In brief Facial recognition bans passed by US cities are being overturned as law enforcement and lobbyist groups pressure local governments to tackle rising crime rates.

In July, the state of Virginia will scrap its ban on the controversial technology after less than a year. California and New Orleans may follow suit, Reuters first reported. Vermont adjusted its bill to allow police to use facial recognition software in child sex abuse investigations.

Elsewhere, efforts are under way in New York, Colorado, and Indiana to prevent bills banning facial recognition from passing. It's not clear if some existing vetoes set to expire, like the one in California, will be renewed. Around two dozen US state or local governments passed laws prohibiting facial recognition from 2019 to 2021. Police, however, believe the tool is useful in identifying suspects and can help solve cases especially in places where crime rates have risen.

"Technology is needed to solve these crimes and to hold individuals accountable," police superintendent Shaun Ferguson from New Orleans previously told reporters.

"Police departments are exploiting people's fears about crime to amass more power," Jennifer Jones, a staff attorney for ACLU of Northern California, said. "This has been for decades, we see new technologies being pushed in moments of crisis."

Researchers at DeepMind have built what they call "a generalist agent," an AI system capable of performing hundreds of different tasks from chatting to playing video games.

The model, dubbed Gato, is trained on a large number of datasets containing image and text data from simulated and real worlds. Powered by a single transformer-based network, the system can "play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more," according to a research paper [PDF].

Gato seems to pack quite a punch for a small model at just 1.2 billion parameters, much smaller than other transformer models like OpenAI's GPT-3. Although Gato can perform numerous tasks, it doesn't always perform as well as other networks trained to do a specialized task. 

Research labs and startups are racing to try and build what they call artificial general intelligence, technologies that can complete all sorts of tasks as well as a human can if not better. Gato explores the idea of a single system being able to perform multiple tasks, but it's not really intelligent in the same way as us. You can read more about the model here. 

A director of machine learning at Apple has reportedly resigned over the company's return-to-work policy, which requires employees to go into the office three days a week starting from 23 May.

Ian Goodfellow led the iGiant's secretive "Special Projects Group" where he has worked for over three years. Rumor has it that he was involved in Apple's push to develop self-driving car software. Goodfellow was said to be unhappy about having to go back into the office, and reportedly decided to quit.

Goodfellow is best known for inventing generative adversarial networks, a type of neural network often used to create AI-generated images. The model StyleGAN, credited with producing hyperrealistic photos of fake humans, for example, is powered by a generative adversarial network. 

Apple and Goodfellow did not respond to our requests for confirmation. 

If you're looking for a more affordable language model to build upon, AI21 Labs just launched J1-Grande, a new, cheaper model with 17 billion parameters.

J1-Grande is a bit bigger than J1-Large (7.5 billion parameters), and much smaller than J1-Jumbo (178 billion parameters). Language models are computationally intensive to train and run. Developers using the API typically pay for the number of tokens generated by the system, with costs being more expensive when using larger models with higher performances.

The Israel-based startup said its latest language model is twice as fast as Jumbo, but at one-third of the price. 

"In fact, while Grande is significantly closer in size to J1-Large, a great majority of users have found that J1-Grande's quality is comparable to that of J1-Jumbo," it said in a blog post. "This is great news for all budget-conscious practitioners; J1-Grande, our mid-size model, offers access to supreme quality text generation at a more affordable rate." ®

Chinese cyberspies targeted two Russian defense institutes and possibly another research facility in Belarus, according to Check Point Research.

The new campaign, dubbed Twisted Panda, is part of a larger, state-sponsored espionage operation that has been ongoing for several months, if not nearly a year, according to the security shop.

In a technical analysis, the researchers detail the various malicious stages and payloads of the campaign that used sanctions-related phishing emails to attack Russian entities, which are part of the state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec Corporation.

The US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday said it intends to take action against educational technology companies that unlawfully collect data from children using online educational services.

In a policy statement, the agency said, "Children should not have to needlessly hand over their data and forfeit their privacy in order to do their schoolwork or participate in remote learning, especially given the wide and increasing adoption of ed tech tools."

The agency says it will scrutinize educational service providers to ensure that they are meeting their legal obligations under COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

The saga surrounding Arm's joint venture in China just took another intriguing turn: a mysterious firm named Lotcap Group claims it has signed a letter of intent to buy a 51 percent stake in Arm China from existing investors in the country.

In a Chinese-language press release posted Wednesday, Lotcap said it has formed a subsidiary, Lotcap Fund, to buy a majority stake in the joint venture. However, reporting by one newspaper suggested that the investment firm still needs the approval of one significant investor to gain 51 percent control of Arm China.

The development comes a couple of weeks after Arm China said that its former CEO, Allen Wu, was refusing once again to step down from his position, despite the company's board voting in late April to replace Wu with two co-chief executives. SoftBank Group, which owns 49 percent of the Chinese venture, has been trying to unentangle Arm China from Wu as the Japanese tech investment giant plans for an initial public offering of the British parent company.

SmartNICs have the potential to accelerate enterprise workloads, but don't expect to see them bring hyperscale-class efficiency to most datacenters anytime soon, ZK Research's Zeus Kerravala told The Register.

SmartNICs are widely deployed in cloud and hyperscale datacenters as a means to offload input/output (I/O) intensive network, security, and storage operations from the CPU, freeing it up to run revenue generating tenant workloads. Some more advanced chips even offload the hypervisor to further separate the infrastructure management layer from the rest of the server.

Despite relative success in the cloud and a flurry of innovation from the still-limited vendor SmartNIC ecosystem, including Mellanox (Nvidia), Intel, Marvell, and Xilinx (AMD), Kerravala argues that the use cases for enterprise datacenters are unlikely to resemble those of the major hyperscalers, at least in the near term.

The US is racing to catch up with China in supercomputing performance amid fears that the country may widen its lead in exascale computers over the next decade, according to reports.

The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is expected to be the first exascale system in the US once it is fully operational, but China already has two exascale systems up and running since last year, as reported on our sister site The Next Platform.

This lead may widen as the US has three exascale systems in the pipeline, while China aims to have up to 10 operational systems by 2025, says a report in the Financial times.

Laptop vendor Framework Computer has launched new faster models. Unlike in the case of any other laptop maker, if you already have one, this is good news.

Modern laptops tend to be promoted on the basis of thinness and lightness, and the Framework range is no different. The machines have 13.5-inch (8.89cm) screens, are just under 16mm thick (0.6 inch), and weigh 1.3kg (2lb 14oz).

The new models have faster 12th-generation Intel Core CPUs.

Two and a half years after its first disastrous launch, Boeing has once again fired its CST-100 Starliner capsule at the International Space Station.

This time it appeared to go well, launching at 18:54 ET from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral. The RD-180 main engine and twin solid rocket boosters of the Atlas V performed as planned before Starliner was pushed to near orbital velocity by the Centaur upper stage.

After separation from the Centaur, Starliner fired its own thrusters for orbital insertion and is on course for the ISS. Docking is scheduled for approximately 19:10 ET today (23:10 UTC).

US president Joe Biden kicked off his first Asian tour since taking office in South Korea, where he visited a Samsung semiconductor fab said to be the model for the company's planned plant in Taylor, Texas.

While speaking at the Samsung Electronics Pyeongtaek Campus, Biden said the region will be a key part of the next several decades – a reason "to invest in one another to deepen our business ties.". 

Much of the talk on Biden's five-day trip to South Korea and Japan will center around broader deepening of economic and business ties. In Pyeongtaek, however, the emphasis was on semiconductor cooperation. While touring the plant with recently elected South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, Biden noted "these little chips are the key to propelling us into the next era of humanity's technological development."

At Meta's first Conversations keynote yesterday, the company announced the WhatsApp Cloud API, aimed at improving the customer service experience for businesses of all sizes.

Meta already has the WhatsApp Business API, the first revenue-generating enterprise product for the otherwise free messaging app, where companies pay WhatsApp on a per-message basis and can use the platform to direct customer communications to other lines like SMS, email, other apps, and more.

It's basically another online presence where enterprises can set up shop to make it easier for customers to get in touch. But the WhatsApp Business API is on-premises and would normally need a solutions provider like Twilio to facilitate back-end integration.

Microsoft has released an out-of-band patch to deal with an authentication issue that was introduced in the May 10 Windows update.

Elizabeth Tyler, cyber security consultant on Microsoft's Detection and Response Team, confirmed the fix to worried administrators early this morning.

UK customers of datacenter and colo service provider Sungard Availability Services are to be transferred to Daisy Corporate Services, part of the Daisy Group, months after Sungard went into administration.

According to some reports, Daisy Group has signed a deal to acquire the UK arm of Sungard, in a move that would see the company pick up Sungard's former customers, including major banks and other financial institutions.

However, a statement given to The Register by the administrators, Teneo Financial Advisory, merely states that some Sungard customers will be transferred to Daisy Corporate Services, and it is not clear how many are included this arrangement.

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