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Iraq parliament elects Kurdish politician Nizar Amedi as president
New president pledges 'Iraq First' after securing 227 votes, ending five months of political deadlock.
Fox News Entertainment Newsletter: Kelly Ripa’s secret signal, ‘Charlie’s Angels’ star on price of fame
The Fox News Entertainment Newsletter brings you the latest Hollywood headlines, celebrity interviews and stories from Los Angeles and beyond.
Fox News Entertainment Newsletter: Kelly Ripa's secret signal, 'Charlie's Angels' star on price of fame
The Fox News Entertainment Newsletter brings you the latest Hollywood headlines, celebrity interviews and stories from Los Angeles and beyond.
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
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People Throw Away This Common Electronic Item Without Knowing It Holds 450MG of Pure 22-Carat Gold
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Borussia Dortmund vs Leverkusen
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Shohei Ohtani passes Ichiro Suzuki for another Japanese MLB record
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Lots of players rest and lots of playoff seeds are locked up on a 15-game Friday in the NBA
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Nevada reports 8,099 new business registrations in March, nearly $21M in revenue
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Your Next Breach Will Look Like Business as Usual
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NHL Playoffs: What’s next for the Penguins?
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Augustana Men Lead, Overall Ranked Second in NSIC All-Sports Standings
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Q4 Rundown: Caesars Entertainment (NASDAQ:CZR) Vs Other Consumer Discretionary
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Flutter Entertainment (FLUT) Stock Trades Down, Here Is Why
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Celebrate Amazing Stories and Science Fiction’s 100th Birthday
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3L Rachel Sadler Charts Path in Brain Health, Technology, and Policy Through UC Law SF’s Health Law Concentration - UC Law San Francisco (Formerly UC Hastings)
3L Rachel Sadler studies health law and policy at UC Law SF while researching the legal implications of neurotechnology and other emerging tools that may affect human cognition. 3L student Rachel Sadler shares how UC Law SF’s Health Law Concentration prepared her for a career focused on the intersection of brain health, government policy, and technology. Gained a detailed understanding of how U.S. health care is regulated and where policy reform is needed through coursework and research. Interned with state and federal agencies that regulate health care services and worked with a major health care provider’s bioethics department. Plans to pursue a career focused on protecting cognitive liberty and mental privacy as new technologies reshape healthcare. 3L Rachel Sadler: The Health Law Concentration has given me fluency in one of the most complex regulated industries and the tools to become an effective advocate for better health policy. Before coming to law school, I spent a decade teaching and working with teachers and administrators on high school programming for multilingual learners. Healthcare kept emerging as the most powerful driver of student outcomes. I wanted to understand how to make effective policy change in this area and how to use existing law to defend people’s health rights in California. Through the concentration’s coursework, I gained a sophisticated understanding of how U.S. healthcare is regulated. I also learned where the pressure points for reform exist. The courses gave me space to develop what became my central research interest: how law and policy can be built to protect human cognition and healthy brain development, particularly regarding new technologies such as generative AI and neurotechnology. The health law faculty were instrumental in that process, genuinely invested in helping me and other students define and pursue our own intellectual vision. During law school, I interned at the General Counsel’s Office for Region IX of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I also externed at the California Department of Justice’s Health, Education and Welfare Division. Additionally, I externed at Kaiser Permanente Northern California’s Bioethics Department. Alongside those placements, I conducted extensive independent research on mental privacy and emerging neurotechnology, working closely with Professors Emily Murphy and George Horvath. That research became the throughline of my law school experience and the foundation of my current policy focus. I must also credit Nicole Ozer of the Center for Constitutional Democracy (CCD), whose deep knowledge of California privacy law and the public-interest privacy landscape deeply informed my work. I currently serve a research assistant with the CCD, where I spearhead the development of K-12 educational resources in partnership with law faculty and students. I’ve found UC Law SF to be an ideal place for second-career, nontraditional students. There is a tremendous diversity of life and career experience here, and I felt fully welcomed into the community, despite returning as a student at a different stage of life. I came to law school wanting to promote equity in California’s healthcare system. I am leaving with a sharper and more specific ambition: to build a policy career focused on protecting cognitive liberty and mental privacy from technological intrusion. This is both an urgent and underserved area of law, and I want to be part of defining this landscape going forward. Whether as a practicing attorney or a policy advisor, I plan to work on these issues after law school. I strongly recommend UC Law SF and the Health Law Concentration. When I arrived in law school, I worried the concentration would be narrow and that my non-clinical background would be a disadvantage. The opposite was true. The health law faculty thinks about health expansively, encompassing social determinants of health, structural inequity, and emerging technologies alongside the regulatory mechanics of the industry. The faculty are accessible, intellectually generous, and genuinely invested in students’ development. I found my research vision here, and I deeply appreciate the concentration’s role in this. The Evidence of Success series highlights UC Law SF students as they share how the College’s opportunities equip them with the experience, skills, and confidence to excel in the legal profession.
Supporters object to trans sports referendum ballot language
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I swore an oath to the Constitution, not a political party
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Every way Trump has changed Washington, DC, in his second term
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Iowa convenience store chain reaches national business milestone
An Iowa-based company is being added to a prestigious list this morning. Casey’s General Stores is now on the S&P 500 stock index. The Ankeny-based convenience store chain is only the second Iowa company on the list, along with Principal Financial Group in Des Moines. The S&P 500 encompasses both the New York Stock Exchange […]
Wasabi Technologies to Acquire Seagate’s Lyve Cloud Business
Wasabi Technologies, the hot cloud storage company, today announced it will acquire the Lyve Cloud business from Seagate Technology LLC (NASDAQ: STX), a lead...
C-section rate in 2025 highest in a decade
Why people overeat, how public health survives in war, and more health news from Morning Rounds
Jolene Jolene sports bar finds permanent Atlanta home
Atlanta women’s sports bar Jolene Jolene secured a permanent home after two years of local pop-ups.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk's secret business weapon: Think about existential threats
Former Tesla president Jon McNeill has seen the inner workings of CEO Elon Musk.
Unless you reboot every once in a while, your Mac will get kicked offline every 49 days
A new bug has been discovered that breaks all Mac networking every 49 days, 17 hours, two minutes, and 47 seconds. It's simple to get around the bug, though.
Experts set 2030 nutrition science goals for resilient food systems
As the second quarter of the 21st century unfolds, experts are examining the state of nutrition as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) deadline looms with five years remaining. To achieve these targets, a new paper outlines key goals for nutrition science from 2025 to 2030. The Frontiers in Nutrition publication discusses the interconnectedness between nutrition, food security, and sustainability in complex food systems affected by shocks, policies, and environmental limits. The researchers reveal how these modern factors impact nutrition science and shape research agendas.
Age-Friendly Kansas: Three-Year Action Plan
Age-Friendly Kansas Three-Year Action Plan: Promoting connection, reducing isolation and integrating healthy aging across sectors through practical strategies developed with state and national partners.
Road to Vostok's hot start on Steam has "secured the entire production budget" the Finnish survival shooter needs for "years to come", dev says
Road to Vostok, a Finnish survival shooter, has already secured the budget it needs for years to come following an early access release, its developer says.
Exclusive: Chinese firm hired lobbyists with ties to Don Jr, then scored a win in Washington
A lobbying firm led by one of Donald Trump Jr.'s hunting buddies helped a Chinese company make its case to a U.S. national security watchdog against a U.S. startup that was seeking to have the Chinese firm removed as one of its investors, public filings show.
Politicians Are Spending More Money on Security as They Increasingly Become Targets
Political candidates are purchasing more home alarms, bulletproof vests, and other protections amid rising fears of political violence.
Second One UI 8.5 beta update for Galaxy S24 is out
Samsung has released the second beta version of One UI 8.5 (Android 16 QPR2) for the Galaxy S24 series. The update brings nine changes.
Twin powers activate: Kullar brothers helping Ephrata challenge in L-L League boys volleyball
Don’t look now, but Ephrata is kicking up a fuss in Lancaster-Lebanon League Section 1 boys volleyball circles.
What to watch for in WPIAL sports on April 9, 2026: Important section series to wrap up
Some rain on Monday and frosty temps the following day led to some postponements on the WPIAL baseball schedule.
Banijay Entertainment Acquires Global Rights to Indian Fitness Format ‘Battleground’ (EXCLUSIVE)
Banijay Entertainment has secured worldwide rights to “Battleground,” a fitness-driven competition format originated by Mumbai-based Rusk Media. The format fuses athletic competition, reality-style dr...
Iran cannot ‘hijack’ strait of Hormuz with shipping tolls, says Yvette Cooper
As Keir Starmer continues his Gulf visit, foreign secretary says laws of the sea prevent Tehran from charging for passage of ‘international transit route’
'It should have been five or six'
Jamie Carragher says the gulf between Liverpool and Paris St.Germain in the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final was "absolutely startling". The Reds, who failed to register a shot on target at Parc des Princes, have a two-goal deficit to overturn in next week's second leg.
Europe is winning the AI and drone science race. It's losing the deployment war
Europe's scientists are ahead. Europe's armies are not. The continent produces world-class research on AI, drones, robotics, quantum and cybersecurity, but watches the US race past it to deployment.Vi...
Europe is winning the AI and drone science race. It's losing the deployment war
Europe's scientists are ahead. Europe's armies are not. The continent produces world-class research on AI, drones, robotics, quantum and cybersecurity, but watches the US race past it to deployment.Vi...
Seven & i delays listing of North America business
Seven & i Holdings said on Thursday it has pushed back the timing of the listing of its North American operations to the financial year starting April 2027 or later, rather than in the second half of 2026.
NBA champion Thunder clinch Western Conference top seed
The Oklahoma City Thunder secured the Western Conference top seed and best record in the NBA with a 128-110 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers on Wednesday.Oklahoma City snagged the West's top seed for the third year running, and with the best overall record they'll have home court advantage throughout the playoffs.
Pakistan’s Last-Minute Diplomacy Secures Iran War Ceasefire
Pakistan warned U.S. officials that ongoing Israeli operations risked collapsing the entire diplomatic process.
UC Davis Launches Aggie Venture Accelerator to Advance Early-Stage Life Science Innovation
The UC Davis Innovation and Economic Development Office has launched the Aggie Venture Accelerator, an initiative designed to support early-stage startups developing solutions at the intersection of life science, food and health. Delivered in partnership with The March Group, a thematic early-stage venture capital firm, the program will provide selected startups with mentorship, structured programming and investment with the aim of accelerating their path to market.
Thunder clinch No. 1 seed in the West, NBA's best overall record for second straight season
High school sports results for Wednesday, April 8, 2026
WEDNESDAY’S RESULTS Baseball CITY LEAGUE Brashear 15, Perry 0 (3) Obama Academy 19, Westinghouse 0 (4) WPIAL CLASS 6A Section 1 Butler 1, North Allegheny...
iPod revival: Secondhand sales surge for Apple's digital musical player
The iPod is undergoing a revival, with secondhand sales surging. Young people in particular are drawn to its retro look and the focused music experience it offers, free from smartphone distractions.
No Charges for Wisconsin Mayor Who Removed Ballot Drop Box in 2024
A special prosecutor said a review of the incident found there was not sufficient evidence to charge Doug Diny, the mayor of Wausau.
Peoria double homicide highlights mental health system failures, advocates say
Prosecutors say Jonathan Turk’s parents tried multiple times to get him mental health treatment before their deaths.
Teen takeover concerns grow in Columbus as business tightens security
Concerns over so-called teen takeovers are growing in Columbus as flyers circulating on social media suggest March gatherings could happen locally.
Your DNA has a secret “second code” that decides which genes get silenced
Not all parts of our genetic code are equal, even when they appear to say the same thing. Scientists have discovered that cells can detect less efficient genetic instructions and selectively silence them. A protein called DHX29 plays a key role in this process by identifying and suppressing weaker messages. This finding reveals a hidden layer of control in how genes are used.
Syrian Doctors Fight Infant Blindness After War
Syrian American ophthalmologists are banding together to improve pediatric tests for retinopathy of prematurity
Secretary of State warns Montana businesses of deceptive mailing
Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen warned business owners Wednesday of a company engaging in “a new deceptive mailing."
iOS 26.4.1 enables Stolen Device Protection by default for enterprise
Apple confirms that Stolen Device Protection will be enabled by default for enterprise devices updating from iOS 26.4 to iOS 26.4.1.