This yr, readers have been once more fascinated by tales about synthetic intelligence. One algorithm discovered to make quick, playable video video games from video footage; one other cloned actual folks’s personalities; and one more took on the position of your future self—prepared and prepared to impart knowledge.
Different widespread items dug into the rise of robotaxis, tantalizing hints about how we would sooner or later stave off growing older, and a unified concept of consciousness.
We hope you take pleasure in a re-evaluation or discovering these for the primary time.
As at all times, thanks for studying!
A Google AI Watched 30,000 Hours of Video Video games—Now It Makes Its Personal
By Jason Dorrier
“As AI requires prodigious quantities of information, one approach to forecast the place issues are going subsequent is to take a look at what knowledge is broadly out there on-line, however nonetheless largely untapped. Video, of which there’s lots, is an apparent subsequent step. Certainly, [in February], OpenAI previewed a brand new text-to-video AI referred to as Sora that surprised onlookers. However what about video…video games?”
Scientists Are Working In the direction of a Unified Concept of Consciousness
By Shelly Fan
“Not all [the] authors agree on the particular mind mechanisms that permit us to understand the outer world and assemble an internal world of ‘self.’ However by collaborating, they merged their concepts, exhibiting that totally different theories aren’t essentially mutually incompatible—the truth is, they could possibly be consolidated right into a normal framework of consciousness and even encourage new concepts that assist unravel one of many mind’s best mysteries.”
Scientists Prolong Life Span in Mice by Restoring This Mind-Physique Connection
By Shelly Fan
“Altering the protein’s habits in aged mice with genetic engineering prolonged their life span by roughly seven %. For a mean 76-year life span in people, the rise interprets to over 5 years. The therapy additionally altered the mice’s well being. Mice like to run, however their vigor plummets with age. Reactivating the neurons in aged mice revived their motivation, reworking them from sofa potatoes into spectacular joggers.”
It Will Take Solely a Single SpaceX Starship to Launch a House Station
By Edd Gent
“SpaceX’s forthcoming Starship rocket will make it attainable to carry unprecedented quantities of fabric into orbit. …Now, a three way partnership between Airbus and Voyager House that’s constructing a non-public house station referred to as Starlab has inked a contract with SpaceX to get it into orbit. The enterprise plans to place the spectacular capabilities of the brand new rocket to full use by launching all the 26-foot-diameter house station in a single go.”
OpenAI’s GPT-4o Makes AI Clones of Actual Folks With Shocking Ease
By Edd Gent
“AI has develop into uncannily good at aping human conversational capabilities. New analysis suggests its powers of mimicry go quite a bit additional, making it attainable to duplicate particular folks’s personalities. …A research led by researchers at Stanford College has found that every one it takes is a two-hour interview for an AI mannequin to foretell folks’s responses to a battery of questionnaires, character exams, and thought experiments with an accuracy of 85 %.”
‘Droidspeak’: AI Brokers Now Have Their Personal Language Because of Microsoft
By Edd Gent
“Getting AIs to work collectively could possibly be a robust pressure multiplier for the know-how. However regardless of their expressive energy, human languages may not be the most effective medium of communication for machines that essentially function in ones and zeros. This prompted researchers from Microsoft to develop a brand new technique of communication that permits brokers to speak to one another within the high-dimensional mathematical language underpinning LLMs. They’ve named the brand new method Droidspeak…and in a preprint paper revealed on the arXiv, the Microsoft workforce reviews it enabled fashions to speak 2.78 instances quicker with little accuracy misplaced.”
Waymo Robotaxis Are Giving 100,000 Rides a Week. It’ll Quickly Be Extra.
By Jason Dorrier
“After a yr of economic operations in San Francisco with out main incident, Waymo is eyeing enlargement. In August, the corporate moved into Daly Metropolis, Broadmoor, and Colma, simply south of the town. Waymo has approval to function in a complete of twenty-two cities alongside the peninsula south of San Francisco, and though there’s no timetable but, based on the San Francisco Chronicle, additionally they have ambitions so as to add operations in San Jose and East Bay, which would come with Oakland and Berkeley.”
A One-and-Finished Injection to Gradual Getting older? New Research in Mice Opens the Chance
By Shelly Fan
“A preventative anti-aging remedy looks like wishful considering. But a brand new research led by Dr. Corina Amor Vegas at Chilly Spring Harbor Laboratory describes a therapy that brings the dream to life—a minimum of for mice. Given a single injection in younger maturity, they aged extra slowly in comparison with their friends. …’If we give it to aged mice, they rejuvenate. If we give it to younger mice, they age slower. No different remedy proper now can do that,’ mentioned Amor Vegas in a press launch.”
These Mini AI Fashions Match OpenAI With 1,000 Instances Much less Knowledge
By Jason Dorrier
“The bogus intelligence trade is obsessive about dimension. Larger algorithms. Extra knowledge. Sprawling knowledge facilities that would, in just a few years, devour sufficient electrical energy to energy entire cities. …Eye-popping numbers like these make it straightforward to overlook dimension isn’t all the things. Some researchers, notably these with fewer assets, are aiming to do extra with much less. AI scaling will proceed, however algorithms can even get much more environment friendly as they develop.”
This MIT Chatbot Simulates Your ‘Future Self.’ It’s Right here to Assist You Make Higher Selections.
By Jason Dorrier
“Chatbots are actually posing as buddies, romantic companions, and departed family members. Now, we will add one other to the checklist: Your future self. MIT Media Lab’s Future You venture invited younger folks, aged 18 to 30, to have a chat with AI simulations of themselves at 60. The sims—which have been powered by a customized chatbot and included an AI-generated picture of their older selves—answered questions on their expertise, shared recollections, and supplied classes discovered over the many years.”
Banner Picture Credit score: Luke Jones on Unsplash
