Community foundation to hold grant workshop
The Cass County Community Foundation is set to begin its 2025 cycle of community grants, beginning with a free workshop for local nonprofits that are interested in applying
The workshop will be held at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, May 20 at the community foundation building, 729 E. Market St., and will last less than one hour.
The workshop will discuss changes for organizations wishing to apply for the 2025 Grants. The Opportunity Grants Program designed to accommodate grant requests of less than $5,000 will also be discussed with program guidelines and deadlines for submission.
'We are urging all non-profit organizations who intend to apply for either program to have a representative at the workshop,' said Deanna Crispen, president and CEO of the community foundation. 'While attendance is not mandatory, those attending will learn about the application process which we hope will result in a more complete application and better results for our nonprofits. We will also announce the amount of funding available at this workshop.'
Space is limited so those planning to attend must call CCCF at 574-722-2200 for reservations.
Grant applications and instructions may be picked up at the CCCF office, 729 E. Market Street, downtown Logansport, or downloaded from the Foundation website (www.casscountycf.org) after the workshop.
For information about the application process, contact the CCCF office at 574-722-2200.
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"What you're losing," Bell concedes, "is the extremely personal and emotional experience of an American admiral who is put into the shoes of his Chinese counterpart, and for the first time is looking at American warships coming to his coast." But you can only run such a realistic simulation with real people a few times a year. "The capabilities of AI are exponential," he says. "The impact is on a much greater scale." There are other challenges with using artificial intelligence for something as high-stakes as preventing the next world war. Researchers have long warned that AI models may hold biases hidden in the data from which they were trained. "People say history is written by the victor," says Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher who fled Eritrea in 1998, during the country's war with Ethiopia. An AI system trained on open-source information on the internet, she says, will inherently represent the biases of the most online groups — which tend to be Western or European. 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They don't actually know what they're saying. It's also hard to trace why they make certain decisions. " Neural networks aren't explainable," Gebru says."It's not like a regression model where you can go back and see how and why it made predictions in certain ways." One study into the use of large language models for diplomatic decision-making, conducted last year by researchers at Stanford, found that AI models tended to be warmongers. "It appears LLM-based agents tended to equate increased military spending and deterrent behavior with an increase in power and security," the researchers wrote. "In some cases, this tendency even led to decisions to execute a full nuclear attack in order to de-escalate conflicts." A trigger-happy AI system could have severe consequences in the real world. For example, if hedge funds or corporations act collectively on a prediction from a tool like North Star that a country in which they have heavily invested is on the brink of collapse, and they preemptively sell off their assets, it may lead to the very situation the system had predicted — the mass exodus of capital actually causing currency depreciation, unemployment, and liquidity crises. "The claim that a place is unstable, will make it unstable," Gebru explains. For now, that problem seems academic to Bell. "It is a bit like a philosophical or ethical problem. Like the butterfly effect," he says. "I think we'll have to wrestle with it at some point." He insists they aren't the typical "move fast, break things" tech company. They're deliberate about consulting with subject-area experts as they model different countries and world leaders, he says, and have released the product to only a select list of firms. "I want to simulate what breaks the world. I don't want to break the world." Jon Danilowicz, a former senior diplomat who served in South Sudan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, notes the inherent unpredictability of war, with contingencies and factors that can't always be accounted for. "If you look at what's going to happen with Israel taking action against Iran's nuclear program, you can do all kinds of scenarios on how that's going to play out. I'm sure there's somebody who's going to make a prediction, which after the fact they'll be able to say they were right. But what about the multiples that got it totally wrong?" "There's never certainty in these kinds of decision-making situations," says Bell. "In some senses, we can't predict the future. But we can assign probabilities. Then it's up to the user to decide what to do." In the meantime, the company has more pressing problems. Like many startups building on top of generative AI models, the costs to run North Star are huge. "I don't want to give you a figure, but if you knew, you'd drop your fork. It's extremely expensive," he says. On top of that, contracting with the government and receiving the necessary clearances can be its own set of bureaucratic red tape and expenses. Despite this, there seems to be no shortage of interest in their technology. As I leave Bell and Dalnoki-Veress, they rush off to another meeting: Eric Schmidt's office wanted a private demonstration.
