Introduction

This week, we'll discuss two COVID stories, language models, and a self-driving startup. A team at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering developed a method to speed up vaccine analysis. Tinta Gebur received a great deal of coverage in the media over a dispute between her and Google that involved the publication of a paper on the harms of large language models. pony.ai announced on February 7th that it has raised another $100 million in an extension of its series C round. Some experts predict the pandemic will hasten the adoption of autonomous transportation technologies.