ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
What OpenAI Really Wants
Steven Levy | Wired
“For Altman and his company, ChatGPT and GPT-4 are merely stepping stones along the way to achieving a simple and seismic mission, one these technologists may as well have branded on their flesh. That mission is to build artificial general intelligence—a concept that’s so far been grounded more in science fiction than science—and to make it safe for humanity. The people who work at OpenAI are fanatical in their pursuit of that goal.”
COMPUTING
The Secret to Nvidia’s AI Success
Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
“[Nvidia] has managed to increase the performance of its chips on AI tasks a thousandfold over the past 10 years, it’s raking in money, and it’s reportedly very hard to get your hands on its newest AI-accelerating GPU, the H100. How did Nvidia get here? …Moore’s Law was a surprisingly small part of Nvidia’s magic and new number formats a very large part. Put it all together and you get what Dally called Huang’s Law (for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang).”
VIRTUAL REALITY
Roblox’s New AI Chatbot Will Help You Build Virtual Worlds
Jay Peters | The Verge
“The new tool, the Roblox Assistant, builds on previously announced features that let creators build virtual assets and write code with the help of generative AI. …Down the line, Roblox has bigger visions for Roblox Assistant, and Sturman teased that it could generate sophisticated gameplay and even make 3D models from scratch. If that all works, it could bring Roblox in line with CEO David Baszucki’s vision of Westworld-like ease of design.”
TECH
Apple Is Reportedly Spending ‘Millions of Dollars a Day’ Training AI
Monica Chin | The Verge
“The company is reportedly working on multiple AI models across several teams. Apple’s unit that works on conversational AI is called ‘Foundational Models,’ per The Information’s reporting. It has ‘around 16’ members, including several former Google engineers. Additional teams at Apple are also working on artificial intelligence, per The Information. A Visual Intelligence unit is developing an image generation model, and another group is researching ‘multimodal AI, which can recognize and produce images or video as well as text.'”
SPACE
SpaceX Broke Its Record for Number of Launches in a Year
Stephen Clark | Ars Technica
“SpaceX is leading the world not just in the number of launches, but also in the total payload mass the company has launched into orbit this year. In the first half of 2023, SpaceX delivered about 447 metric tons of cargo into orbit, roughly 80 percent of all the material launched into orbit worldwide, according to data from the space analytics firm BryceTech. Musk said SpaceX will launch about 90 percent of the world’s total payload mass into orbit next year, based on the company’s launch manifest for 2024.”
ART
Refik Anadol Just Turned the Las Vegas Sphere Into the World’s Largest AI Artwork
Jesus Diaz | Fast Company
“With Sphere, the building is the canvas—a bland engineering marvel that transforms into something visually arresting once Anadol gets his hands on it. ‘I think this is one of the most Blade Runner moments ever,’ he says. ‘A science fiction moment that, finally, merges media arts and architecture, embedding technology into a physical environment that exists in the real world.'”
BIOTECH
Redwire Space Prints Human Knee Cartilage in Space for the First Time
Aria Alamalhodaei | TechCrunch
“Redwire Space has successfully ‘bioprinted’ a human knee meniscus aboard the International Space Station, a landmark development that could help people recovering from meniscus injuries here on Earth. The meniscus cartilage was printed on Redwire’s BioFabrication Facility (BFF) on the ISS. …After the BFF printed the meniscus with living human cells, it was transferred to Redwire’s Advanced Space Experiment Processor for a 14-day enculturation process. After the culture process was complete, the meniscus was packaged up and sent back to Earth aboard SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission.”
AUTOMATION
FAA Clears UPS Delivery Drones for Longer-Range Flights
Sheena Vasani | The Verge
“UPS Flight Forward, a UPS subsidiary focused on drone delivery, can now deliver small packages beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) without spotters on the ground monitoring the route and skies for other aircraft, using Matternet M2 drones. The FAA also announced authorizations for two other companies to fly beyond sight for commercial purposes.”
Image Credit: Marek Piwnicki / Unsplash
