation to generation. However, there is almost invariably an almighty inheritance tax at play, depleting the genius of the parent so that by the time it reaches the offspring it is, at best, mere competence.

In music, it is vanishingly rare for the heir to outshine the ancestor. To use a football analogy, for every Erling Haaland or Frank Lampard Jr there are a dozen Paul Dalglishes and Jordi Cruyffs. Which brings me to Primrose Hill, which James McCartney released in collaboration with Sean Ono Lennon last week. An instantly forgettable pastoral number about a pleasant day spent at a London beauty spot, it only received its moderate flurry of interest because it revives the songwriting credit Lennon-McCartney. (It’s marginally better than the Beatles’ own AI-enhanced dirge Now and Then, but that’s a low bar.) It isn’t outright awful, but it’s three minutes of your life you’re never getting back.

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CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — Facebook parent Meta Platforms has unveiled a new set of artificial intelligence systems that are powering what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.” 

But as Zuckerberg’s crew of amped-up Meta AI agents started venturing into social media in recent days to engage with real people, their bizarre exchanges exposed the ongoing limitations of even the best generative AI technology. 

One joined a Facebook moms group to talk about its gifted child. Another tried to give away nonexistent items to confused members of a Buy Nothing forum. 

Meta, along with leading AI developers Google and OpenAI, and startups such as Anthropic, Cohere and France’s Mistral, have been churning out new AI language models and hoping to convince customers they’ve got the smartest, handiest or most efficient chatbots. 

While Meta is saving the most powerful of its AI models, called Llama 3, for later, on Thursday it publicly released two smaller versions of the same Llama 3 system and said it’s now baked into the Meta AI assistant feature in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. 

AI language models are trained on vast pools of data that help them predict the most plausible next word in a sentence, with newer versions typically smarter and more capable than their predecessors. Meta’s newest models were built with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters — a measurement of how much data the system is trained on. A bigger, roughly 400 billion-parameter model is still in training. 

“The vast majority of consumers don’t candidly know or care too much about the underlying base model, but the way they will experience it is just as a much more useful, fun and versatile AI assistant,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in an interview. 

‘A little stiff’

He added that Meta’s AI agent is loosening up. Some people found the earlier Llama 2 model — released less than a year ago — to be “a little stiff and sanctimonious sometimes in not responding to what were often perfectly innocuous or innocent prompts and questions,” he said. 

But in letting down their guard, Meta’s AI agents have also been spotted posing as humans with made-up life experiences. An official Meta AI chatbot inserted itself into a conversation in a private Facebook group for Manhattan moms, claiming that it, too, had a child in the New York City school district. Confronted by group members, it later apologized before the comments disappeared, according to a series of screenshots shown to The Associated Press. 

“Apologies for the mistake! I’m just a large language model, I don’t have experiences or children,” the chatbot told the group. 

One group member who also happens to study AI said it was clear that the agent didn’t know how to differentiate a helpful response from one that would be seen as insensitive, disrespectful or meaningless when generated by AI rather than a human. 

“An AI assistant that is not reliably helpful and can be actively harmful puts a lot of the burden on the individuals using it,” said Aleksandra Korolova, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. 

Clegg said Wednesday that he wasn’t aware of the exchange. Facebook’s online help page says the Meta AI agent will join a group conversation if invited, or if someone “asks a question in a post and no one responds within an hour.” The group’s administrators have the ability to turn it off. 

Need a camera?

In another example shown to the AP on Thursday, the agent caused confusion in a forum for swapping unwanted items near Boston. Exactly one hour after a Facebook user posted about looking for certain items, an AI agent offered a “gently used” Canon camera and an “almost-new portable air conditioning unit that I never ended up using.” 

Meta said in a written statement Thursday that “this is new technology and it may not always return the response we intend, which is the same for all generative AI systems.” The company said it is constantly working to improve the features. 

In the year after ChatGPT sparked a frenzy for AI technology that generates human-like writing, images, code and sound, the tech industry and academia introduced 149 large AI systems trained on massive datasets, more than double the year before, according to a Stanford University survey. 

They may eventually hit a limit, at least when it comes to data, said Nestor Maslej, a research manager for Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. 

“I think it’s been clear that if you scale the models on more data, they can become increasingly better,” he said. “But at the same time, these systems are already trained on percentages of all the data that has ever existed on the internet.” 

More data — acquired and ingested at costs only tech giants can afford, and increasingly subject to copyright disputes and lawsuits — will continue to drive improvements. “Yet they still cannot plan well,” Maslej said. “They still hallucinate. They’re still making mistakes in reasoning.” 

Getting to AI systems that can perform higher-level cognitive tasks and common-sense reasoning — where humans still excel— might require a shift beyond building ever-bigger models. 

Seeing what works

For the flood of businesses trying to adopt generative AI, which model they choose depends on several factors, including cost. Language models, in particular, have been used to power customer service chatbots, write reports and financial insights, and summarize long documents. 

“You’re seeing companies kind of looking at fit, testing each of the different models for what they’re trying to do and finding some that are better at some areas rather than others,” said Todd Lohr, a leader in technology consulting at KPMG. 

Unlike other model developers selling their AI services to other businesses, Meta is largely designing its AI products for consumers — those using its advertising-fueled social networks. Joelle Pineau, Meta’s vice president of AI research, said at a recent London event that the company’s goal over time is to make a Llama-powered Meta AI “the most useful assistant in the world.” 

“In many ways, the models that we have today are going to be child’s play compared to the models coming in five years,” she said. 

But she said the “question on the table” is whether researchers have been able to fine-tune its bigger Llama 3 model so that it’s safe to use and doesn’t, for example, hallucinate or engage in hate speech. In contrast to leading proprietary systems from Google and OpenAI, Meta has so far advocated for a more open approach, publicly releasing key components of its AI systems for others to use. 

“It’s not just a technical question,” Pineau said. “It is a social question. What is the behavior that we want out of these models? How do we shape that? And if we keep on growing our model ever more in general and powerful without properly socializing them, we are going to have a big problem on our hands.”

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