Welcome to the January 31, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
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An international AI safety report published Wednesday ahead of the AI Action Summit hosted by France next month compiled insights from 100 independent international experts. ACM A. M. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio, the driving force behind the report, said that while AI holds "great potential" for society, it also presents "significant risks." He said the intention of the report was to “facilitate constructive and evidence-based discussion around these risks and serves as a common basis for policymakers around the world to understand general-purpose AI capabilities, risks and possible mitigations."
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Gov.UK (January 29, 2025)
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Cybersecurity firm Wiz said in a blog post that scans of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's infrastructure showed that company had inadvertently left more than a million lines of data available unsecured, including digital software keys and chat logs that appeared to capture prompts being sent from users to the company's recently unveiled AI assistant. After alerting DeepSeek of the find, the company quickly secured the data.
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Reuters; Raphael Satter (January 29, 2025)
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In separate papers, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Germany's Ruhr University Bochum detailed new CPU side-channel attacks involving modern Apple processors that can be remotely executed by a Web browser using a malicious webpage containing JavaScript or WebAssembly code. Dubbed False Load Output Prediction (FLOP) and Speculative Load Address Prediction (SLAP), the attacks take aim at features that predict future instructions in an effort to accelerate processing. Apple said it plans to address the vulnerabilities.
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BleepingComputer; Bill Toulas (January 28, 2025)
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The Kids Off Social Media Act, reintroduced by U.S. Senators Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), would prohibit children under 13 from using social media, ban social media platforms from making personalized recommendations targeting teen users, and make schools that prohibit students from using social media eligible for federal Internet subsidies. With Cruz serving as chair of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, the bill is expected to be part of a larger debate on social media regulation.
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The Washington Post; Cristiano Lima-Strong; Andrea Jiménez (January 28, 2025)
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The Joint Mathematics Meetings was held in Seattle Jan. 8-11, drawing 5,444 mathematicians with the theme of "Mathematics in the Age of AI." Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist and an ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate, delivered a keynote in which he discussed the current state of machine learning. LeCun also suggested a "large-scale world model" as an alternative for generative large language models, noting that it "can reason and plan because it has a mental model of the world that predicts consequences of its action."
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The New York Times; Siobhan Roberts (January 28, 2025)
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By combining AI with holographic encryption, a team led by Stelios Tzortzakis at the University of Crete in Greece developed an ultra-secure data protection system that uses neural networks to retrieve elaborately scrambled information stored as a hologram. The researchers found the neural network could accurately retrieve encoded images 90-95% of the time.
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Optica (January 30, 2025)
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Researchers at the U.K.'s University of Oxford used tensor networks to represent turbulence probability distributions, then used these quantum-inspired algorithms to simulate turbulent fluid flows, which are key to accurate weather forecasting. The researchers managed to accomplish this on a standard laptop in just hours, compared to the days required on a supercomputer using existing tools. The team achieved a 1,000-fold reduction in processor demand and a million-fold reduction in memory demand by utilizing the tensor networks.
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New Scientist; Matthew Sparkes (January 29, 2025)
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Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) scientists are using an AI-powered robot, MiniROV, to locate and track marine organisms autonomously. According to MBARI's Kakani Katija, "The goal is to track individual animals for up to 24 hours so we can answer questions about the animal's behavior and ecology." The researchers also launched FathomVerse, a game that allows citizen scientists to explore a virtual ocean and classify marine organisms in the FathomNet database in an effort to train the AI.
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Bloomberg; Todd Woody (January 29, 2025)
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 Startup Compute Exchange will allow datacenter operators and cloud providers to sell their excess computing capacity through auctions, where AI companies can purchase blocks of processing times for different chip arrays. Donald Wilson Jr., founder of the trading platform, predicted oil "will be displaced by compute" as the biggest commodity over the next decade. The startup expects about 12 sellers to participate in its first public auction on Feb. 25.
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The Wall Street Journal; Alexander Osipovich (January 29, 2025)
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About 100 students attended “Break the Binary: Across the Spider-Verse,” a coding event hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on Jan. 25. Anmol Gupta of ACM-Women said she wanted the event to be inclusive of underrepresented groups in computer science. “Just looking at the ICPC (ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest) demographic, you’ll see it’s a lot of male participants,” said Gupta. “We wanted to open it up to women, non-binary and just overall underrepresented groups that are often not in competitive programming."
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Daily Bruin; Leilani Krantz; Alyssa Wong (January 29, 2025)
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Nonprofit Software Heritage has launched the CodeCommons project with the goal of creating the biggest repository of ethically sourced code for training AI models. CodeCommons will be focused on developing a unified data platform that gives researchers access to pre-cleaned code collections featuring license information, links to related research papers, and other metadata.
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IEEE Spectrum; Edd Gent (January 28, 2025)
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Using computational models of the skin to simulate biophysical changes during early stages of tumor progression, researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at Canada's University of Waterloo moved a step closer to noninvasive detection of early invasive skin melanoma. Using their Hyperspectral Light Impingement on Skin (HyLIoS) model, the researchers conducted in silico experiments to simulate the effects of angiogenesis (the process of forming new blood vessels from existing blood vessels) on the spectral characteristics of early melanoma.
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University of Waterloo Cheriton School of Computer Science (Canada) (January 29, 2025)
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A paper issued by the Vatican Jan. 28 emphasizes the need for constant AI oversight, citing the wealth of opportunities provided by the technology, as well as its "profound risks." The paper, developed by a Vatican team in conjunction with AI and other experts, expressed concerns about the potential for AI to destroy trust by spreading misinformation, its ability to cause isolation, and its possible harmful effects on human relationships.
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The New York Times; Elisabetta Povoledo (January 29, 2025)
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