Short Takes – 9-7-23

Pipeline safety agency’s proposed pilot for ChatGPT in rulemaking raises questions. FedScoop.com article. Pull quote: “The Transportation Department’s AI inventory states that the OpenAI chatbot would be used to conduct sentiment analysis on comments sent to the agency about proposed rules. The tool could be used for analyzing the “relevance” of the comments, providing a “synopsis” for comments, “cataloging of comments,” and identifying duplicates.”

COVID surges heading into fall: What you need to know. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: ““We have to understand that COVID is here, and COVID is staying here,” he said. “I expect that we’ll see increases in cases. But I don’t expect to see something that was similar to what we saw across the population where we saw massive increases of cases over a short period of time.””

SpaceX stacks giant Starship rocket ahead of 2nd test flight. Space.com article. Pull quote: “But there's more to Starship's flight readiness than technical progress, as Musk noted in his social media post: The FAA still hasn't granted a launch license for this second liftoff.”