This Week’s Superior Tech Tales From Across the Net (Via June 8)

The CEO of Zoom Wants AI Clones in Meetings
Nilay Patel | The Verge
“Like just about each different firm, Zoom now has a giant funding in AI—and [CEO Eric Yuan’s] visions for what that AI will do are fairly wild. Eric actually needs you to cease having to attend Zoom conferences your self. You’ll hear him describe how he thinks one of many large advantages of AI at work will likely be letting us all create one thing he calls a ‘digital twin’—primarily a deepfake avatar of your self that may go to Zoom conferences in your behalf and even make selections for you whilst you spend your time on extra vital issues, like your loved ones.”

AI Used to Predict Potential New Antibiotics in Groundbreaking Study
Eric Berger | The Guardian
“The report, revealed Wednesday within the journal Cell, particulars the findings of scientists who used an algorithm to mine the ‘entirety of the microbial variety that we’ve got on Earth—or an enormous illustration of that—and discover virtually a million new molecules encoded or hidden inside all that microbial darkish matter,’ stated César de la Fuente, an creator of the examine and professor on the College of Pennsylvania.”

OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance
Kevin Roose | The New York Instances
“The members say OpenAI, which began as a nonprofit analysis lab and burst into public view with the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, is placing a precedence on income and progress because it tries to construct synthetic normal intelligence, or AGI, the trade time period for a pc program able to doing something a human can.”

DIGITAL MEDIA

The Near Future of Deepfakes Just Got Way Clearer
Nilesh Christopher | The Atlantic
“All through this election cycle—which ended [this week] in a victory for [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Occasion after six weeks of voting and greater than 640 million ballots solid—Indians have been bombarded with artificial media. …However for all the priority over how generative AI and deepfakes are a looming ‘atomic bomb’ that may warp actuality and alter voter preferences, India foreshadows a distinct, stranger future.”

Pilotless Air Taxis? Joby Sees the Possibility With New Acquisition
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“Joby’s electrical air taxis are nonetheless a pair years away from launch, however the firm says it needs to place itself to make the most of autonomous flight when the expertise is prepared for industrial utility. Xwing, which was based in 2016, has carried out 250 autonomous check flights in addition to 500 auto-landings. And, in April 2023, it was the primary firm to obtain an official mission designation for the certification of a big unmanned aerial system from the Federal Aviation Administration, Joby says.”

The Age of the Drone Police Is Here
Dhruv Mehrotra and Jesse Marx | Wired
“A Wired investigation, based mostly on greater than 22 million flight coordinates, reveals the difficult reality concerning the first full-blown police drone program within the US—and why your metropolis may very well be subsequent. …As police departments look to broaden their use of unmanned aerial plane, no company has embraced the expertise fairly just like the [Chula Vista Police Department].”

Starship Launch: Fourth Test Succeeds as Both Stages Splash Into Sea
Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist
“SpaceX’s Starship, the biggest rocket ever constructed, has made a profitable fourth check flight, with each its first and second levels finishing up their missions as deliberate earlier than splashing down into totally different oceans. …This fourth flight check centered on getting Starship again from orbit after its earlier check reached area for the primary time.”

Google’s AI Overviews Misunderstand Why People Use Google
Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
“The worth of Google has at all times been in pointing you to the locations it thinks are prone to have good solutions to these questions. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless as much as you, as a consumer, to determine which of these sources is probably the most dependable and related to what you want at that second. …When your AI is simply summarizing the highest search outcomes from across the internet, it’s solely ever going to be as sensible or as dumb because the search engine itself. With out the human issue that helps make sense of Google’s map of the net, a Google-powered ‘AI Overview’ is at all times going to fail in some exceptional methods.”