The Era of Predictive AI Is Almost Over
Dean W. Ball | The New Atlantis
“For companies like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic to realize their bold objectives, AI fashions might want to do greater than write prose and code and give you photographs. And the businesses must take care of the truth that human enter for coaching the fashions is a restricted useful resource. The following step in AI improvement is promising as it’s daunting: AI constructing upon AI to unravel ever extra complicated issues and test for its personal errors. There’ll doubtless be one other leap in LLM improvement, and shortly.”
ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode Impresses Testers With Sound Effects, Catching Its Breath
Benj Edwards | Ars Technica
“In early exams reported by customers with entry, Superior Voice Mode permits them to have real-time conversations with ChatGPT, together with the flexibility to interrupt the AI mid-sentence virtually immediately. It may possibly sense and reply to a person’s emotional cues via vocal tone and supply, and supply sound results whereas telling tales. However what has caught many individuals off-guard initially is how the voices simulate taking a breath whereas talking.”
Arc’teryx’s New Powered Pants Could Make Hikers Feel 30 Pounds Lighter
Andrew Liszewski | The Verge
“Power-boosting exoskeleton fits will help make jobs with bodily labor really feel much less strenuous, however Arc’teryx has partnered with Skip, a by-product of Google’s X Labs, to convey the expertise to leisure time. The powered MO/GO pants function a light-weight electrical motor on the knee that may enhance a hiker’s leg power when going uphill whereas additionally absorbing the impression of steps throughout a descent.“
Silicon Valley’s Trillion-Dollar Leap of Faith
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“Silicon Valley has already triggered tens and even a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} of spending on AI, and corporations solely wish to spend extra. Their reasoning is simple: These firms have determined that one of the simplest ways to make generative AI higher is to construct greater AI fashions. And that’s actually, actually costly, requiring assets on the dimensions of moon missions and the interstate-highway system to fund the info facilities and associated infrastructure that generative AI is dependent upon. …Now quite a lot of voices within the finance world are starting to ask whether or not all of this funding can repay.”
Robots Are Coming, and They’re on a Mission: Install Solar Panels
Brad Plumer | The New York Occasions
“On Tuesday, AES Company, one of many nation’s greatest renewable vitality firms, launched a first-of-its-kind robotic that may lug round and set up the hundreds of heavy panels that sometimes make up a big photo voltaic array. AES mentioned its robotic, nicknamed Maximo, would in the end be capable of set up photo voltaic panels twice as quick as people can and at half the fee.”
Silicon Plus Perovskite Solar Reaches 34 Percent Efficiency
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“Perovskite crystals might be layered on high of silicon, making a panel with two supplies that take up completely different areas of the spectrum—plus, perovskites might be produced from comparatively low-cost uncooked supplies. Sadly, it has been troublesome to make perovskites which might be each high-efficiency and final for the a long time that the silicon portion will. Plenty of labs are trying to alter that, although. And two of them reported some progress this week, together with a perovskite/silicon system that achieved 34 % effectivity.”
DIGITAL MEDIA
How This Brain Implant Is Using ChatGPT
Jesse Orrall | CNET
“One of many modern implantable brain-computer-interface, or BCI, firms is experimenting with ChatGPT integration to make it simpler for individuals dwelling with paralysis to regulate their digital units. …Now, as a substitute of typing out every phrase, solutions might be stuffed in with a single ‘click on.’ There’s a refresh button in case not one of the AI solutions are proper, and [a pioneering patient] Mark has observed the AI getting higher at offering solutions which might be extra in step with issues he may say.”
A New Trick Could Block the Misuse of Open Source AI
Will Knight | Wired
“When Meta launched its giant language mannequin Llama 3 at no cost this April, it took outdoors builders simply a pair days to create a model with out the security restrictions that forestall it from spouting hateful jokes, providing directions for cooking meth, or misbehaving in different methods. A new coaching method developed by researchers on the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, UC San Diego, Lapis Labs, and the nonprofit Middle for AI Security may make it more durable to take away such safeguards from Llama and different open supply AI fashions sooner or later.”
Complex Life on Earth May Be Much Older Than Thought
Georgina Rannard | BBC
“A bunch of scientists say they’ve discovered new proof to again up their idea that complicated life on Earth might have begun 1.5 billion years sooner than thought. The staff, working in Gabon, say they found proof deep inside rocks displaying environmental circumstances for animal life 2.1 billion years in the past. However they are saying the organisms had been restricted to an inland sea, didn’t unfold globally and finally died out.”
Should We Put a Frozen Backup of Earth’s Life on the Moon?
James Woodford | New Scientist
“A backup of life on Earth could possibly be stored secure in a completely darkish location on the moon, with out the necessity for energy or upkeep, permitting us to probably restore organisms in the event that they die out. …’There is no such thing as a place on Earth chilly sufficient to have a passive repository that have to be held at -196°C, so we considered area or the moon,’ says [Mary] Hagedorn.”
Picture Credit score: Vishnu Mohanan / Unsplash