Brittney Ball

This week's episode of The Impact is live! New rules are landing before most people even realize the game has changed. In Sacramento, legislators just drew the first hard line for artificial intelligence, forcing the biggest developers to prove their systems are safe, keep shutdown plans on file, and log serious incidents. In Washington, Congress countered with a plan to test frontier models through the Department of Energy, backed by million-dollar-a-day penalties. And while those fights heat up, the White House doubled funding for AI-driven cancer research despite deep(er) cuts elsewhere, right as watchdogs sued four agencies to reveal how they already use AI behind the scenes. It’s been a week where rules, power, and technology all met on the same stage, and no one agrees who’s running the show. That’s where The Impact steps in. Our new episode breaks down how AI regulation is being written in real time and what it means for campaigns, advocacy, and innovation across the country. 🎧 The Impact reaches thousands of political and policy professionals each week. Listen to the full conversation with Addie and Hal here or wherever you get your podcasts!

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Further expanding our open-source safety toolkit, this morning Roblox open sourced Sentinel, a contrastive learning system developed to help detect early signals of potential child endangerment for even earlier investigation. Sentinel has been running in production, at scale, on Roblox since late 2024. In the first half of this year, 35% of the cases detected were due to Sentinel’s proactive approach, in many cases before an abuse report could be filed.

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The new era of vibe coding is...vibe debugging. A little behind-the-scenes look at a new tool from Cursor, a hugely-popular AI-assisted coding platform, and a proof point for why churning at code at a higher velocity requires more safety checks https://lnkd.in/dP4akzms

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I inadvertently learned my lesson about the pitfalls of AI last week while trying to navigate from San Jose to a three-day Q2B conference (commercialization of Quantum technologies) at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the South Bay of Northern California. The streets were as congested as they were back in 2019 before COVID. I have often been to conferences at the same convention center, but post-remote work, I struggled to find my way to the once-familiar parking lot. I had no choice but to rely on Google Maps. To help me find the shortest and least-congested routes, it attempted to guide me to alternative routes to the 101 freeway across residential neighborhoods. Sadly, I ended up in dead ends! I guessed that the more distant streets did not have base stations to sustain high-quality signals. It was embarrassing to miss sessions where quantum technology experts delivered high-quality talks! On the second day, it struck me that some of the streets adjacent to the freeway had much less traffic, which could help me skirt around the choked traffic near the commercial area of Santa Clara. I decided to drive across them. Sure enough, the next day the drive was a breeze, and I got to the conference in time for the early-morning sessions. Clearly, human intelligence is needed to make the best of AI. #ArtificialIntelligence #CommercialQuantum #Q2B #SantaClara #NorthernCalifornia #GoogleMaps #COVID #HumanIntelligence

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California law SB 243 is designed to protect children and vulnerable users from some of the harms associated with AI companion chatbot use. From big labs like Meta and OpenAI to startups like Character AI and Replika are all legally accountable. https://ow.ly/v3NT50XbswG

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Super excited about a mega-utility tool the San Francisco Chronicle launched today. It lets readers dig into the stories behind violations at thousands of healthcare facilities across California. The coolest part for me was using AI to help flag which violations might be most concerning. AI in journalism can be tricky, but here it made real sense: reviewing 40,000 documents by hand would have taken years. With careful prompting and editorial judgment, we were able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. Hope you find it useful! https://lnkd.in/gQpRuaY9

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