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    Can Math Help AI Chatbots Stop Making Stuff Up?

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    Chatbots like ChatGPT get stuff wrong. But researchers are building new A.I. systems that can verify their own math — and maybe more.On a recent afternoon, Tudor Achim gave a brain teaser to an A.I. bot called Aristotle.The question involved a 10-by-10 table filled with a hundred numbers. If you collected the smallest number in each row and the largest number in each column, he asked, could the largest of the small numbers ever be greater than the smallest of the large numbers?The bot correctly answered “No.” But that was not surprising. Popular chatbots like ChatGPT may give the right answer, too. The difference was that Aristotle had proven that its answer was right. The bot generated a detailed computer program that verified “No” was the correct response.Chatbots like ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google can answer questions, write poetry, summarize news articles and generate images. But they also make mistakes that defy common sense. Sometimes, they make stuff up — a phenomenon called hallucination.Mr. Achim, the chief executive and co-founder of a Silicon Valley start-up called Harmonic, is part of growing effort to build a new kind of A.I. that never hallucinates. Today, this technology is focused on mathematics. But many leading researchers believe they can extend the same techniques into computer programming and other areas.Because math is a rigid discipline with formal ways of proving whether an answer is right or wrong, companies like Harmonic can build A.I. technologies that check their own answers and learn to produce reliable information.Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central A.I. lab, recently unveiled a system called AlphaProof that operates in this way. Competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the premier math competition for high schoolers, the system achieved “silver medal” performance, solving four of the competition’s six problems. It was the first time a machine had reached that level.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The U.S. Investors Caught in the Scrum Over TikTok

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      Major U.S. investment firms such as General Atlantic, Susquehanna and Sequoia Capital own stakes in ByteDance, the parent of TikTok. Their investments are increasingly under fire.For years, the U.S. investors who backed ByteDance, the Chinese internet company that owns TikTok, have wrestled with the complexities of owning a piece of a geopolitically fraught social media app.Now it’s gotten even more complicated.A bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok is winding its way through the Senate after sailing through the House this month. Questions about whether TikTok’s Chinese ties make it a national security threat are mounting. And U.S. investors including General Atlantic, Susquehanna International Group and Sequoia Capital — which collectively poured billions into ByteDance — are facing increased pressure from state and federal lawmakers to answer for their investments in Chinese companies.Last year, a House committee began examining U.S. investments in Chinese companies. The Biden administration has curbed U.S. investments in China. In December, a Missouri pension board voted to divest from some Chinese investments, following political pressure from the state treasurer. And Florida passed legislation this month to require the state’s Board of Administration to sell off its stakes in China-owned companies.All of this comes on top of existing issues with owning a piece of ByteDance. The Beijing-based company has grown into one of the world’s most highly valued start-ups, worth $225 billion, according to CB Insights. That’s a boon, at least on paper, for U.S. investors who put money into ByteDance when it was a smaller company.Yet in reality, these investors have an illiquid investment that is hard to spin into gold. Since ByteDance is privately held, investors cannot simply sell their stakes in it. A confluence of politics and economics means ByteDance is also unlikely to go public soon, which would enable its shares to trade.Even if a sale of TikTok was easy to pull off, the Chinese government appears reluctant to relinquish control of an influential social media company. Beijing moved to stop a deal for TikTok to American buyers a few years ago and recently condemned the congressional bill that mandates ByteDance divest the app.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside Amira Yahyaoui’s Claims about Mos, a Student Aid Start-Up

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      Amira Yahyaoui, a human rights activist, promoted the success of her student aid start-up, Mos. Some of her statements do not add up, according to internal data and people familiar with the company.As a Tunisian human rights activist in the 2000s, Amira Yahyaoui staged protests and blogged about government corruption. In interviews, she described being beaten by police. When she was 18, she said, she was kidnapped from the street, dropped off at the Algerian border and placed in exile for several years.Ms. Yahyaoui’s compelling background helped her stand out among entrepreneurs when she moved in 2018 to San Francisco, where she founded a student aid start-up called Mos. The app hit the top of Apple’s App Store and Ms. Yahyaoui raised $56 million from high-profile investors, including Sequoia Capital, John Doerr and Steph Curry, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups. Mos was valued at $400 million.In podcasts, TV interviews and other media, Ms. Yahyaoui, 39, frequently discussed Mos’s success.Among other things, she said the start-up had helped 400,000 students get financial aid. But internal company data viewed by The New York Times showed that as of early last year, only about 30,000 customers had paid for Mos’s student aid services. The rest of the 400,000 users included anyone who had signed up for a free account and may have gotten an email about applying for student aid, two people familiar with the situation said.After Mos expanded into online banking in September 2021, Ms. Yahyaoui told publications such as TechCrunch that the company had more than 100,000 bank accounts. But those accounts had very small amounts of money in them, according to the internal data. Less than 10 percent of Mos’s roughly 153,000 bank users had put their own money into their accounts, the data showed.Some employees tried to speak up about Ms. Yahyaoui’s claims, said Emi Tabb, who worked at Mos in operations and had roles such as head of financial aid before resigning in late 2022. But Ms. Yahyaoui dismissed and sometimes disparaged employees who tried pushing back against her public comments, five people who witnessed the incidents said.“She created a culture of fear,” Mx. Tabb said.Mos is among a class of tech start-ups that rose during the fast money era of the late 2010s and early in the pandemic, when young companies landed millions of dollars in funding with little more than promises. Now as the money has dried up and many tech start-ups grapple with a downturn, investors are pickier, customers are warier of bold claims and employees are more suspicious of founder pronouncements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      American Firms Invested $1 Billion in Chinese Chips, Lawmakers Find

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      A Congressional investigation determined that U.S. funding helped fuel the growth of a sector now viewed by Washington as a security threat.A congressional investigation has determined that five American venture capital firms invested more than $1 billion in China’s semiconductor industry since 2001, fueling the growth of a sector that the United States government now regards as a national security threat.Funds supplied by the five firms — GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Walden International — went to more than 150 Chinese companies, according to the report, which was released Thursday by both Republicans and Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.The investments included roughly $180 million that went to Chinese firms that the committee said directly or indirectly support Beijing’s military. That includes companies that the U.S. government has said provide chips for China’s military research, equipment and weapons, such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker.The report by the House committee focuses on investments made before the Biden administration imposed sweeping restrictions aimed at cutting off China’s access to American financing. It does not allege any illegality.Last August, the Biden administration banned U.S. venture capital and private equity firms from investing in Chinese quantum computing, artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors. It has also imposed worldwide limits on sales of advanced chips and chip-making machines to China, arguing that these technologies could help advance the capabilities of the Chinese military and spy agencies.Since it was established a year ago, the committee has called for raising tariffs on China, targeted Ford Motor and others for doing business with Chinese companies, and spotlighted forced labor concerns involving Chinese shopping sites.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More