U.S. stocks opened deeply in the red on Monday after China allowed its currency to fall to a fresh low against the dollar, upping the ante in the ongoing trade war. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -1.92% opened at 26,189, 1.2%, or 384 points lower. The S&P 500 SPX, -1.97% opened at 2,895, down 37 points, or 1.2%. The Nasdaq COMP, -2.54% was off 179 points, 2.2%, at the start of trading, to 7,822. Global stocks suffered steep declines as well. In pre-market trading, shares of Cars.com lost more than one-third of their value after the company announced it had received no bids to sell itself.

Evan McMurry
@evanmcmurry
NEW: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recovering from a fractured shoulder after a fall at his home this morning, his communications director says. "He has been treated, released, and is working from home in Louisville." (link: http://abcn.ws/2KrrgVk) abcn.ws/2KrrgVk

StanceGrounded
@_SJPeace_
This is Glen Oakley.

He was in the Foot Locker when the El Paso shooting happened. When he ran to leave, he saw kids in the mall without their parents, scared and alone.

So he picked up as many as he could and carried them to safety

KNOW HIS NAME!

Dave Matt
@davematt88
Today I called Mitch Mconnels office.

Me: " Yes, Russian Embassy, I'd like to set up an appointment to apply for my Russian visa."

Assistant: " You have the wrong number this is Senator Mitch McConnell's office."

Me: "Right. He's the Russian ambassador."

Click.

The performance of the system was so disconcerting, now the researchers are only releasing a reduced version of GPT-2 based on a much smaller text corpus. In a blog post on the project and this decision, researchers Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever wrote:

Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code. We are not releasing the dataset, training code, or GPT-2 model weights. Nearly a year ago we wrote in the OpenAI Charter: “we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research,” and we see this current work as potentially representing the early beginnings of such concerns, which we expect may grow over time. This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas.

OpenAI is funded by contributions from a group of technology executives and investors connected to what some have referred to as the PayPal "mafia"—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jessica Livingston, and Sam Altman of YCombinator, former PayPal COO and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and former Stripe Chief Technology Officer Greg Brockman. Brockman now serves as OpenAI's CTO. Musk has repeatedly warned of the potential existential dangers posed by AI, and OpenAI is focused on trying to shape the future of artificial intelligence technology—ideally moving it away from potentially harmful applications.

Given present-day concerns about how fake content has been used to both generate money for "fake news" publishers and potentially spread misinformation and undermine public debate, GPT-2's output certainly qualifies as concerning. Unlike other text generation "bot" models, such as those based on Markov chain algorithms, the GPT-2 "bot" did not lose track of what it was writing about as it generated output, keeping everything in context.

For example: given a two-sentence entry, GPT-2 generated a fake science story on the discovery of unicorns in the Andes, a story about the economic impact of Brexit, a report about a theft of nuclear materials near Cincinnati, a story about Miley Cyrus being caught shoplifting, and a student's report on the causes of the US Civil War.

Paul Tarashuk had schizoaffective disorder, suffering delusions and hallucinations. But he was getting on with his life, until one night last September, when he had a psychotic breakdown traveling along a highway in Orangeburg County, South Carolina.

Parked for a roadside break, a trucker suddenly saw Tarashuk walk toward him, naked. The trucker took off, but as he drove down the interstate, he realized Tarashuk was riding on his rig and called 911.

...

"I'm being f***ing serious. I'm sleepy. Give me your damn name so I can go home for real. I'm tired," one first responder said.

...

The deputy put Tarashuk into his cruiser and drove him 15 miles to a closed gas station near the county line. Surveillance video outside the gas station captured Tarashuk the last time he was seen alive. He had no shoes, no phone and no idea where he was.