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Upcoming Events
Amherst College Quant Competition!
We are excited to announce the first-ever Quant Competition at Amherst College, taking place on March 1st from 9 AM to 4 PM. The event is sponsored by Jane Street, Amherst College, and potentially other quantitative finance firms
Participants can compete in one or more of the following challenges:
Strategy & Product Case (Virtual)
Jane Street Estimathon®
Coding Challenge
Algorithmic Trading Case (Virtual)
Manual Trading
Brain Teaser Battle
The Algorithmic Trading and Product & Strategy cases require virtual submissions, while others will be completed in-person. Cases will be released on February 10th to allow for preparation.
Event Details:
📍 Location: Beneski 107 – Paino Classroom
🍽️ Perks: Free food, merch, and networking with industry professionals
🎓 Alumni Showcase & Case Walkthroughs
Participants must be present on March 1st to be eligible for prizes (including Algorithmic Trading and Product & Strategy).
Featured AI News
It’s hard to keep up with all the AI-related News these days, but here are a couple stories that have us thinking and discussing. Let us know what AI News stories have you riveted!
Musk’s xAI Releases New Model Grok 3
The race to the better AI chatbot continues
Grok3, xAI’s latest AI model, is set to be available later today to premium x subscribers. Musk has attracted the attention and curiosity of many in the industry and beyond with the promise that Grok3 will outperform OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s recent dark horse DeepSeek, stating that the model was “scary smart.”
What gives Musk the confidence in Grok3’s abilities? Here are a few technologies xAI has implemented.
- The Colossus Supercomputer — built in eight months this system is powered by 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs and provides 200 million GPU-hours for training which is ten fold of Grok2
- Synthetic Datasets — compared to real-world sources, artificially generated data makes training models more efficient and avoids privacy concerns
- Self Correction — Grok3 is boasted by Musk as capable of reflection upon its own mistakes for logical consistency
This release of a supposed superior AI model is not surprising in the increasingly heated AI race. Does it live up to what Musk claims it will? We will have to wait and see.
AI & War: How US AI Technologies are playing a role in Israel & Gaza
Advanced AI technologies from US tech giants have been playing a significant role in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Most notably, Israeli military has been using AI to process extensive intelligence, calling AI a “game changer” in yielding targets more swiftly. “This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and former senior safety engineer at OpenAI.
Leading in this collaboration with the Israeli military is Microsoft, who has been providing advanced AI models through OpenAI and it’s Azure cloud platform. However, Microsoft and OpenAI are just two among may US technology firms who have provided technological support to Israel’s war efforts in recent years.
But how reliable is their technology? It seems that there are still margins for error. One intelligence officer said he had seen targeting mistakes that relied on incorrect machine translations from Arabic to Hebrew. Issues have also arisen with faulty profiling, where innocent civilians are marked as militant individuals. Although the Israeli military claims to have additional sets of human eyes checking the results of AI’s processing, these advanced models are still playing a a larger role than ever before in warfare.
Now, a mistake AI makes is no longer just a faulty ChatGPT response we can laugh off, it can be the different between life and death. The role AI plays in war will only grow. How do we responsibly rely on the swift technological support AI provides while insuring that it does not take away innocent lives?
Don’t forget to check out some of our latest blog posts and leave your comments and reflections to keep the conversation going!
AILA Recommended Watch
Looking for a new read? Here are some recommendations from the AILA staff of novels that might give you a new perspective on Artificial Intelligence.
Wall-E (2008)
| The world’s been quite chaotic lately, so we thought we’d go with something light you can watch with family or friends this time around (though be warned, it can be a tearjerker). Wall-E, short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class is the last robot left on Earth. He was lonely in his lone task until he meets Eve, together they embark on a journey. |
Explore Some AI Tools!
Our AI Mentorship and Tools team is always exploring new applications of AI. Access some interesting tools from our website below and explore them freely from with your personal account. Be mindful of bias, accuracy, content ownership, and use of personally identifiable information with these tools. Institutions are evaluating the use and configuration of AI-based tools, so please check with your IT department before using these tools with college or institutional systems or data.
The Artificial Intelligence in the Liberal Arts initiative at Amherst College aims to engage a broad, interdisciplinary community of participants in discussions and activities related to artificial intelligence, exploring and facilitating multi-way interactions between work in artificial intelligence and work across the liberal arts. Our newsletter contains the latest AI-related events, tools, scholarship, and news in AI.