Scroll was a subscription-based web service developed by Scroll Labs Inc., offering ad-free access to websites in exchange for a fee. Scroll was not an ad blocker; instead, it partnered directly with internet publishers who voluntarily removed ads from their sites for Scroll users in exchange for a portion of the subscription fee. In May 2021, Scroll was acquired by Twitter. In October 2021, Scroll sent out an email announcing its integration into Twitter Blue within 30 days. == Functionality == Scroll enabled users to browse websites that partnered with Scroll without encountering online advertising, in exchange for a subscription fee. Unlike ad blocker, which disable advertisements without compensating the publisher, Scroll sent a browser cookie indicating that the user was a subscriber. The Scroll software integrated into the website detected this cookie and served an ad-free version of the site. In exchange for disabling advertisements, partner websites received a portion of the subscription fee. As of January 2020, Scroll retained 30% of the subscription fee, with the remaining 70% distributed among publisher sites. Payments to sites were made individually by users based on their 'engagement and loyalty,' rather than from a single pool of all subscription revenue. Scroll did not grant subscribers access to partner sites behind a paywall; it only removed ads from the site if the user also paid the publication's subscription fee. == History == Scroll was founded in 2016 by former Chartbeat Chief Executive Tony Haile. Scroll raised US$3 million in its first round of funding in 2016, including investments from The New York Times, Uncork Capital, and Axel Springer SE. By October 2018, Scroll had raised US$10 million in funding. In 2018, Scroll signed its first partner websites, which included The Atlantic, Fusion Media Group, Business Insider, Slate, MSNBC, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Talking Points Memo. In February 2019, Scroll acquired the social media curation app Nuzzel. The same month, Mozilla and Scroll announced a partnership to run a "test pilot" together, but did not go into details. Scroll entered beta testing in 2019 and launched to the general public on January 28, 2020. In March 2020, Mozilla started offering Scroll as part of its "Firefox Better Web" service bundle. In May 2021, Scroll was acquired by Twitter, with the future of Scroll cited as being uncertain. An email to customers announcing the change said, "Later this year, Scroll will become part of a wider Twitter subscription that will expand on and adapt our services and functionality".
In philosophy and AI (especially, knowledge-based systems), the qualification problem is concerned with the impossibility of listing all the preconditions required for a real-world action to have its intended effect. It might be posed as how to deal with the things that prevent me from achieving my intended result. It is strongly connected to, and opposite the ramification side of, the frame problem. John McCarthy gives the following motivating example, in which it is impossible to enumerate all the circumstances that may prevent a robot from performing its ordinary function: [T]he successful use of a boat to cross a river requires, if the boat is a rowboat, that the oars and rowlocks be present and unbroken, and that they fit each other. Many other qualifications can be added, making the rules for using a rowboat almost impossible to apply, and yet anyone will still be able to think of additional requirements not yet stated.
GENESIS (The General Neural Simulation System) is a simulation environment for constructing realistic models of neurobiological systems at many levels of scale including: sub-cellular processes, individual neurons, networks of neurons, and neuronal systems. These simulations are “computer-based implementations of models whose primary objective is to capture what is known of the anatomical structure and physiological characteristics of the neural system of interest”. GENESIS is intended to quantify the physical framework of the nervous system in a way that allows for easy understanding of the physical structure of the nerves in question. “At present only GENESIS allows parallelized modeling of single neurons and networks on multiple-instruction-multiple-data parallel computers.” Development of GENESIS software spread from its home at Caltech to labs at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the University of Antwerp, the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, the University of Colorado, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Emory University. == Neurons and Neural Systems == GENESIS works by creating simulation environments for constructing models of neurons or neural systems. "Nerve cells are capable of communicating with each other in such a highly structured manner as to form neuronal networks. To understand neural networks, it is necessary to understand the ways in which one neuron communicates with another through synaptic connections and the process called synaptic transmission". Neurons have a specialized structure for their function, they "are different from most other cells in the body in that they are polarized and have distinct morphological regions, each with specific functions". The two important regions of a neuron are the dendrite and the axon. "Dendrites are the region where one neuron receives connections from other neurons. The cell body or soma contains the nucleus and the other organelles necessary for cellular function. The axon is a key component of nerve cells over which information is transmitted from one part of the neuron (e.g., the cell body) to the terminal regions of the neuron". The third important piece of a neuron is the synapse. "The synapse is the terminal region of the axon this is where one neuron forms a connection with another and conveys information through the process of synaptic transmission". Neural networks like the ones simulated with GENESIS software can quickly become highly complex and difficult to understand. "Just a few interconnected neurons (a microcircuit) can perform sophisticated tasks such as mediate reflexes, process sensory information, generate locomotion and mediate learning and memory. Even more complex networks, macrocircuits, consist of multiple embedded microcircuits. Macrocircuits mediate higher brain functions such as object recognition and cognition". GENESIS endeavors to simulate neural systems as they are found in nature. Often, "a neuron can receive contacts from up to 10,000 presynaptic neurons, and, in turn, any one neuron can contact up to 10,000 postsynaptic neurons. The combinatorial possibility could give rise to enormously complex neuronal circuits or network topologies, which might be very difficult to understand". == History == GENESIS was developed by Dr. James M. Bower, in the Caltech laboratory, and first released to the public in 1988 in association with the first Methods in Computational Neuroscience Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. Full source code for the software was released in the same year under an open software model for development. It's now supported by the Computational Biology Initiative at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is available free along with tutorial guides on its use. P-GENESIS, a parallel version of GENESIS, was first run in 1990 on the Intel Delta, which was the prototype for the Intel Paragon family of massively parallel supercomputers. == How GENESIS Works == GENESIS is useful in creating a simulation environment for constructing models of neurobiological systems, such as: sub-cellular processes individual neurons networks of neurons neuronal systems The GENESIS system is complicated, but relatively easy to use. An individual can input commands through one of three ways: script files, graphical user interface, or the GENESIS command shell. These commands are then processed by the script language interpreter. "The Script Language Interpreter processes commands entered through the keyboard, script files, or the graphical user interface, and passes them to the GENESIS simulation engine. The simulation engine also loads compiled object libraries, reads and writes data files, and interacts with the graphical user interface". Below is a graphical representation of the user input process and a sample GENESIS output. == Applications == Most current applications for GENESIS involve realistic simulations of biological systems. It is usually used to simulate the behavior of larger brain structures, for example the cerebral cortex. These studies most often occur in lab courses in neural simulation at Caltech and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. GENESIS can be used in combination with Yale University’s software called NEURON as a means for scientists to collaborate to construct a physical description of the nervous system. The GENESIS software can also be used with Kinetikit in the modeling of signal transduction pathways. GENESIS has been used in many studies. Some of these studies involve research that focuses on the development of software that would be useful across many disciplines. Others are studies of neurons, such as Purkinje cells. These studies used GENESIS to simulate Purkinje cells and could be useful for the planning and development of later experiments using the GENESIS software. There may also be biomedical applications of the software. For example, St. Jude Medical in Europe has developed an implanted GENESIS device.
AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which performs predictions of protein structure. It is designed using deep learning techniques. AlphaFold 1 (2018) placed first in the overall rankings of the 13th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) in December 2018. It was particularly successful at predicting the most accurate structures for targets rated as most difficult by the competition organizers, where no existing template structures were available from proteins with partially similar sequences. AlphaFold 2 (2020) repeated this placement in the CASP14 competition in November 2020. It achieved a level of accuracy much higher than any other entry. It scored above 90 on CASP's global distance test (GDT) for approximately two-thirds of the proteins, a test measuring the similarity between a computationally predicted structure and the experimentally determined structure, where 100 represents a complete match. The inclusion of metagenomic data has improved the quality of the prediction of multiple sequence alignments. One of the biggest sources of the training data was the custom-built Big Fantastic Database of 65,983,866 protein families, represented as multiple sequence alignments and Hidden Markov models, covering 2,204,359,010 protein sequences from reference databases, metagenomes, and metatranscriptomes. AlphaFold 2's results at CASP14 were described as "astounding" and "transformational". However, some researchers noted that the accuracy was insufficient for a third of its predictions, and that it did not reveal the underlying mechanism or rules of protein folding for the protein folding problem, which remains unsolved. Despite this, the technical achievement was widely recognized. On 15 July 2021, the AlphaFold 2 paper was published in Nature as an advance access publication alongside open source software and a searchable database of species proteomes. As of November 2025, the paper had been cited nearly 43,000 times. AlphaFold 3 was announced on 8 May 2024. It can predict the structure of complexes created by proteins with DNA, RNA, various ligands, and ions. The new prediction method shows a minimum 50% improvement in accuracy for protein interactions with other molecules compared to existing methods. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared one half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded "for protein structure prediction," while the other half went to David Baker "for computational protein design." Hassabis and Jumper had previously won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2023 for their leadership of the AlphaFold project. == Background == Proteins consist of chains of amino acids which spontaneously fold to form the three dimensional (3-D) structures of the proteins. The 3-D structure is crucial to understanding the biological function of the protein. Protein structures can be determined experimentally through techniques such as X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which are all expensive and time-consuming. Such efforts, using the experimental methods, have identified the structures of about 170,000 proteins over the last 60 years, while there are over 200 million known proteins across all life forms. Over the years, researchers have applied numerous computational methods to predict the 3D structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences, accuracy of such methods in best possible scenario is close to experimental techniques (NMR) by the use of homology modeling based on molecular evolution. CASP, which was launched in 1994 to challenge the scientific community to produce their best protein structure predictions, found that GDT scores of only about 40 out of 100 can be achieved for the most difficult proteins by 2016. AlphaFold started competing in the 2018 CASP using an artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning technique. == Algorithm == DeepMind is known to have trained the program on over 170,000 protein structures from the Protein Data Bank, a public repository of protein sequences and structures. The program uses a form of attention network, a deep learning technique that focuses on having the AI identify parts of a larger problem, then piece it together to obtain the overall solution. The overall training was conducted on processing power between 100 and 200 GPUs. === AlphaFold 1 (2018) === AlphaFold 1 (2018) was built on work developed by various teams in the 2010s, work that looked at the large databases of related protein sequences now available from many different organisms (most without known 3D structures), to try to find changes at different residues (peptides) that appeared to be correlated, even though the residues were not consecutive in the main chain. Such correlations suggest that the residues may be close to each other physically, even though not close in the sequence, allowing a contact map to be estimated. Building on recent work prior to 2018, AlphaFold 1 extended this by estimating a probability distribution for the distances between residues, effectively transforming the contact map into a distance map. It also used more advanced learning methods than previously to develop the inference. The code was not made publicly available, except to run on sequences of proteins in the 2018 CASP competition. === AlphaFold 2 (2020) === The 2020 version of the program (AlphaFold 2, 2020) is significantly different from the original version that won CASP 13 in 2018, according to the team at DeepMind. AlphaFold 1 used a number of separately trained modules to produce a guide potential, which was then combined with a physics-based energy potential. AlphaFold 2 replaced this with a system of interconnected sub-networks, forming a single, differentiable, end-to-end model based on pattern recognition. This model was trained in an integrated manner. After the neural network's prediction converges, a final refinement step applies local physical constraints using energy minimization based on the AMBER force field. This step only slightly adjusts the predicted structure. A key part of the 2020 system are two modules, believed to be based on a transformer design, which are used to progressively refine a vector of information for each relationship (or "edge" in graph-theory terminology) between an amino acid residue of the protein and another amino acid residue (these relationships are represented by the array shown in green); and between each amino acid position and each different sequences in the input sequence alignment (these relationships are represented by the array shown in red). Internally these refinement transformations contain layers that have the effect of bringing relevant data together and filtering out irrelevant data (the "attention mechanism") for these relationships, in a context-dependent way, learned from training data. These transformations are iterated, the updated information output by one step becoming the input of the next, with the sharpened residue/residue information feeding into the update of the residue/sequence information, and then the improved residue/sequence information feeding into the update of the residue/residue information. As the iteration progresses, according to one report, the "attention algorithm ... mimics the way a person might assemble a jigsaw puzzle: first connecting pieces in small clumps—in this case clusters of amino acids—and then searching for ways to join the clumps in a larger whole." The output of these iterations then informs the final structure prediction module, which also uses transformers, and is itself then iterated. In an example presented by DeepMind, the structure prediction module achieved a correct topology for the target protein on its first iteration, scored as having a GDT_TS of 78, but with a large number (90%) of stereochemical violations – i.e. unphysical bond angles or lengths. With subsequent iterations the number of stereochemical violations fell. By the third iteration the GDT_TS of the prediction was approaching 90, and by the eighth iteration the number of stereochemical violations was approaching zero. The training data was originally restricted to single peptide chains. However, the October 2021 update, named AlphaFold-Multimer, included protein complexes in its training data. DeepMind stated this update succeeded about 70% of the time at accurately predicting protein-protein interactions. === AlphaFold 3 (2024) === Announced on 8 May 2024, AlphaFold 3 was co-developed by Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, both subsidiaries of Alphabet. AlphaFold 3 is not limited to proteins, as it can also predict the structures of protein complexes with DNA, RNA, post-translational modifications and selected ligands and ions. AlphaFold 3 introduces the "Pairformer," a deep learning architecture inspired by the transformer, which is considered similar to, but si
The Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator (SWIG) is an open-source software tool used to connect computer programs or libraries written in C or C++ with scripting languages such as Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl, and other language implementations like C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, D, OCaml, Octave, Scilab and Scheme. Output can also be in the form of XML. == Function == The aim is to allow the calling of native functions (that were written in C or C++) by other programming languages, passing complex data types to those functions, keeping memory from being inappropriately freed, inheriting object classes across languages, etc. The programmer writes an interface file containing a list of C/C++ functions to be made visible to an interpreter. SWIG will compile the interface file and generate code in regular C/C++ and the target programming language. SWIG will generate conversion code for functions with simple arguments; conversion code for complex types of arguments must be written by the programmer. The SWIG tool creates source code that provides the glue between C/C++ and the target language. Depending on the language, this glue comes in three forms: a shared library that an extant interpreter can link to as some form of extension module, or a shared library that can be linked to other programs compiled in the target language (for example, using Java Native Interface (JNI) in Java). a shared dynamic library source code that should be compiled and dynamically loaded (e.g. Node.js native extensions) SWIG is not used for calling interpreted functions by native code; this must be done by the programmer manually. == Example == SWIG wraps simple C declarations by creating an interface that closely matches the way in which the declarations would be used in a C program. For example, consider the following interface file: In this file, there are two functions sin() and strcmp(), a global variable Foo, and two constants STATUS and VERSION. When SWIG creates an extension module, these declarations are accessible as scripting language functions, variables, and constants respectively. In Python: == Purpose == There are two main reasons to embed a scripting engine in an existing C/C++ program: The program can then be customized far faster, via a scripting language instead of C/C++. The scripting engine may even be exposed to the end-user, so that they can automate common tasks by writing scripts. Even if the final product is not to contain the scripting engine, it may nevertheless be very useful for writing test scripts. There are several reasons to create dynamic libraries that can be loaded into extant interpreters, including: Provide access to a C/C++ library which has no equivalent in the scripting language. Write the whole program in the scripting language first, and after profiling, rewrite performance-critical code in C or C++. == History == SWIG is written in C and C++ and has been publicly available since February 1996. The initial author and main developer was David M. Beazley who developed SWIG while working as a graduate student at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Utah and while on the faculty at the University of Chicago. Development is currently supported by an active group of volunteers led by William Fulton. SWIG has been released under a GNU General Public License. == Google Summer of Code == SWIG was a successful participant of Google Summer of Code in 2008, 2009, 2012. In 2008, SWIG got four slots. Haoyu Bai spent his summers on SWIG's Python 3.0 Backend, Jan Jezabek worked on Support for generating COM wrappers, Cheryl Foil spent her time on Comment 'Translator' for SWIG, and Maciej Drwal worked on a C backend. In 2009, SWIG again participated in Google Summer of Code. This time four students participated. Baozeng Ding worked on a Scilab module. Matevz Jekovec spent time on C++0x features. Ashish Sharma spent his summer on an Objective-C module, Miklos Vajna spent his time on PHP directors. In 2012, SWIG participated in Google Summer of Code. This time four out of five students successfully completed the project. Leif Middelschulte worked on a C target language module. Swati Sharma enhanced the Objective-C module. Neha Narang added the new module on JavaScript. Dmitry Kabak worked on source code documentation and Doxygen comments. == Alternatives == For Python, similar functionality is offered by SIP, Pybind11, and Boost's Boost.python library. == Projects using SWIG == ZXID (Apache License, Version 2.0) Symlabs SFIS (commercial) LLDB GNU Radio up to (including) version 3.8.x.x; later versions use Pybind11 Xapian TensorFlow Apache SINGA QuantLib Babeltrace
Frames are an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing "stereotyped situations". They were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge". Frames are the primary data structure used in artificial intelligence frame languages; they are stored as ontologies of sets. Frames are also an extensive part of knowledge representation and reasoning schemes. They were originally derived from semantic networks and are therefore part of structure-based knowledge representations. According to Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, structural representations assemble "facts about particular object and event types and [arrange] the types into a large taxonomic hierarchy analogous to a biological taxonomy". == Frame structure == The frame contains information on how to use the frame, what to expect next, and what to do when these expectations are not met. Some information in the frame is generally unchanged while other information, stored in "terminals", usually change. Terminals can be considered as variables. Top-level frames carry information, that is always true about the problem in hand, however, terminals do not have to be true. Their value might change with the new information encountered. Different frames may share the same terminals. Each piece of information about a particular frame is held in a slot. The information can contain: Facts or Data Values (called facets) Procedures (also called procedural attachments) IF-NEEDED: deferred evaluation IF-ADDED: updates linked information Default Values For Data For Procedures Other Frames or Subframes == Features and advantages == A frame's terminals are already filled with default values, which is based on how the human mind works. For example, when a person is told "a boy kicks a ball", most people will visualize a particular ball (such as a familiar soccer ball) rather than imagining some abstract ball with no attributes. One particular strength of frame-based knowledge representations is that, unlike semantic networks, they allow for exceptions in particular instances. This gives frames a degree of flexibility that allows representations to reflect real-world phenomena more accurately. Like semantic networks, frames can be queried using spreading activation. Following the rules of inheritance, any value given to a slot that is inherited by subframes will be updated (IF-ADDED) to the corresponding slots in the subframes and any new instances of a particular frame will feature that new value as the default. Because frames are based on structures, it is possible to generate a semantic network given a set of frames even though it lacks explicit arcs. References to Noam Chomsky and his generative grammar of 1950 are generally missing from Minsky's work. The simplified structures of frames allow for easy analogical reasoning, a much prized feature in any intelligent agent. The procedural attachments provided by frames also allow a degree of flexibility that makes for a more realistic representation and gives a natural affordance for programming applications. == Example == Worth noticing here is the easy analogical reasoning (comparison) that can be done between a boy and a monkey just by having similarly named slots. Also notice that Alex, an instance of a boy, inherits default values like "Sex" from the more general parent object Boy, but the boy may also have different instance values in the form of exceptions such as the number of legs. == Frame language == A frame language is a technology used for knowledge representation in artificial intelligence. They are similar to class hierarchies in object-oriented languages although their fundamental design goals are different. Frames are focused on explicit and intuitive representation of knowledge whereas objects focus on encapsulation and information hiding. Frames originated in AI research and objects primarily in software engineering. However, in practice, the techniques and capabilities of frame and object-oriented languages overlap significantly. === Example === A simple example of concepts modeled in a frame language is the Friend of A Friend (FOAF) ontology defined as part of the Semantic Web as a foundation for social networking and calendar systems. The primary frame in this simple example is a Person. Example slots are the person's email, home page, phone, etc. The interests of each person can be represented by additional frames describing the space of business and entertainment domains. The slot knows links each person with other persons. Default values for a person's interests can be inferred by the web of people they are friends of. === Implementations === The earliest frame-based languages were custom developed for specific research projects and were not packaged as tools to be re-used by other researchers. Just as with expert system inference engines, researchers soon realized the benefits of extracting part of the core infrastructure and developing general-purpose frame languages that were not coupled to specific applications. One of the first general-purpose frame languages was KRL. One of the most influential early frame languages was KL-ONE. KL-ONE spawned several subsequent Frame languages. One of the most widely used successors to KL-ONE was the Loom language developed by Robert MacGregor at the Information Sciences Institute. In the 1980s, Artificial Intelligence generated a great deal of interest in the business world fueled by expert systems. This led to the development of many commercial products for the development of knowledge-based systems. These early products were usually developed in Lisp and integrated constructs such as IF-THEN rules for logical reasoning with Frame hierarchies for representing data. One of the most well known of these early Lisp knowledge-base tools was the Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) from Intellicorp. KEE provided a full Frame language with multiple inheritance, slots, triggers, default values, and a rule engine that supported backward and forward chaining. As with most early commercial versions of AI software KEE was originally deployed in Lisp on Lisp machine platforms but was eventually ported to PCs and Unix workstations. The research agenda of the Semantic Web spawned a renewed interest in automatic classification and frame languages. An example is the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard for describing information on the Internet. OWL is a standard to provide a semantic layer on top of the Internet. The goal is that rather than searching the web using keywords as most search engines (e.g. Google) do today, the web can be organized by concepts organized in an ontology, like a directory structure. The name of the OWL language itself provides a good example of the value of a Semantic Web. If one were to search for "OWL" using the Internet today most of the pages retrieved would be on the bird Owl rather than the standard OWL. With a Semantic Web it would be possible to specify the concept "Web Ontology Language" and the user would not need to worry about the various possible acronyms or synonyms as part of the search. Likewise, the user would not need to worry about homonyms crowding the search results with irrelevant data such as information about birds of prey as in this simple example. In addition to OWL, various standards and technologies that are relevant to the Semantic Web and were influenced by Frame languages include OIL and DAML. The Protege Open Source software tool from Stanford University provides an ontology editing capability that is built on OWL and has the full capabilities of a classifier. However it ceased to explicitly support frames as of version 3.5 (which is maintained for those preferring frame orientation), with the current version being 5.6.8 as of 2025. The justification for moving from explicit frames being that OWL DL is more expressive and "industry standard". === Comparison of frames and objects === Frame languages have a significant overlap with object-oriented languages. The terminologies and goals of the two communities were different but as they moved from the academic world and labs to the commercial world developers tended to not care about philosophical issues and focused primarily on specific capabilities, taking the best from either camp regardless of where the idea began. What both paradigms have in common is a desire to reduce the distance between concepts in the real world and their implementation in software. As such both paradigms arrived at the idea of representing the primary software objects in taxonomies starting with very general types and progressing to more specific types. The following table illustrates the correlation between standard terminology from the object-oriented and frame language communities: The primary difference between the two paradigms was in the degree that encapsulation was considered a majo
Luciano Floridi (Italian: [luˈtʃaːno ˈflɔːridi]; born 16 November 1964) is an Italian and British philosopher. He is John K. Castle Professor in the Practice of Cognitive Science and Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University. He is also a Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bologna, Department of Legal Studies, where he is the director of the Centre for Digital Ethics. Furthermore, he is adjunct professor ("distinguished scholar in residence") at the Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C. He is married to the neuroscientist Anna Christina Nobre. Floridi is best known for his work on two areas of philosophical research: the philosophy of information, and information ethics (also known as digital ethics or computer ethics), for which he received many awards, including the Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit, Italy's most prestigious honor. According to Scopus, Floridi was the most cited living philosopher in the world in 2020. Between 2008 and 2013, he held the research chair in philosophy of information and the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire. He was the founder and director of the IEG, an interdepartmental research group on the philosophy of information at the University of Oxford, and of the GPI the research Group in Philosophy of Information at the University of Hertfordshire. He was the founder and director of the SWIF, the Italian e-journal of philosophy (1995–2008). He is a former Governing Body Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. == Early life and education == Floridi was born in Rome in 1964, and studied at Rome University La Sapienza (laurea, first class with distinction, 1988), where he was originally educated as a historian of philosophy. He soon became interested in analytic philosophy and wrote his tesi di laurea (roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis) in philosophy of logic, on Michael Dummett's anti-realism. He obtained his Master of Philosophy (1989) and PhD degree (1990) from the University of Warwick, working in epistemology and philosophy of logic with Susan Haack (who was his PhD supervisor) and Michael Dummett. Floridi's early student years are partly recounted in the non-fiction book The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, where he is "Luciano". During his graduate and postdoctoral years, he covered the standard topics in analytic philosophy in search of a new methodology. He sought to approach contemporary problems from a heuristically powerful and intellectually enriching perspective when dealing with lively philosophical issues. During his graduate studies, he began to distance himself from classical analytic philosophy. In his view, the analytic movement had lost its way. For this reason, he worked on pragmatism (especially Peirce) and foundationalist issues in epistemology and philosophy of logic, as well as the history of skepticism. == Academic career and previous positions == Floridi started his academic career as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick in 1990–1991. He joined the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Oxford in 1990 and the OUCL (Oxford's Department of Computer Science) in 1999. He was junior research fellow (JRF) in philosophy at Wolfson College, Oxford University (1990–1994), a Frances Yates Fellow in the History of Ideas at the Warburg Institute, University of London (1994–1995) and Research Fellow in philosophy at Wolfson College, Oxford University (1994–2001). During these years in Oxford, he held lectureships in different Colleges. Between 1994 and 1996, he also held a post-doctoral research scholarship at the Department of Philosophy, University of Turin. Between 2001 and 2006, he was Markle Foundation Senior Research Fellow in Information Policy at the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, Oxford University. Between 2002 and 2008, he was associate professor of logic at the Università degli Studi di Bari. In 2006, he became Fellow by Special Election of St Cross College, Oxford University, where he played for the squash team. In 2008, he was appointed full professor of philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, to hold the newly established research chair in philosophy of information and, in 2009, the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics, a position which he held until 2013, when he moved back to Oxford. In 2017, Floridi became a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and the chair of its Data Ethics Group, holding these positions until 2021 and 2020, respectively. Since 2010 he has been editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Technology (Springer). In January 2023, Floridi announced he would move to Yale at the beginning of the academic year 2023–2024, to take over the position of founding director of the Yale Digital Ethics Center. == Philosophical views == One of Floridi's key contributions is his formulation of the 'Philosophy of Information' (PoI). The PoI provides a framework for understanding the nature of information and its role in the world. According to Floridi, information is a vital resource that shapes our knowledge and understanding of the world. It is not simply a neutral representation of reality but a part of the world, with its own properties, effects, and moral implications. Floridi's PoI has several key components including an 'ontology of information', which defines the nature of information, an 'ethics of information', which provides a framework for evaluating the moral implications of information and information technologies, an 'epistemology of information', that analyses the role of information in the development of knowledge and science, and a 'logic of information', the concentrates on the more formal aspects. The PoI also includes a theory of the 'information environment', the infosphere, which encompasses the physical, social, and cultural contexts in which information is produced, used, and communicated. == Recognitions and awards == 2022 - Knight of the Grand Cross - First Class of the Order of Merit (Cavaliere di Gran Croce Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, the highest honor in the Italian Republic), awarded through a special decree by the president of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella for his work on the philosophy and ethics of information. 2022 - Fellow of the Accademia delle Scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna 2021 - Honorary Doctorate (Laurea honoris causa) in Informatics, University of Skövde, Sweden, for "his groundbreaking work on the philosophy of information". 2020 - Premio Udine Filosofia, Mimesis Festival, for The Logic of Information (OUP, 2019) 2020 - Premio Socrate, Cesare Landa Foundation, for philosophical communication 2019 - CogX Award, for "outstanding achievement in ethics of AI" 2019 - Gilbert Ryle Lectures, Trent University 2019 - Premio Aretè "Maestro della Responsabilità", Nuvolaverde, Confindustria, Gruppo 24 Ore Salone della CSR e dell'innovazione sociale, for ethics of communication 2018 - Thinker Award, IBM, for AI Ethics 2018 - Premio Conoscenza, Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane (CRUI, equivalent of Universities UK), for achievements in research and communication about digital ethics 2017 - Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences 2016 - J. Ong Award, Media Ecology Association, for The Fourth Revolution (OUP, 2016) 2016 - Copernicus Scientist Award, Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Ferrara, in recognition of research in the ethics and philosophy of information 2015 - Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow, European University Institute 2014-15 - Cátedras de Excelencia, University Carlos III of Madrid, for research in philosophy and ethics of information 2013 - Member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences 2013 - Fellow of the British Computer Society 2013 - Weizenbaum Award, International Society for Ethics and Information Technology, for "very significant contribution to the field of information and computer ethics, through his research, service, and vision" 2012 - Covey Award, International Association for Computing and Philosophy, for "outstanding research in computing and philosophy" 2011-12 - Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee 2011 - Honorary Doctorate (Laurea honoris causa) in philosophy, University of Suceava, Romania, for "his leading research in the philosophy and ethics of information" 2011 - Fellow, World Technology Network, NY, in the category "ethics and technology" 2010 - Vice Chancellor Research Award, University of Hertfordshire 2009 - Fellow of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AIBS) 2009-10 - Gauss Professor of the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Göttingen, in recognition of research in the philosophy of information (first philosopher to receive the award, generally given to mathematicians or physicists) 2009 - Barwise Prize, American Philosophical Asso
DREAM Challenges (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods) is a non-profit initiative for advancing biomedical and systems biology research via crowd-sourced competitions. Started in 2006, DREAM challenges collaborate with Sage Bionetworks to provide a platform for competitions run on the Synapse platform. Over 60 DREAM challenges have been conducted over the span of over 15 years. == Overview == DREAM Challenges were founded in 2006 by Gustavo Stolovizky from IBM Research and Andrea Califano from Columbia University. Current chair of the DREAM organization is Paul Boutros from University of California. Further organization spans emeritus chairs Justin Guinney and Gustavo Stolovizky, and multiple DREAM directors. Individual challenges focus on tackling a specific biomedical research question, typically narrowed down to a specific disease. A prominent disease focus has been on oncology, with multiple past challenges focused on breast cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, and prostate cancer or similar diseases. The data involved in an individual challenge reflects the disease context; while cancers typically involve data such as mutations in the human genome, gene expression and gene networks in transcriptomics, and large scale proteomics, newer challenges have shifted towards single cell sequencing technologies as well as emerging gut microbiome related research questions, thus reflecting trends in the wider research community. Motivation for DREAM Challenges is that via crowd-sourcing data to a larger audience via competitions, better models and insight is gained than if the analysis was conducted by a single entity. Past competitions have been published in such scientific venues as the flagship journals of the Nature Portfolio and PLOS publishing groups. Results of DREAM challenges are announced via web platforms, and the top performing participants are invited to present their results in the annual RECOMB/ISCB Conferences with RSG/DREAM organized by the ISCB. While DREAM Challenges have emphasized open science and data, in order to mitigate issues rising from highly sensitive data such as genomics in patient cohorts, "model to data" approaches have been adopted. In such challenges participants submit their models via containers such as Docker or Singularity. This allows retaining confidentiality of the original data as these containers are then run by the organizers on the confidential data. This differs from the more traditional open data model, where participants submit predictions directly based on the provided open data. == Challenge organization == DREAM challenge comprises a core DREAM/Sage Bionetworks organization group as well as an extended scientific expert group, who may have contributed to creation and conception of the challenge or by providing key data. Additionally, new DREAM challenges may be proposed by the wider research community. Pharmaceutical companies or other private entities may also be involved in DREAM challenges, for example in providing data. == Challenge structure == Timelines for key stages (such as introduction webinars, model submission deadlines, and final deadline for participation) are provided in advance. After the winners are announced, organizers start collaborating with the top performing participants to conduct post hoc analyses for a publication describing key findings from the competition. Challenges may be split into sub-challenges, each addressing a different subtopic within the research question. For example, regarding cancer treatment efficacy predictions, these may be separate predictions for progression-free survival, overall survival, best overall response according to RECIST, or exact time until event (progression or death). == Participation == During DREAM challenges, participants typically build models on provided data, and submit predictions or models that are then validated on held-out data by the organizers. While DREAM challenges avoid leaking validation data to participants, there are typically mid-challenge submission leaderboards available to assist participants in evaluating their performance on a sub-sampled or scrambled dataset. DREAM challenges are free for participants. During the open phase anybody can register via Synapse to participate either individually or as a team. A person may only register once and may not use any aliases. There are some exceptions, which disqualify an individual from participating, for example: Person has privileged access to the data for the particular challenge, thus providing them with an unfair advantage. Person has been caught or is under suspicion of cheating or abusing previous DREAM Challenges. Person is a minor (under age 18 or the age of majority in jurisdiction of residence). This may be alleviated via parental consent.
The Automated Mathematician (AM) is one of the earliest successful discovery systems. It was created by Douglas Lenat in Lisp, and in 1977 led to Lenat being awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. AM worked by generating and modifying short Lisp programs which were then interpreted as defining various mathematical concepts; for example, a program that tested equality between the length of two lists was considered to represent the concept of numerical equality, while a program that produced a list whose length was the product of the lengths of two other lists was interpreted as representing the concept of multiplication. The system had elaborate heuristics for choosing which programs to extend and modify, based on the experiences of working mathematicians in solving mathematical problems. == Controversy == Lenat claimed that the system was composed of hundreds of data structures called "concepts", together with hundreds of "heuristic rules" and a simple flow of control: "AM repeatedly selects the top task from the agenda and tries to carry it out. This is the whole control structure!" Yet the heuristic rules were not always represented as separate data structures; some had to be intertwined with the control flow logic. Some rules had preconditions that depended on the history, or otherwise could not be represented in the framework of the explicit rules. What's more, the published versions of the rules often involve vague terms that are not defined further, such as "If two expressions are structurally similar, ..." (Rule 218) or "... replace the value obtained by some other (very similar) value..." (Rule 129). Another source of information is the user, via Rule 2: "If the user has recently referred to X, then boost the priority of any tasks involving X." Thus, it appears quite possible that much of the real discovery work is buried in unexplained procedures. Lenat claimed that the system had rediscovered both Goldbach's conjecture and the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. Later critics accused Lenat of over-interpreting the output of AM. In his paper Why AM and Eurisko appear to work, Lenat conceded that any system that generated enough short Lisp programs would generate ones that could be interpreted by an external observer as representing equally sophisticated mathematical concepts. However, he argued that this property was in itself interesting—and that a promising direction for further research would be to look for other languages in which short random strings were likely to be useful. == Successor == This intuition was the basis of AM's successor Eurisko, which attempted to generalize the search for mathematical concepts to the search for useful heuristics.
The Alliance for Secure AI is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization which educates the public about the risks of advanced artificial intelligence (AI). Politico has described the Alliance as a "bipartisan nonprofit trying to push a middle-ground approach to AI guardrails." == History == In June 2025, the Alliance was launched as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit watchdog in Washington, D.C. That same month, the organization rolled out a six-figure advertising campaign featuring bipartisan warnings about advanced AI. The ad campaign presented different messages for different political audiences. The Alliance opposed the idea of a moratorium on state AI laws as part of the July 2025 budget bill, in addition to President Donald Trump's December 2025 executive order on the issue. The group has also criticized AI companies like Meta and OpenAI for what it says are failures to prevent harms to children. In addition, the Alliance has criticized OpenAI for subpoenaing nonprofit organizations in the AI safety space. In March 2026, the Alliance launched JobLoss.ai, a website that tracks the jobs that have been eliminated with AI cited as a contributing factor. As of April 2026, JobLoss.ai has tracked more than 127,000 lost jobs. == Leadership == Brendan Steinhauser, a longtime political and communications strategist, is the founder and CEO of the Alliance. He was an early Tea Party movement organizer, and ran campaigns for multiple members of Congress, including Sen. John Cornyn, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Rep. Michael McCaul. Peyton Hornberger is the group's communications director. In July 2025, Hornberger criticized Palantir for its use of AI in a USA Today op-ed column.
Logic Programming Associates (LPA) is a company specializing in logic programming and artificial intelligence software. LPA was founded in 1980 and is widely known for its range of Prolog compilers, the Flex expert system toolkit and most recently, VisiRule. LPA was established to exploit research at the Department of Computing and Control at Imperial College London into logic programming carried out under the supervision of Prof Robert Kowalski. == History of LPA Prolog == One of the first Prolog implementations made available by LPA was micro-PROLOG which ran on popular 8-bit home computers such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Apple II. The 8-bit micro-PROLOG interpreter was soon followed by micro-PROLOG Professional one of the first Prolog implementations for the IBM PC running MS-DOS. micro-PROLOG Professional could access all of the 640K memory available under MS-DOS and therefore manage much larger programs In 1985, LPA released LPA MacProlog which ran on the MacPlus and Mac II computers which could access up to 4 Mb memory. MacProlog was later licensed to Quintus for re-distribution in the USA. In 1989, LPA started work on a new 32-bit Prolog compiler which could use DOS-extender technology to access up to 4GB memory. This became the basis for LPA Prolog for Windows, aka WIN-PROLOG, which was then released for Windows 3.0 in 1990. LPA's core Prolog product is LPA Prolog for Windows, a compiler and development system for the Microsoft Windows platform. The current LPA software range comprises an integrated AI toolset which covers various aspects of Artificial Intelligence including Logic Programming, Expert Systems, Knowledge-based Systems, Data Mining, Agents and Case-based reasoning etc. As well as continuing with Prolog compiler technology development, LPA has a track record of creating innovative associated tools and products to address specific challenges and opportunities. == Flex Expert System toolkit == In 1989, in response to the rise of interest in Expert Systems and the emergence of products such as Crystal, GoldWorks, NExpert, LPA developed the Flex expert system toolkit, which incorporated frame-based reasoning with inheritance, rule-based programming and data-driven procedures. Flex has its own English-like Knowledge Specification Language (KSL) which means that knowledge and rules are defined in an easy-to-read and understand way. LPA supported Flex on Windows, DOS and Macintosh PCs, as an add-on toolkit to its various LPA Prolog systems and eanbled LPA to enter the then quick vibrant Expert Systems rules-market. Flex was quickly established as the leading Prolog-based expert system toolkit and was licensed to other Prolog providors on other hardware platforms including Telecomputing Plc to supplement Top One on IBM and ICL mainframes. Other implementations included Quintec-Flex, Quintus Flex, Poplog Flex and BIM Flex which were all running on Unix and/or Vax/VMS platforms. POPLOG-Flex was used to build BRAND EVALUATOR - an expert system to assist brand specialists in evaluating the worth of branded products Quintec-Flex was used to build a hybrid system for the non-linear dynamic analysis/design of coupled shear walls Flex was adopted by the Open University as part of its course T396, "Artificial intelligence for technology" which was designed by Prof Adrian Hopgood. Some of the teaching material is now available on his AI tookit website. Flex was also used by David A Ferrucci and Selmer Bringsjord in their storytelling machine, BRUTUS. == PVG == In 1992, LPA helped set up the Prolog Vendors Group, a not-for-profit organization whose aim was to help promote Prolog by making people aware of its usage in industry. == Business Integrity Ltd and Contract Express == Between 1996 and 1998, based on work co-funded through a DTI Smart award, LPA developed ScaffoldIT, a tool for building dynamic documents and intelligent web sites. This technology, built using the LPA Prolog engine and associated ProWeb Server, was able to generate complex, personalised documents such as insurance policy schedules, legal contracts, and complex sales proposals, over the Web. In 1999/2000, LPA helped set up Business Integrity Ltd, as a Joint Venture with Tarlo-Lyons, to bring the above document assembly technology to market. This product eventually became Contract Express. Contract Express became very popular amongst large law firms and was sold worldwide for both internal and external use. Partners and GCs liked Contract Express because lawyers were able to quickly and accurately automate and update their legal templates in Word without requiring IT specialists to convert them into programs. As a result of the commercial success of Contract Express, BIL was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2015. The very early days of BIL are described by Clive Spenser here. == VisiRule == In 2004, LPA launched VisiRule a graphical tool for developing knowledge-based and decision support systems. VisiRule was described in IEEE Potentials in 2007 (see Drawing on your knowledge with VisiRule): VisiRule has been used in various sectors, to build legal expert systems, machine diagnostic programs, medical and financial advice systems, etc. In 2013, VisiRule was incorporated into Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) where it has been used to provide enhanced decision support capabilities. EMDS integrates state-of-the-art geographic information system (GIS) as well as logic programming and decision modeling technologies on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) to provide decision support for a substantial portion of the adaptive management process of ecosystem management. EMDS is actively used, extended, supported and maintained by Mountain View Business Group (for an in-depth reprise of EMDS see the article in Frontiers in Environmental Science). In 2023, VisiRule was listed as one of the 5 best decision support software for large enterprises in 2024. == Customers == For many years, LPA has worked closely with Valdis Krebs, an American-Latvian researcher, author, and consultant in the field of social and organizational network analysis. Valdis is the founder and chief scientist of Orgnet, and the creator of the popular Inflow software package. LPA Prolog and Flex were used to create Allergenius, an expert system for the interpretation of allergen microarray results. Rules representing the knowledge base (KB) were derived from the literature and specialized databases. The input data included the patient's ID and disease(s), the results of either a skin prick test or specific IgE assays and ISAC results. The output was a medical report.
Liang Wenfeng (Chinese: 梁文锋; pinyin: Liáng Wénfēng; born 1985) is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman who is the co-founder of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, as well as the founder and CEO of its artificial intelligence company DeepSeek. Liang attended Zhejiang University, and began his career by applying machine learning methods to quantitative finance. Through High-Flyer, he built large-scale computing infrastructure that was later used to support artificial intelligence research, leading to the creation of DeepSeek in 2023. DeepSeek gained international attention following the release of DeepSeek-R1, which analysts described as demonstrating high-level performance with comparatively limited compute resources. In 2025, Liang was named to Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People in AI and Fortune's list of the Most Powerful People in Business. == Early life == Liang was born in 1985 in the village of Mililing (米历岭村), Qinba town (覃巴镇), Wuchuan city (吴川市), Guangdong. His parents were both primary school teachers. Liang was routinely praised by both locals and teachers alike. Even since middle school, Liang was recalled for being well-known for reading comic books, while also being very proficient in mathematics. == Education == After elementary school, Liang attended Wuchuan No. 1 Middle School. There, he quickly excelled in class and ranked highly amongst his peers. He taught himself high school and university-level mathematics courses. Liang then attended Wuchaun No. 1 High School. In these years, he developed hobbies of mathematical modeling and conducting research projects. Compared to his peers, he was always ranked highly. For every mathematics exam, he always ranked within the top three. He was also the top scorer in the Zhanjiang region of Guangdong for the college entrance exam. Thus, in 2002, Liang left high school early to further pursue his education at the university level at the young age of 17. Attending Zhejiang University at the age of 17, Liang earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic Information Engineering in 2007 and his Master of Engineering in Information & Communication Engineering in 2010. His master's dissertation was titled "Study on Object Tracking Algorithm Based on Low-Cost PTZ camera" (基于低成本PTZ摄像机的目标跟踪算法研究). In his college years, DJI founder Wang Tao asked Liang to join as a co-founder. Liang declined the invitation to pursue artificial intelligence methodologies in financial markets. While he states that those around him had entrepreneurial mindsets, he himself valued academics. == Career == === Early career (2008–2016) === During the 2008 financial crisis, Liang formed a team with his classmates to accumulate data related to financial markets. He also led the team to explore quantitative trading using machine learning and other technologies. After his graduation, Liang moved to a cheap flat in Chengdu, Sichuan, where he experimented with ways to apply AI to various fields. These ventures failed, until he tried applying AI to finance. In 2013, Liang attempted to integrate artificial intelligence with quantitative trading and founded Hangzhou Yakebi Investment Management Co Ltd with Xu Jin, an alumnus of Zhejiang University. In 2015, they co-founded Hangzhou Huanfang Technology Co Ltd, which is today's Zhejiang Jiuzhang Asset Management Co Ltd. === High-Flyer (2016–2023) === In February 2016, Liang and two other engineering classmates co-founded Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership). The team relied on mathematics and AI to make investments. Much of the early startup culture was described by former employees to be "geeky" and "quirky," often seen as contrary to the existing culture in large Chinese tech companies. In 2019, Liang founded High-Flyer AI which was dedicated to research on AI algorithms and its basic applications. By this time, High-Flyer had over 10 billion yuan in assets under management. On 30 August 2019, Liang Wenfeng delivered a keynote speech entitled "The Future of Quantitative Investment in China from a Programmer's Perspective" at the Private Equity Golden Bull Award ceremony held by China Securities Journal, and sparked heated discussions. Liang stated that the criterion for determining what is quantitative or non-quantitative is whether the investment decision is made by quantitative methods or by people. Quantitative funds do not have portfolio managers making the decisions and instead are just servers. He also stated High-Flyer's mission is to improve the effectiveness of China's secondary market. In February 2021, Gregory Zuckerman's book The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution was published. Liang wrote the preface for the Chinese edition of the book where he stated that whenever he encountered difficulties at work, he would think of Simons' words "There must be a way to model prices". In January 2025, Zuckerman wrote in The Wall Street Journal where he acknowledged this fact and stated he has been trying to get in touch with Liang but much like Simons, Liang is very secretive and difficult to contact. During 2021, Liang started buying thousands of Nvidia GPUs for his AI side project while running High-Flyer. Liang wanted to build something and it will be a game changer which his business partners thought was only possible from giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba Group. === DeepSeek (since 2023) === ==== DeepSeek begins ==== In May 2023, Liang announced High-Flyer would pursue the development of artificial general intelligence and launched DeepSeek. During that month in an interview with 36Kr, Liang stated that High-Flyer had acquired 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the US government imposed AI chip restrictions on China. That laid the foundation for DeepSeek to operate as an LLM developer. Liang also stated DeepSeek gets funding from High-Flyer. This was because when DeepSeek was founded, venture capital firms were reluctant in providing funding as it was unlikely that it would be able to generate an exit in a short period of time. Liang only personally holds 1% of the company, with 99% of the company being held by Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership). With DeepSeek's funding model, it lacks commercial pressure and rigid key performance indicators, enabling the company to deviate from previously established model architectures. ==== Early development ==== In July 2024, Liang was interviewed again by 36Kr. He stated that when DeepSeek-V2 was released and triggered an AI price war in China, it came as a huge surprise as the team did not expect pricing to be so sensitive. Liang's aggressive pricing of the language model forced domestic tech giants including Alibaba and Baidu to cut their own rates by over 95%. He also stated that as China's economy develops, it should gradually become a contributor instead of freeriding. What is lacking in China's innovation is not capital but a lack of confidence and knowledge on organizing talent into it. DeepSeek has not hired anyone particularly special and employees tend to be locally educated. When it comes to disruptive technologies, closed source approaches can only temporarily delay others in catching up. As the goal was long-term, DeepSeek sought employees who had ability and passion rather than experience. To retain a high talent density relative to larger firms like Bytedance or Baidu, DeepSeek aimed to maintain a low-hierarchy corporate culture, with members working in project-based groups, as well as competitive compensation. Liang emphasized his vision for DeepSeek employees to bring their "unique experience and ideas" instead of needing to be explicitly directed, with an overall bottom-up approach to division of labor. Liang noted that a significant outcome of this approach was the multi-head latent attention training architecture, which was attributed directly to a young DeepSeek researcher's personal interest. This advancement played a core role in reducing the cost of training the DeepSeek-V3 model, released in December 2024. ==== Release of DeepSeek-R1 ==== Also on 20 January 2025, DeepSeek, the company Liang founded and served as the CEO, released DeepSeek-R1, a 671-billion-parameter open-source reasoning AI model, alongside the publication of a detailed technical paper explaining its architecture and training methodology. The model was built using just 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs at a cost of $5.6 million, showcasing a resource-efficient approach that contrasted sharply with the billion-dollar budgets of Western competitors. The development of DeepSeek-R1 occurred amidst U.S. sanctions where Trump limited sales of Nvidia chips to China. By 27 January, DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT to become the #1 free app on the United States iOS App Store. U.S. stocks plummeted, as more than $1 trillion was erased in market capitalization amid panic over DeepSeek. Technology journ