The feds have made some progress after President Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI, with the agency that manages the nation’s civil service issuing new guidelines on how federal agencies can use generative AI in some situations.

FedScoop reported the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) met a 180-day deadline under the executive order to issue a competency model and hiring guidance for federal AI roles—in other words, guidance on how agencies should define what AI skill sets they need and how they should recruit for AI roles—as well as similar guidance specific to civil engineering.

That guidance may quickly come into play. According to the Federal News Network, an interagency task force led by White House officials recently disclosed that federal agencies have hired at least 150 AI experts as of April 2024, and expect to have over 500 in total by the end of fiscal year 2025. That number does not include around 11,500 AI experts the Defense Department has plans to hire over the same time period.

OPM also issued other guidance on AI classification and talent acquisition, FedScoop reported, although those actions were required under a 2020 law.

Read more here.—TM

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And he might’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling government agencies.

In simultaneous announcements on May 7 that felt only slightly like the finale to a Scooby-Doo episode, the US Department of Justice and the UK’s National Crime Agency pulled the mask off the individual they allege to be behind the digital persona known as “LockBitSupp”—someone the government orgs claim to be a leading figure behind the operation of the ransomware group LockBit.

“Through the meticulous work of our investigators and prosecutors, we have unmasked the man behind ‘LockBitSupp,’” Nicole M. Argentieri, principal deputy assistant attorney general, head of the criminal division, said in a May 7 statement, naming the Russian individual believed to be behind LockBitSupp—Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev—and declaring a 26-count indictment against him.

Additionally, the US State Department announced a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to Khoroshev’s apprehension.

The NCA’s statement also provided a photo “identity reveal” of Khoroshev, stating he will now face asset freezes and travel bans.

Read more here.—BH

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Scale AI—an AI company that provides data labeling, data curation, and reinforcement learning from human feedback—is rooting for the US in the AI race against China.

IT Brew caught up with Vijay Karunamurthy, the company’s field CTO—which is now valued at over $13 billion—to chat about China’s role in the AI industry, national security and risk mitigation, and an AI model’s willingness to work harder when money’s on the table.

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang has acknowledged just how much of a superpower China is when it comes to AI—the fact that they are one of the countries leading the charge and are predicted to be an AI world leader by 2030. How is Scale AI navigating this?

“The [Chinese] government’s empowered to access a lot of data—private data from their citizens…they’re trying to find the right talent, get them into China, get them building models,” Karunamurthy said, noting that China has utilized both open-source and closed-source models.

“The idea that we’re in a competition with China is really important to us,” Karunamurthy added. “You’ve seen Alexandr talk about it in congressional testimony. We really do think it’s scary—the amount of talent that’s there that’s pushing ahead. And if you think about the amount of computing resources it takes to train one of these models, it’s really the US and China that are in direct competition with each other to have the right resources, have the right talent.”

Keep reading here.—AF

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