The tech sphere has recently been buzzing about the announcement of the NEO Home Robot. For $20,000 or a monthly subscription fee of $499, you can pre-order your friendly humanoid home assistant marketed to do your chores: dusting and ordering your bookshelves, vacuum cleaning, bringing you flowers, carrying your groceries from the car, emptying the…

Matthias Schulze, 07.10.2024 The aim of this multipart blog series is to take a closer look at the various definitions one can find and dissect what types of actions the term “active defense” describes and how it contributes to security. The confusion with it stems from multiple reasons. 1) it is a political term, a…

Matthias Schulze, 2.10.2024 On September 7, the FBI published a dossier on Russia’s systematic information operations against the West and Ukraine. The 270-page document reveals a kind of automated information warfare-as-a-service. The scope, frequency and methods of the information operations against Ukraine and the West are frightening. Is Germany able to counter this?  Social media…

Matthias Schulze 22. January 2024 A German version of this blog post appeared in Tagesspiegel Background Cyber. As in Ukraine, the current war in the Middle East is once again being accompanied by a digital conflict. After two months of war, it is now possible to draw some preliminary conclusions about cyber capabilities in the…

Jantje Silomon 15 May 2023 Peeking under the Hood As mentioned in the last post, the ‘GPT’ part in ChatGPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” – just one example of a transformer model in a family of many dozens. Two graphics by Xavier Amatriain illustrate the model boom and interrelationship nicely: Xavier Amatriain: Five years of models…

Jantje Silomon 26 April 2023 Last November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot built on top of the GPT-3 Large Language Model (LLM) family. Its humanesque responses quickly garnered attention, from interviews and being hailed as “amazing, creative, and totally wrong” to calling it “dumber than you think“. It did not take long for people to try find…

Mischa Hansel 16 March 2023 Cybercrime and the fight against are no longer a niche topic: the economic repercussions alone are too high, costing the Federal Republic of Germany over 200 billion euros annually according to an estimate from the industry association Bitcom. However, other costs – such as the social and political issues that can aggravate…

Jantje Silomon 17 January 2023 While the West was settling down to the Christmas holidays and looking forward to a quiet turn-of-the-year, a group of researchers uploaded a paper to arxiv.org, an open-access repository with over 2 million scholarly articles. The site is well-known with the natural science community, having started off in the 1990s as a…

Emilia Neuber (Hertie School of Governance) & Mischa Hansel (IFSH) 09 January 2023 Credibility and Impartiality Technical indicators, standards, and criteria do not set peer review apart from other review mechanisms. Rather, it is the political authority of a state-led process as opposed to an evaluation by, say, a technical secretariat of an UN treaty…