This Week’s Superior Tech Tales From Across the Internet (By way of July 2)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
We Requested GPT-3 to Write an Educational Paper About Itself—Then We Tried to Get It Revealed
Almira Osmanovic Thunström | Scientific American
“On a wet afternoon earlier this 12 months, I logged in to my OpenAI account and typed a easy instruction for the corporate’s synthetic intelligence algorithm, GPT-3: Write an educational thesis in 500 phrases about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations contained in the textual content. Because it began to generate textual content, I stood in awe. Right here was novel content material written in tutorial language, with well-grounded references cited in the proper locations and in relation to the proper context. It seemed like some other introduction to a reasonably good scientific publication.”
MOORE’S LAW
We’re Coaching AI Twice as Quick This Yr as Final
Samuel Ok. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
“In accordance with one of the best measures we’ve bought, a set of benchmarks referred to as MLPerf, machine-learning techniques may be skilled practically twice as shortly as they might final 12 months. It’s a determine that outstrips Moore’s Regulation, but in addition one we’ve come to count on. A lot of the acquire is due to software program and techniques improvements, however this 12 months additionally gave the primary peek at what some new processors, notably from Graphcore and Intel subsidiary Habana Labs, can do.”
AUGMENTED REALITY
Mojo’s Good Contact Lenses Start In-Eye Testing
Scott Stein | CNET
“The lenses allow eye-controlled head-up shows to seem to hover in-air, approaching a sort of monochromatic Google Glass-like AR interface with out glasses. The corporate’s solely doing assessments with one lens in a single eye for the second, though the following objective is to have two lenses worn directly for 3D visible overlays.”
GENETICS
CRISPR, 10 Years On: Studying to Rewrite the Code of Life
Carl Zimmer | The New York Instances
“i‘I keep in mind considering very clearly, after we publish this paper, it’s like firing the beginning gun at a race,’ she mentioned. In only a decade, CRISPR has develop into probably the most celebrated innovations in trendy biology. It’s swiftly altering how medical researchers examine illnesses: Most cancers biologists are utilizing the tactic to find hidden vulnerabilities of tumor cells. Docs are utilizing CRISPR to edit genes that trigger hereditary illnesses. ‘The period of human gene enhancing isn’t coming,’ mentioned David Liu, a biologist at Harvard College. ‘It’s right here.’i”
HEALTH
Protein Blobs Linked to Alzheimer’s Have an effect on Ageing in All Cells
Vivianne Callier | Quanta Journal
“The ageing brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and different neurodegenerative illnesses are suffused with telltale aggregates of proteins in or round their neurons. …However a current examine by a staff of Stanford College researchers means that protein aggregation could also be a common phenomenon in ageing cells and might be concerned in lots of extra illnesses of ageing than was suspected.”
AUTOMATION
Cruise Robotaxis Blocked Site visitors for Hours on This San Francisco Avenue
Rebecca Bellan | TechCrunch
“Greater than a half dozen Cruise robotaxis stopped working and sat in a avenue in San Francisco late Tuesday evening, blocking site visitors for a few hours till staff arrived and manually moved the autonomous automobiles. …The mishap comes lower than every week after Cruise launched its first totally driverless, business robotaxi service within the metropolis.”
SPACE
NASA’s DART Mission Will Completely Deform Dimorphos Asteroid
Passant Rabie | Gizmodo
“NASA’s DART spacecraft is presently on its approach to a binary asteroid system generally known as Didymos and can primarily crash into one tiny asteroid to check out a deflection technique. However somewhat than forsaking an affect crater as initially meant, the DART spacecraft may very well deform the mini-moon, making it practically unrecognizable.”
ENVIRONMENT
The Authorities Is Growing a Photo voltaic Geoengineering Analysis Plan
James Temple | MIT Expertise Evaluation
“The White Home is creating a analysis plan that might information and set requirements for the way scientists examine one of many extra controversial methods of counteracting local weather change: photo voltaic geoengineering. The fundamental thought is that we would be capable of intentionally tweak the local weather system in ways in which launch extra warmth into house, cooling an in any other case warming planet. The transfer, which has not been beforehand reported on, marks the primary federally coordinated US effort of this sort.”
ROBOTICS
This Warehouse Robotic Reads Human Physique Language to Be a Higher Coworker
Will Knight | Wired
“Rodney Brooks is aware of a good bit about robots. In addition to being a pioneer of educational robotics analysis, he has based firms which have given the world the robotic vacuum cleaner, the bomb disposal bot, and a manufacturing facility robotic anybody can program. Now Brooks needs to introduce one other revolutionary kind of robotic helper—a cell warehouse robotic with the flexibility to learn human physique language to inform what staff round it are doing.”
FUTURE
World’s Oldest Timber Reveal the Largest Photo voltaic Storm in Historical past
Ethan Siegel | Large Assume
“One of many best threats to all of humanity’s digital and electrified infrastructure is a photo voltaic storm, which has the potential to trigger a multi-trillion greenback catastrophe. At present, we’ve got no enough protections in place to defend towards an occasion akin to the good storm of 1859: generally known as the Carrington occasion. However within the years 774-775, a fair bigger cosmic occasion occurred, putting Earth with a fury by no means seen earlier than. After a ten 12 months investigation, we’ve discovered that the Solar is much more violent—and extra threatening—than we’d ever imagined.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
By Exploring Digital Worlds, AI Learns in New Methods
Allison Whitten | Quanta Journal
“Whether or not they exist in simulations or the true world, embodied AI brokers are studying extra like us, on duties which are extra like those we do day-after-day. …’I see a convergence of deep studying, robotic studying, imaginative and prescient and in addition even language,’ [Fei-Fei] Li mentioned. ‘And now I believe by means of this moonshot or North Star in direction of embodied AI, we’re going to study the foundational know-how of intelligence, or AI, that may actually result in main breakthroughs.’i”
Picture Credit score: Maxim Berg / Unsplash