FUTURE
Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips
Kevin Kelly | Wired
“For the first time in history, humans can conjure up everyday acts of creativity on demand, in real time, at scale, for cheap. Synthetic creativity is a commodity now. Ancient philosophers will turn in their graves, but it turns out that to make creativity—to generate something new—all you need is the right code. We can insert it into tiny devices that are presently inert, or we can apply creativity to large statistical models, or embed creativity in drug discovery routines. What else can we use synthetic creativity for?”
ART
MoMA’s Newest Artist Is an AI Trained on 180,000 Works, From Warhol to Pac-Man
Jesus Diaz | Fast Company
“The colossal installation—a stunning 24- by 24-foot digital display that fills the entire MoMA lobby—renders an infinite animated flow of images, each of them dreamed up as you watch by an AI model fed by the museum’s entire collection of artwork. This flow is controlled by what happens around it, making the piece feel like it’s alive.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
New Records for the Biggest and Smallest AI Computers
Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
“Training AI has been a problem that’s driven billions of dollars in investment, and it seems to be paying off. ‘A few years ago we were talking about training these networks in days or weeks, now we’re talking about minutes,’ says Dave Salvator, director of product marketing at Nvidia.”
TRANSPORTATION
Meet Midnight, the eVTOL Air Taxi That Archer Will Take to Production
Loz Blain | New Atlas
“As with all eVTOL companies, Archer is promising it’ll be unobtrusive in urban operations, 100 times quieter than a helicopter. It also promises to be a heap cheaper, coming in at around the price of an Uber-style service per mile, and this super-accessible pricing is key to the eVTOL sector’s rapid expansion plans. And expansion will indeed be rapid; Archer is building an initial factory in Georgia designed to pump out up to 650 aircraft a year. All going according to plan, that’ll soon be expanded to produce 2,300 a year.”
SPACE
NASA Gets Its Mojo Back With a Stunning Nighttime Launch of the SLS Rocket
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“The US space agency had not launched an orbital rocket since 2011, when NASA flew its storied space shuttle for the final time. Moreover, NASA had not flown a new orbital rocket into space since the shuttle’s debut in 1981. So on Wednesday morning, remarkably, NASA flew its first new rocket in more than four decades.”
CRYPTOCURRENCY
The Risky Business of Sam Bankman-Fried
Ben Cohen | The Wall Street Journal
“Nobody as rich as Sam Bankman-Fried ever spent so much time speaking to podcasters and explaining how they got rich. Weeks before the crackup of his cryptocurrency exchange and spectacular collapse of his wealth, the chief executive of FTX gave an interview that began with an illuminating question: What was the first thing his company did better than any other? ‘Manage risk,’ he said.”
DIGITAL MEDIA
Intel Unveils Real-Time Deepfake Detector, Claims 96% Accuracy Rate
Sharon Goldman | VentureBeat
“[FakeCatcher] is based on photoplethysmography, or PPG, a method for measuring the amount of light that is absorbed or reflected by blood vessels in living tissue. When the heart pumps blood, it goes to the veins, which change color. …’You cannot see it with your eyes, but it is computationally visible,’ [Intel’s Ilke] Demir told VentureBeat. ‘PPG signals have been known, but they have not been applied to the deepfake problem before.’i”
SPACE
Will Physics Prevent SpinLaunch From Succeeding?
Ethan Siegel | Big Think
“Although humanity has succeeded in sending spacecraft into orbit and even beyond Earth’s gravitational pull, the only way we’ve done so is via fuel-devouring rocket launches. In the past, alternatives have been proposed: railguns, projectile launches, space elevators, and more, but none have ever delivered a single payload into orbit. With a working prototype successfully launching objects at 1,000 miles-per-hour, SpinLaunch looks promising. But will the laws of physics stand in the way of a full-scale version?”
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Binance Has a Cunning Plan to Save Crypto—but It’s Too Late
Joel Khalili and Morgan Meaker | Wired
“None of the measures that crypto exchanges are putting in place will ward off the period of heightened regulatory scrutiny now expected to begin. To date, efforts to regulate crypto companies have moved too slowly, partly as a result of the complexity of the underlying technology, says Charley Cooper, former COO of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the US. But the scale of the FTX collapse is likely to light a fire under regulators around the world.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Why Meta’s Latest Large Language Model Survived Only Three Days Online
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology
“Meta’s misstep—and its hubris—show once again that Big Tech has a blind spot about the severe limitations of large language models. There is a large body of research that highlights the flaws of this technology, including its tendencies to reproduce prejudice and assert falsehoods as facts. However, Meta and other companies working on large language models, including Google, have failed to take it seriously.”
Image Credit: lilzidesigns / Unsplash
