ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
I Made an AI Clone of Myself
Chloe Xiang | Motherboard
“To create my AI clone, Synthesia told me that we would have to clone my voice and body, and it would take a total of a little over two hours to do so. Before the shoot, I was given a schedule of ‘Voice Clone,’ ‘Prep [Hair and Makeup],’ and ‘Video Performance.’ No details beyond that. Entering the studio the day of, I had no idea what to expect, other than that I was like an actress responding to a call sheet, ready to do my best improv.”
SPACE
California Company Sets Launch Date for World’s First 3D-Printed Rocket
Passant Rabie | Gizmodo
“On Wednesday, Relativity Space announced that it had secured its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration and is ready to blast its Terran 1 rocket into space. …Terran 1 is a two-stage, 110-foot-tall (33 meters) rocket that’s 85% 3D printed, making it the ‘largest 3D printed object to exist and to attempt orbital flight,’ according to the company. Relativity Space is working towards its goal of making the rocket 95% 3D printed.”
COMPUTING
Google’s Improved Quantum Processor Good Enough for Error Correction
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“…getting quantum error correction isn’t really the news—they’d managed to get it to work a couple of years ago. Instead, the signs of progress are a bit more subtle. In earlier generations of processors, qubits were error-prone enough that adding more of them to an error-correction scheme caused problems that were larger than the gain in corrections. In this new iteration, adding more qubits and getting the error rate to go down is possible.”
TECH
ChatGPT-Style Search Represents a 10x Cost Increase for Google, Microsoft
Ron Amadeo | Ars Technica
“A ChatGPT-style search engine would involve firing up a huge neural network modeled on the human brain every time you run a search, generating a bunch of text and probably also querying that big search index for factual information. …All that extra processing is going to cost a lot more money. After speaking to Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy (Alphabet is Google’s parent company) and several analysts, Reuters writes that ‘an exchange with AI known as a large language model likely costs 10 times more than a standard keyword search’ and that it could represent ‘several billion dollars of extra costs.’i”
SPACE
Ingenious Technique Could Make Moon Farming Possible
Kevin Hurler | Gizmodo
“The idea is that astronauts can extract nutrients in lunar regolith to create fertilizer for hydroponic farming. These nutrients could be pulled from soil using a processing plant and then dissolved into water, all on the Moon’s surface. The resulting nutrient-rich water can then be pumped into a greenhouse for hydroponic farming, a crucial part of maintaining a long-term human presence on the Moon.”
GOVERNANCE
The US Copyright Office Says You Can’t Copyright Midjourney AI-Generated Images
Richard Lawler | The Verge
“A copyright registration granted to the Zarya of the Dawn comic book has been partially canceled, because it included ‘non-human authorship’ that hadn’t been taken into account. …To justify the decision, the Copyright Office cites previous cases where people weren’t able to copyright words or songs that listed ‘non-human spiritual beings’ or the Holy Spirit as the author—as well as the infamous incident where a selfie was taken by a monkey.”
ROBOTICS
Alphabet Layoffs Hit Trash-Sorting Robots
Paresh Dave | Wired
“Just over a year after graduating from Alphabet’s X moonshot lab, the team that trained over a hundred wheeled, one-armed robots to squeegee cafeteria tables, separate trash and recycling, and yes, open doors, is shutting down as part of budget cuts spreading across the Google parent, a spokeswoman confirmed. …Everyday Robots emerged from the rubble of at least eight robotics acquisitions by Google a decade ago. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin expected machine learning would reshape robotics, and Page in particular wanted to develop a consumer-oriented robot, a former employee involved at the time says, speaking anonymously to discuss internal deliberations.”
Image Credit: Abhishek Tiwari / Unsplash
