FUTURE
OpenAI Is Forming a New Team to Bring ‘Superintelligent’ AI Under Control
Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch
“To move the needle forward in the area of ‘superintelligence alignment,’ OpenAI is creating a new Superalignment team, led by both [Ilya] Sutskever and [Jan] Leike, which will have access to 20% of the compute the company has secured to date. Joined by scientists and engineers from OpenAI’s previous alignment division as well as researchers from other orgs across the company, the team will aim to solve the core technical challenges of controlling superintelligent AI over the next four years.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Is Coming for Mathematics, Too
Siobhan Roberts | The New York Times
“In 2019, Christian Szegedy, a computer scientist formerly at Google and now at a start-up in the Bay Area, predicted that a computer system would match or exceed the problem-solving ability of the best human mathematicians within a decade. Last year he revised the target date to 2026.”
AUTOMATION
Eric Schmidt: This Is How AI Will transform the Way Science Gets Done
Eric Schmidt | MIT Technology Review
“If we play our cards right, with sensible regulation and proper support for innovative uses of AI to address science’s most pressing issues, AI can rewrite the scientific process. We can build a future where AI-powered tools will both save us from mindless and time-consuming labor and also lead us to creative inventions and discoveries, encouraging breakthroughs that would otherwise take decades.”
ENVIRONMENT
Efforts to Mass-Produce Green Steel Are Finally Nearing Reality
Michael Le Page | New Scientist
“Iron and steel production are two of the most carbon-heavy industries, but efforts to make these materials without fossil fuels are finally gathering momentum. A company in Sweden called H2 Green Steel says it will start producing green steel commercially in late 2025, and it is just one of several working on this.’
TECH
ChatGPT’s Website Traffic Dipped for the First Time Since Its Launch
Kevin Hurler | Gizmodo
“It appears that the artificial intelligence fatigue is upon us: OpenAI’s website traffic has fallen for the first time since the company launched the viral chatbot ChatGPT in November. Web analytics firm SimilarWeb reported this week that worldwide traffic to OpenAI’s ChatGPT webpage, including both desktop and mobile traffic, dipped 9.7 percent in June. In the US alone, the traffic drop is estimated to be 10.3 percent.“
SCIENCE
Time Appears to Run Five Times Slower in the Early Universe
Chen Ly | New Scientist
“[Using patterns in the behavior of early quasars] like a standard clock, the duo found that the earliest quasar, which is at a distance putting it around one billion years after the beginning of the universe, appeared to run five times more slowly than quasars from today. This is our earliest ever observation of cosmological time dilation, says Lewis.”
SENSORS
At Last, Single-Photon Cameras Could Peer Into Your Brain
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“Superconductor-based cameras that can detect a single photon—the smallest smidgeon of light—have existed for 20 years, but they’ve remained confined to laboratories due to the inability to scale them past a few pixels. Now, a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo., has created a 0.4-megapixel single-photon camera—400 times as large as the previous biggest camera of its type.”
TECH
What Did People Do Before Smartphones?
Ian Bogost | The Atlantic
“I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you: waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you’d stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block. You’d pace, or sulk, or stew.”
