Sam Altman seeks trillions of dollars to reshape chip and AI businesses
Kitsch Hagei | wall street journal
“The CEO of OpenAI is working with investors, including the Government of the United Arab Emirates, to raise funds for ambitious technology initiatives that will strengthen the world’s chip manufacturing capabilities, expand AI-enhanced capabilities, among other expenses, and It's being discussed. $1 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter. “The project may require financing of up to $5 trillion to $7 trillion,” one official said.
AI is rewiring coders’ brains. You Might Be Next
Will Knight | mad
“Microsoft, the owner of GitHub, said in its most recent quarterly earnings that there are now 1.3 million paid Copilot accounts (a 30% increase from the previous quarter) and 50,000 companies are using the software. Dohmke said Copilot's most recent usage data shows that nearly half of all user-generated code is generated by AI. At the same time, he argues that there is little indication that these AI programs can operate without human supervision.”
Google prepares for a future where search is not king.
Lauren Goode | mad
“[Sundar] Pichai is experimenting with a new vision for what Google can offer. It's not a replacement for search yet, it's about building an alternative to see what sticks. “We’ve always approached search in the sense that we’ve adapted as search has evolved and mobile has been adopted and user interactions have changed,” Pichai told Wired ahead of Gemini’s launch. 'In some cases, as with multimodal AI, we are leading the way with our users. But I want to be flexible about the future. Because otherwise we will be in error.’”
Turbocharged CAR-T cells use a trick from cancer cells to melt tumors in mice
Asher Mullard | nature
“The team treated mice carrying blood and solid tumors with multiple T cell therapies boosted by CARD11-PIK3R3 and observed the animals’ tumors melting. Researchers typically use about 1 million cells to treat these mice, but just 20,000 of the T cells that promote cancer mutations are enough to eliminate the tumors, Dr. Choi says. “This is an impressively small number of cells,” said Nick Restifo, a cell therapy researcher and chief scientist at Marble Therapeutics, a rejuvenating startup company in Boston, Massachusetts.
OpenAI wants to control computers
Maxwell Jeff | gizmodo
“OpenAI is reportedly developing ‘agent software’ that will effectively take over your device and complete complex tasks on your behalf. information. OpenAI agents work across multiple apps on your computer to perform clicking, cursor movements, and text input. “This is truly a new type of operating system and could completely change the way we interact with computers.”
New car battery could spark electric vehicle revolution
Nicola Jones | nature
“Researchers are experimenting with a variety of designs that could lower costs, extend vehicle range and provide other improvements. … The Chinese manufacturer has announced a low-cost 2024 car with batteries based on cheap sodium, one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust, rather than the lithium that powers today's best electric vehicles (EVs). And an American lab has surprised the world with a dream battery that could operate partly in air and pack enough energy to power an airplane.”
security
I stopped using my password. It's great, but it's a total mess.
Matt Burgess | mad
“Over the past month, I've been switching as many accounts as I can (about a dozen now) to use passkeys and get off passwords for good. Spoiler: Once cryptographic keys work seamlessly, millions, if not billions, of people will get a glimpse into a more secure future, reinventing the way they log into websites and services. But accessing all your accounts over the internet is still likely to be a minefield and will take some time.”
Facing the reality that instantaneous fusion breakthrough is difficult
Ed Gent | IEEE spectrum
“The dream of nuclear fusion power came closer to reality in December 2022, when researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) discovered that the fusion reaction produced more energy than needed to start. New research shows that the feat of instantaneous fusion required exquisite choreography and extensive preparation, and the sheer level of difficulty suggests there is a long way to go before anyone can hope to have a practical power source at hand.”
Meet ‘Smaug-72B’, the new king of open source AI
Michael Nuñez | venture beat
“What’s most notable about today’s release is that Smaug-72B outperforms GPT-3.5 and Mistral Medium, two of the most advanced proprietary large language models developed by OpenAI and Mistral, respectively, across several of the most popular benchmarks. “While the model still falls short of the 90 to 100 average scores that indicate human-level performance, it signals that open source AI may soon be able to compete with the long-shrouded capabilities of Big Tech.”
AI-generated voices in robocalls can fool voters. The FCC just made it illegal.
Ali Swenson | Associated Press
“that much [FCC] On Thursday, it made robocalls containing artificial intelligence-generated voices illegal, a decision that sends a clear message that abusing the technology to trick people and mislead voters will not be tolerated. …Bad actors are using AI-generated voices in robocalls to misinform voters, impersonate celebrities and extort family members, said Jessica Rosenworcel, the agency's president. “It may seem like a very distant future, but these threats already exist,” Rosenworcel told The Associated Press on Wednesday as the commission considers the regulations.
Image credit: NASA Hubble Space Telescope / Unsplash