Foreign Aid, Turing Award, and Dream Science

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Foreign Aid Ruling

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Trump administration must release roughly $2B in funds for foreign development assistance, rejecting a White House request to put a lower court's ruling on hold in an unsigned 5-4 decision. The decision, outlined in a single paragraph, is the biggest by the court affecting moves by the new Trump administration. 

The funds represent a small part of the US Agency for International Development's roughly $40B annual budget and relate to work already performed before Feb. 13. The ruling does not affect a larger freezing of the agency, which has been effectively shuttered and wrapped into the State Department. 

In related news, congressional leaders are negotiating paths to keep the federal government open ahead of a March 14 funding deadline. 

AI Pioneers Awarded

The inventors of reinforcement learning, a foundational technique in artificial intelligence, were awarded the Turing Award yesterday, the computer science equivalent of a Nobel Prize. North American academic researchers Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto outlined the mathematical framework for the technology in a 1998 book, which laid the groundwork for popular chatbots like ChatGPT. The pair will share a $1M prize.

Reinforcement learning was first theorized by the award’s namesake, Alan Turing, in the 1950s, when he argued that sufficient computing power would allow machines to learn through experience like humans and animals. Barto and Sutton began modeling this technique mathematically in the 1980s, seeking ways to incentivize computer systems to seek out rewards and avoid failures. The technique laid the groundwork for the recent AI revolution rooted in large language models, which are often trained via reinforcement learning with human feedback.

Take a crash course in reinforcement learning here. 

Kabul Bombing Suspect Caught

Pakistani intelligence officers confirmed the arrest of a suspected senior planner of the 2021 Kabul airport bombing yesterday, a day after President Donald Trump announced the arrest in his address to Congress.

The suspect, Mohammad Sharifullah, was captured in Pakistan’s Balochistan province after a coordinated effort with US intelligence. Sharifullah was extradited to the US and appeared in federal court yesterday to face charges of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, resulting in death. If convicted, Sharifullah faces a maximum penalty of life in prison. Officials say Sharifullah is a member of ISIS-Khorasan and admitted to planning the deadly suicide bomber attack at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate.

The bombing took place amid the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, killing 13 US service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians. The attack was part of the chaotic departure that concluded America’s longest war and undermined public confidence in former President Joe Biden’s administration.

Read US generals' recounts of the pullout here and see public reactions here.

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